From the mad man that brought us to Coachella to create a cosmic light prism comes Station to Station. This is a coast-to-coast US tour featuring Visual, Musical, Photographic, Sculpture, Literary and Performance artists performing at historic railroad stations in 9 cities. The entire tour travels by train. Mitchey from Planet Events brought us along to install LED screens on the sides of 7 classic railroad cars, which artist Doug Aitken used to display interactive, environmental visual imagery. Each city is curated by a musical guest including Cat Power, Beck, Jackson Browne, Ariel Pink, Giorgio Moroder, Charlotte Gainsburg, and many more. We are providing sound, lighting, video and projection systems for all concerts. Just finished the LED install, and the trains are rolling to Brooklyn as we speak, for the first show. More to come!
Comic-Con is nuttier than ever. We were in the Convention Center with the Jordanah Girls doing Fox stuff, out on the street doing a costume contest with MTV, and we were here at Petco Park doing a big EDM concert with our pal Adam Stewart from Viacom. The convention center was a riot and populated with the best-ever fraternity of awesome nerds. Neil Patrick Harris even signed stuff at one of our booths. This stuff is giant business now - Be careful who you bully today, kids - you might be looking to that same person for a job in 10 years. Oh, and don't be a dick bully either way. Anyway, this Petco gig was really cool - we did Versatubes and stuff on the stage with a huge variety of vendors doing audio, lighting, staging, labor, etc. It takes a village.
So we pretty much always need to do two entries for June - it's just that kind of month for us every year. Here we found ourselves in the comfort of our long time pal Mary Bonefede at Disney Interactive, at E3. This was a great year for this booth - Gorgeous design and production by Brodey Francis. Lots of projection and killer lighting design by Shawn Richardson. We also had a great opportunity to work on a projection mapping project with Janine and Denny from Production Elements. This was for the reveal of the new Otis Booth building and the 100 year anniversary of the Museum of Natural History in LA. Giant glass building was covered with a huge cyc, which we mapped Radar LA designs on to. Kabuki solenoids popped and the huge drape fell to reveal the gorgeous new building. The crowd went nuts!
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 100 Years: Otis Pavilion Unveiling 3D Mapping
USC brought us down again to help out with a huge announcement press conference. Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre gifted SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS to USC. Insane. They are building an academy for arts and technology business. Looking for this new breed of youngsters who have arts chops and are entrepreneurial and are are adroit with new technology. We got the call at 4pm to install a high def LED wall for an 11am press conference the next day. Easy-E! Seriously, from F the Police to magna cum laude? What a country!
Gary and the gang at Sequoia invited us to engage in a historic cultural event in Los Angeles this month. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is opening an Oscar Museum. The Museum will be in the iconic deco giant May Company building (right where Biggie got shot RIP). This event was a temporary exhibit of memorabilia (look how small Bogie's piano was from Casablanca in photo) and other elements that will ultimately be on display in the permanent collection. Ryan and his team blended dozens of projectors together using dozens of Watchout computers to create a stunning multi-media display. Chris' lighting was wicked beautiful. Only bummer was we had to tear it down after a three hour event. I wish we could have left it up for months.
The "other" Adam Rosen and Meghan from USC included us in a great event on campus at USC. Here we built a sculpture of multiple-sized LCD displays, Versatubes and toned truss. Some displays were landscape and some portrait. All playback was matrixed so the client could see any image on any display, with the push of a button. Great stuff. Can anyone guess who the mystery guy is at the lectern?