Manchester Central (formerly known as the G-Mex Centre) was host to the cream of Europe's DJ’s for Industrial Revolution, a themed celebration of Electronic Dance Music. The 2 night event was descended upon by an audience of thousands.

The event was commissioned by the Manchester International Festival as one of the highlights of their summer calendar of events. The visual element of the Industrial Revolution was the brainchild of Todd Graft, Artistic Director. It was brought to fruition by visual artists from Micro chunk to perform custom-designed, multi-media to the soundscape of the world’s leading DJ’s.

 

Todd Graft of Microchunk said "We used thousands of video clips to create a visual journey from the North West Industrial Revolution to Digital Revolution, posing questions about our use of visual media" and added. "We are exploring global issues and making connections with Manchester" all of this displayed on the biggest high-res digital screen installation in the world.

 

What set Industrial Revolution apart from other more generic events was the approach to the live visual element. It was in March 2007 that Todd contacted Steve Purkess at CT to work towards a Technical solution for the job. Creative Technology were asked to project an image 5760 pixels x 2160 pixels onto an arched screen 48m wide hung from the roof of Manchester Central. CT were to provide the technical solution from the VJ system right through to the image projection.

 

As always when working on something ground breaking, the right hardware is essential. When creating this visually captivating backdrop the live creation of the image from the source material was key. The imagery used for the VJ’s was created as a single image then cut into segments and stored on 5 V3 HD Hippotisers. Hippotiser was selected because it bridged the gap between free flowing live operating environment and a complex technical requirement. There were over 1,000 bespoke image clips made for the event and 20,000 embedded clips from public submissions and archive material. With such a vast array of images, the Hippotiser was key to ensure the backdrop was unique and responded to each DJ.

 

The VJ media was stored on 5 synchronised V3 HD Hippotisers, the five DVI outputs from the hippos were blended together in a Vista Systems 10:5 Spyder and sent to the projectors. After many projection tests the decision was taken to run with  5 blended Barco HD18 projectors to cover the projection area

 

The five CT supplied Barco FMCHD18 projectors, with a combined output of 90,000 ansi lumens. Were fed the HD DVI signals via fibre-optic cables enabling the lossless digital signal distribution. To give an idea of scale the projected image resolution was six times higher than a standard HD SDI signal.

 

Steve Purkess from CT was the Project Manager, he comments “For an event of this type the technical requirements have been refreshingly high. We are lucky at CT to have some of the best technical crew in the business, and when tackling a project of this complexity it is good to have their experience to draw on. The show ran without a hitch and from what we could see the paying customers were thoroughly enjoying themselves”