First daily 4k digital showing in Belgium

One of the set ups of the international Expo “It's Our Story” by the Museum of Europe at the site “Tour and Taxis” in Brussels Belgium includes a 4k digital projection of a “living” photograph. The piece, conceived and directed by the Swiss filmmaker Danilo Catti and shot by the Belgian cinematographer Kommer Kleijn SBC shows a simultaneous portrait of 27 European citizens. Each is from a different European country and the picture shows them united together on one 7 meter wide and 2 meter high portrait, occupying the entire back wall of a 15 meter long black room. When you enter this room on the other side the picture looks like a big projected slide showing the 27 people posing together. However, when you are walking towards the screen you start feeling something slightly strange and magic: The picture is alive! The 27 people are posing for the photographer, but they are not frozen, they all breathe and blink their eyes and sometimes slightly move. It is a magic feeling indeed. You can then approach this screen and notice that the persons projected on it are at exactly at the real live size. You can then get face-to-face with each of them.

To achieve this effect, Danilo and Kommer, together with production manager Nicolas Esghain, spend many hours thinking and conceiving the setup to realize this concept in the best way. They realized that would this effect be convincing, a very high picture resolution would be mandatory given the high number of persons 1n the picture. As always, budgets being limited and no 4k cameras or projectors being available in Belgium at the time of shooting (fall 2007) technical creativity was needed. Finally the short movie was shot in studio using 2 separate HD images using an HDW-900R3 with a FUJINON 10-100 Cine Style zoom lens. However, the internal HDCAM recorder of the HDW-900R3 camcorder was not used and the camera HD-SDI output was fed into an HDCAM-SR studio deck to capture the full 1920 wide resolution of the camera on tape. The images were then stitched together on a Quantel IQ at ACE digital house by Stephan Rijcken, senior VFX operator and head of the studio, in order to get one seamless moving image of 3840 in with. This is then projected on the expo from 3 synchronised harddisk servers and using three BARCO SIM4 DLP simulation projectors. These projectors have a resolution of 1280 times 1024 each, achieving a total resolution of 3840 in with, corresponding with the two HD camera images together at 1920 each. Only 56 lines in height were lost, which was taken into account during the shoot. The special simulation projectors have physical facilities to make the image joints completely invisible: physical louvers (like were used in Cinerama projectors) allow for fades on the sides including black level and the projectors (made in Belgium) are equipped with sophisticated electronics that guarantee constant light output and constant color in time even when the lamp evolves. An individual light metering system in each projector measures the light from the lamp constantly and compensates for the changes in lamp intensity and color over time. That way the fades between the projectors will stay invisible for the entire duration of the projector lamp life.

The expo is visible in Brussels at Tour & Taxis till Mai 12, 2008.

It is expected to move to Paris and other European cities after that.

The web site of the expo is at: http://www.expo-europe.be/

Some pictures of the expo can be found here:

http://www.expo-europe.be/en/site/presse/telechargement.html

A full rez frame of the movie can be downloaded here (tiff, 9.1 Mb) Feel free to look and comment but please contact us before any other use and please do not distribute):

http://www.kommer.com/jetais/jetai179.tif

Contact: Kommer Kleijn SBC, e-mail: kommer@kommer.com , Web site: http://www.kommer.com/