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TECH PROFILE
constantly, and appropriate action was taken whenever it was required.” With the star safely rigged, the Unusual Rigging team remained in Riyadh for the duration of the festival, so they were on hand to de-rig once it came to an end, which took just 10 days. “The Kingdom Tower is the focal point of Riyadh and Star in Motion was very much the focal point of the festival,” Sutton concluded. “It was a spectacular icon for the city and we’re very proud to have been part of the project.” ‘EVERYTHING RAN FAULTLESSLY’ Another standout installation of Noor Riyadh was Daniel Canogar’s Bifurcation. The artwork consisted of electric-like bolts of light that zigzagged up and down the Zebra Building of the King Abdullah Financial District. Connected to the internet, it used storm-tracking data to react in real time to thunderstorms happening around the globe. BWS engaged Snap Productions to handle the technical delivery of the project. Rupert
ME
Morse, Creative at Snap, explained the specifics of the project. “It was quite complex,” he began. “The design studio would usually map with video, but on this occasion, they wanted to implement lasers. That’s where we came in.” According to Morse, the real-time aspect of the installation was the biggest challenge. “At any one time, there are hundreds of lightning strikes taking place all over the world. We needed to find a way of taking that data and translating it into laser mapping on the building,” he recalled. While Pangolin isn’t normally able to implement that kind of real-time data, Morse found a clever solution. “I got in touch with Pangolin and asked for the SDK, which meant that the design studio could programme directly into Pangolin itself. They wrote a programme in C++, which took two points from the top of the building and then found the shortest route down the building’s façade to the floor – much like real lightning. We built in some variables to stop it going down the same route every time.” A total of 10 lasers were deployed, with much of the
projection done from floor level. “This meant that we had a very steep angle, so it was a challenge to get the telemetry right,” Morse recalled. And that wasn’t the only challenge, as the nature of the site meant that the usual method of cabling could not be used. Instead, the Snap team utilised airFiber 24. “It’s basically a 24 GHz pointto-point radio system, which has a maximum range of up to 13km,” Morse explained. “We had two sets of those, which fed back to a central tent. This negated the need to go between sites all the time. It worked really well.” BirdDog NDI cameras were also used to capture the images in low-light conditions. “All this was made possible because airFiber runs so quickly with next to no latency,” Morse furthered. “A couple of years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to do this. It’s only during the past year that the technology has made a huge leap forward.” The show ran from 6pm to 1am every evening and while the Snap team remained on-site in case of any issues, Morse was glad to report that everything went off without a hitch.
