World of WearableArt

Content Creation - Screen Design - Encoders

An audience of 60,000 comes together every year to escape into the World of WearableArt, moving art off the wall and onto the body. Often described as “breathtaking” and “spectacular” the show is a fusion of fashion, art, theatre, circus and live entertainment.

One of our biggest challenges was filming all the garments, given the variety of colours and shapes the garments come in, and the compressed time we had to film, we knew that a traditional green screen pipeline was not going to work for us. Never ones to miss an opportunity to try something new we developed a technique using infrared light as our key colour. Allowing us to film garments of any colour or level of transparency all on a black background.

To achieve this, we had to build our own high-powered IR lights to wash our backdrop in IR. Big shout-out to Olivier Jean from O2D, he was integral to the build and delivery of the SpectralMatte technique. More info on this here

Alongside filming, we also chose to 3D scan the garments (and some of the dancers!) for the Myths & Legends section, this enabled us to bring them into our 3D tools and relight and texture them as large-scale statues.

Tech Info:

  • 5x Switchable Film Surfaces (Opaque/Transparent)

  • 3x Tracked Projection Surfaces

  • 4x LED Columns on tracks, creating the central triagle screen

  • 12x Handheld LED Screens

  • 12x Projectors

  • 3x Disguise Media Servers

  • 12x Workstations/Render Nodes

  • 428,000 Frames Rendered during creation

  • 5400 hours of continuous rendering

  • 32tb of data created

Credits:
Delainy Jamahl - Lead Video Design
Rowan Pierce - Lead Video Design
Ruben O’Hara - Motion Designer
Rachel Nesser - Motion Designer
Jamie Berry - Video Design (Aotearoa)
Owen McCarthy - Motion Designer
Olivier Jean - Spectural Matter
Jason Naran - Camera Tech
Thomas Williams - Best Boy

We developed a draw wire encoder system to track the three volumes that fly in from the grid. These encoders enable us to lock a projected image onto the surface as it moves up and down. More info on our encoders here