Candy Crush Friends Live — the largest architectural projection-mapped game ever.
What did you want to accomplish with the project?
We wanted to break a world record. It was something we discussed early on, when we measured the building and realised that we were well on course to be the biggest projection mapped game. It seemed like a fitting way to announce such a massive new mobile game to the world.
We also just wanted to put on a really fun and entertaining event that gave people a really unique experience. I think the juxtaposition of putting a game that is usually played on a screen that fits in the palm of your hand, on the side of a skyscraper, was a fantastic artistic contrast. It’s impossible to take ourselves too seriously when you’re designing a show that involves swedish fish, yeti’s and dogs made out of chocolate donuts, so it was about making a cool and fun event that made a real splash.
What technical challenges did you encounter and how did you solve them?
Initially the main challenge was getting through the various approval departments to actually be allowed to project on the side of the building. Regulations have been tightened up in recent years and so there were a lot of standards we had to meet. We honestly had to have a guy, to deal with the guy who deals with the guy who makes the decisions. It got complex.
We also had to solve the issue of how you take a game that is usually designed to be played at maybe a maximum 600 pixels wide, and make it look hi resolution on a building that is 100m wide. This meant quite a specific set up with the media servers and projectors to split the image and re-render it at a higher resolution, something that is done quite routinely with pre-rendered content, but we needed to achieve it with a live stream from a tablet that was on the gaming stage.
What did winning the FWA award mean to you?
FWA awards are always just such a validation that other people and peers think your idea was cool too. When you get your head down and into a project, it’s easy to think it’s the coolest and most interesting thing around because that’s all that is going on in your life. But when you come out the other side, knowing that other people thought that too, makes it feel like it was all worthwhile.
Tools used:
After Effects to create and edit all the animationsCinema 4D for some of the coolest 3D projection effects.D3 to run and coordinate the running of the projection show. 34 x Barco Projectors
Three hot facts:
- The projectors can draw a maximum of 4800W each, which means that over the 34 projectors, we could be drawing anything up to 163,200 Watts of power at any one moment. That’s the equivalent of over 2300 42inch TVs, or turning on 150 kettles all at the same time.
- We made a custom level for the projection, so that it fit the building better. One of our team scored over 650,000 on it. To put that in context…the highest score that happened on the live event, was around 110,000.
- As the building was over 200m away from where our projection tower was sited, on the other side of the marina, that meant that if a projector moved by 1 single mm at any point, the resulting projection could be out by over 30cm. So when Hurricane Michael arrived on the day of the event…it was time to batten down the hatches to ensure they were tightly secured.
This article was originally published at FWA (theFWA.com).
- Link to FWA article:
- Link to FWA Case Page:
