Copenhagen Culture Night
Projection mapping and light installations
For more than 26 years the Copenhagen Culture Night has been one of the city’s biggest cultural events. Every year in October more than 250 shops, museums, libraries, parks, churches and public institutions open their doors and let the public experience events and spaces that are otherwise off limits. Everything from cooking classes, riding firetrucks to performance art. On average around 60.000 – 80.000 people participate each year, in spite of rain or freezing winds. This is a testement to the significance and interest the Culture Night is able to generate, and this is only thanks to all the dedicated people and institutions who every year work hard to make it happen.
I was lucky enough to work on several different projects for three years in a row, during my time at No Parking. Each project required it’s own research, preparation and had unique technical challenges. Common to all the projects however is the fact that the Culture Night is ment to be inclusive. Whatever you create, it has to be for everybody to enjoy or participate in.
We had several meetings with stakeholders to nail down the vision and scope for each project. After initial concepts were approved we would often prototype in 3D or by building scale models with styrofoam and bamboo pens. For some motion and compositing work additional freelancers were hired.
Projects
For the 2015 Culture Night No Parking was approached by the National Museum to create a show in the courtyard. The theme would be a Tolkien inspired event, promoting an exhibition in the nearby Royal Arsenal Museum. The general story and set-pieces were invisioned by the creative director and would feature a mapped setting of London, and then transition into Hobbiton. Hobbiton would feature the arrival of Gandalf, complete with a fireworks display.
Getting this show ready was an intense process that required a lot of illustration and animation. Each scene was drawn from scratch in a large Photoshop document and composited in After Effects. Smoke, fog, fire, twinkling stars and silhouettes recorded on greenscreen were aded in and the entire comp was exported in tiles and patched together in Watchout. The dragon and fireworks display were made with Fusion. This was played on four large-venue projectors with powerfull loudspeakers providing the soundtrack. Assets and art was created in collaboration with Jon Gjetting.
For the Culture Night 2016 No Parking was tasked with creating light installations on Dronning Louises bridge and in Kongens Have. Additionally projections were also set up on Nørreport Station and Frederiksberg Townhall. For this project I mostly assisted lighting designer Cecile Warming with pre-visualisation and mocking-ups. Unfortunately I had other responsibilities at the time so I could not make the animations for Nørreport and Frederiksberg Townhall. Instead these where done by Marco Sandeman, with me assisting with some assets and comping.
For the 2017 culture night Christiansborg Palace opened it’s doors to a special exhibition, and wanted to draw attention from pedestrians. We suggested mapping the two entrances, the Queens Gate and the Inner Gate, with the beautiful artwork found in the galleries.
This was actually a pretty straight forward task, since the beautiful artwork and tapestries speak for themselves. They also lend themselves surprisingly well to being projected, with excellent contrast and fidelity. Most of my work was animating the transitions, preparing the setup.
We arrived the day before to set up and align projectors and scaffolding was built with the help from Tuxen. The show ran in 10 minute loops for at period of 5 hours.
My main takeaway from the work I did for the Culture Night is that you can never prepare too much. When you are dealing with giant compositions that are projected on to buildings, tiny mistakes all of the sudden become not so tiny. I definitely learned a lot about light and contrast, and how it behaves on different surfaces. But what I have been able to apply to other work is, that lessons learned in early testing can make all the difference. The more you can test, the more you can prepare, the more you increase your chances of success. This especially applies to actual design work. Rapid prototyping and testing in any creative process is key. And if it means doing it with cardboard, or throwing up projections on walls outside the office, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you gain the insights you are looking for.
