Project Profile: Shark Week Poolside Projections

October 4, 2012 by Dave Haynes

This is much more live event than digital signage project, but interesting enough to mention …

For the recent 25th anniversary celebration of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week programming, the press and people involved with the show had a party at the Beverly Hilton in LA that inclued a ton of projection work around and in the pool.

Christie was pulled in with its projector systems to deliver the visuals, using one of its Christie Nitro “digital luminaires” – those yoke systems that can smoothly move projected images around a canvas – and six Christie Roadster DLP projectors that displayed images of sharks on a large rear wall. The projections were edge-blended to make one canvas, and then stacked to effectively double the brightness.

“The reason that I love [Christie] Nitro is because it moves a 20K projector,” said Bart Kresa, principal, BARTKRESA Design. “And in this event … in order to do this across the whole pool, we probably would have had to set up six 20K projectors. With the [Christie] Nitro, we can use one projector and then create an animation. When we move the animation and the projector around, it looks natural. The sharks are moving around the pool but it sort of gives the sense that the whole pool is filled with an image.”