VANCOUVER, BC – The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) and Vancouver's waterfront Canada Place commissioned Look at the Games, a light show involving the Canada Place's iconic Sails of Light, to run nightly from Jan. 30 to March 31, 2010. Appearing from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m., the light show blends color, animation, imagery and texture, with the lighting design and content provided by Quebec-based Moment Factory. "We have worked on projects all over the world, but I don't think that any other of our projects will of have been see by as many people," said Moment Factory's Sakchin Bessette.
Along with the throngs visiting Vancouver this month, hundreds of millions more will catch a glimpse of the show on TV, with the five 90-foot sail-shaped structures pulsing with Olympic-themed colors and images and serving as a iconic backdrop to the Winter Games themselves.
Shortly before the gear for the Olympics-themed show set the sails aglow, Moment Factory relied upon Rosco for the custom-made gobos needed for the Martin Exterior 1200 Image Projectors providing the illumination.
The light show's designers needed an exact match with the official colors of the Winter Olympics. They also needed to design and produce them so they would fit the triangular shape of the sails, with no image spill off the sails.
Rosco noted that it is the only gobo manufacturer with the ability to color-coat the glass in its own facility and create the dichroics, so the company said it was in a unique position to help. More than 40 color glass gobos were custom-made for the project, plus a dozen custom-made black and white glass gobos.
Anne Hunter, who supervised the project for Rosco, gave this account of the Winter Olympics gobo backstory:
"The interesting part was the color scheme they sent us. There could be little to no fluctuation as we were told these were the official Olympic colors – combinations and gradations of blues and greens," Hunter said.
"Gradations of different greens are sometimes difficult to achieve in the gobo color mixing process. Greens can be a hard color to hit. The combination of blues could also be difficult. However, because we have created different variations of cyan, magenta, and yellow glass for OEM purposes, we were able to pick the proper CMY combinations that would mix well to match the original art.
"By having a cyan available that we designed specifically for an OEM customer for example, we knew we could match the blues and all the gradients within it exactly, in combination with our percentage decisions within the art previous to going to etch. We had a choice of Rosco-created color for mixing. Our expertise in color, allowed us to come up with the proper combinations for both the art color mix percentages and the chosen Dichroic color variation of the cyan, magenta and yellow. That produced an exact match to the Olympic colors.
"The Martin 1200, which would project the gobos, uses a blue lamp source. That was also taken into consideration, providing clues for the precise adjustments of the art color and the etch process. This, in combination with the CMY glass we had chosen, would directly affect the green and bring it in line to match the color scheme upon projection.
"What made this particular job even more special was the short time frame involved. As the art was created, it was immediately e-mailed over for creation of the color gobos, sometimes for same-day shipping. For the final job – over 30 multi color originals and 10 black & white high res glass.
"This isn't a case where the art was in hand or previously created," Hunter noted. "They would create the art, send it to us, and move on to the next set of art pieces. By Thursday, we were finalizing last color and black and white pieces, to ship out for Friday delivery to Vancouver for install that weekend. Mutual cooperation was key here. They set their schedule in coordination with our production schedule for an effective quick turnaround."
After the Olympics-themed light show is complete, Canada Place's Sails of Light will feature a different show, highlighting the diversity of Canadian landscapes from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts.
Canada Place has also used the Sails of Light for holiday-themed shows, including Christmas-themed projections from Dec. 6 to Dec. 31, 2009.
For more information, please visit www.rosco.com.
