We recently created a huge digital landscape projection for Asif Kahn’s pavilion for the World Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Representing the UK at the World Expo 2017 in Kazakhstan, Asif Kahn created a pavilion for the theme Future Energy. The centerpiece of the pavilion consisted of a futuristic yurt surrounded by an animated digital landscape projection.
The 360 degree landscape projection was created by Chris Bore, Martin Aufinger and colour- graded by Andreas Daxer. Initial concepts and layouts were created by Xavier Chassaing.
Working closely with Asif and Xavier, we managed to create an impressive seamless 360 degree landscape at a resolution of 37k pixel in width. Visitors experienced changes in time of day and weather; starting with a beautiful sunrise and ending in an impressive display of lightning and thunderstorms.
The seamless loop was 7.5 minutes long and the experience was enhanced by Brian Eno’s music.
Creating the massive projection was an artistic and technical achievement. The entire world was created as a 3 dimensional model with animated trees, butterflies, water, clouds, …. We aimed to create an environment representing the world, not necessary the UK specifically and focused on showing the weather, storms and the sun – natural sources of energy – in all its glory.
The entire content was created in Sidefx Houdini and rendered in the Amazon Cloud which took the processing power of over 8000 cpus for several weeks. Even just handling the huge amount of data and pushing it through our custom built render farm took a lot of engineering and creative thinking.
I also got the chance to travel to Astana and see the yurt in action. Really nice experience. Audio, visuals and the pysical installation work really well together.
Also, check out this nice video by iART.
Credits:
Client: UK Trade & Investment
Design and Architecture: Asif Kahn
Digital Landscape and Video Content: Martin Aufinger, Chris Bore, Andreas Daxer
Creative Director: Xavier Chassaing
Installation, Interactive Engineering: iArt
Music: Brian Eno
