"Staged" Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth

The City Observatory, Edinburgh August 2010

Client : Collective Gallery

Staged is an installation mixing prerecorded and live camera feeds within the City observatory on top of Calton Hill. The brief involved taking live footage from PTZ cctv cameras and projecting it around the walls of the 7m square room. The projectors are a single 6.5m / 3m image on the end wall flanked by 4m / 3m images on the side walls with an additional 2.5m / 3m image around the door on the final wall. All the projections had to be masked precisely to the architecture of the building with images fitted between the pillars from skirting to cornice and around the various doors. This had to be generated in real time due to the live cameras. To further complicate matters there is a large circular collumn in the centre of the room which meant that all the projectors had to be rigged well off centre to avoid it.

The long wall has live cameras fed to a pair of Sanyo 106 projectors in an 8/3 aspect. The signal is fed by a Onelan Server via a matrox dual head card. The onelan box takes a composite video feed from a local camera and combines it with a remote IP camera fed via a narrow band wifi link from the camera obscura about a mile away, then applies a mask over the top fitting the camera images perfectly to the building.

Two solid state media players and one DVD player feed the other projectors which were set up well in advance to allow for the prerecorded footage to be edited and masked exactly onsite in Final cut before being exported to the media players. The side walls are filled with further Sanyo 106 units set in the corners of the room to avoid the central pillar. As all the projectors are rigged higher than the ideal and the side walls extremly off centre the sanyos corner keystoning was used extensively to get it all true and square. The final projection was provided by a Hitachi Cpa 100 short throw unit and was a comparatively easy setup.

The technical setup took a fairly long time, in particular the translation of the live relay of an ip based camera system which had to be "re-served".by a Mac system running Evocam to allow full screen video with out user interaction. {Chris at Acquiss Media deserves the credit for this solution} As far as we are aware there isnt a system other than Onelan that would be able to take analogue and Web content , mask it and output reliably at a 2048 / 768 resolution, It may not be the purpose that Onelan was designed for, but it works well.

All cctv supplied and installed etc by REMCAM Ltd - http://www.remcam.co.uk/

Siobhan Carroll, Project Manager, 'Staged', Collective.

Collective and the artists Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth worked closely with WarPro on planning and installing, ‘Staged’ in the City Observatory, Calton Hill, Edinburgh.

The main issues with this install from the Project Manager/Artists perspective that required a lot of discussion with WarPro were; achieving maximum projection coverage over the 4 walls, taking into account the large central pillar in the room and the low ceilings and creating digital 'masks' over the projected footage which would come from 3 different sources ; pre-recorded footage in a final cut pro file, live footage from a hard wired CCTV camera and live footage coming from an ip based system.

Through working with WarPro we managed to find creative solutions to these problems. We were given accurate and informative advice on different projector set ups which allowed the artists plan how they would like the final artwork to be presented. Considering the masking, we worked closely with WarPro in dialogue RemCam the CCTV providers, WarPro were able to offer us a suite of solutions including using the OneLan system to mask the live feeds and creating Photoshop files to place over the pre-recorded final cut pro files.

The OneLan system was incredibly user friendly and the results were exactly what we needed, because of this the artists were able to achieve the results they aspired to, using technology that they were able to get to grips with quickly.

Considering the amount of different components that went into this install WarPro managed to set up all of the equipment so that it was very east to switch on and off. WarPro were also on hand throughout the install and the run of the exhibition to support Collective and the artists in any way.

Through working with WarPro and using the OneLan system we were able to fully realise the potential of 'Staged'. WarPro offered accurate, understandable solutions to all of our problems and in doing so assisted the creative process. WarPro worked to ensure that the project of on budget.

Press & Reviews:

Kirsty Wark remarked on BBC2s Review show as to "the incredible Precision" of the projections...

Paul Dale, The List
http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/27106-kim-coleman-and-jenny-hogarth-at-edinburgh-art-festival/


Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman
http://www.edinburgh-festivals.com/viewreview.aspx?id=1491


David Pollock, The List
http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/27755-kim-coleman-and-jenny-hogarth-staged/


Stuart Fallon, Central Station
http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_On-Staged/blog/2582573/126249.html