Leeds Light Night 2014
"Theatre of Illumination"

3rd November 2014

Working closely with OMNI Pictures' director and designer Will Simpson, QED transformed Leeds Civic Hall as it had never been seen before. Attended by over 30,000 people the projection provided the centre-piece for Leeds Night Light 2014. The content design was very unusual and required an exceptionally high level of projection brightness to overcome the high level of ambient light pollution, so QED deployed ten Christie WU20K-J 20,000 lumen projectors fed by a d3 v2.5 server and QED fibre system.

Simpson had a clear vision from the start: "I have always wanted to create work that used only white light... Monochromatic design has great impact and means that you have to tackle the design in a different way."

QED's Head of Digital Media Dan Gray added "We knew from the outset that in order for this project to be successful the content template had to be as accurate as possible and it also needed to be conducive to the OMNI workflow to allow them to create the animations, specifically the straight line effects, parallel to the edges and features of the building. Resolution was also extremely important, so we opted to deliver everything at 4K.

We chose d3 as it provides the best functionality and tools for projection mapping such as multiple layers of keystone and warping per output, masking and blending per output, true cross-server sync and frame -lock alongside instantaneous master/slave backup. In addition, our d3 systems provide playback of up to two simultaneous layers of 8k content without any frame-dropping."