Tuesday, February 22, 2005

WORLD EXPO 2005, JAPAN (Visuals)



After a years work, the think!OTS team have successfully completed construction of the Australian Pavilion in Aichi, Japan.

The project was quickly hailed as Australia's most innovative and crowd pleasing pavilion yet, with Prime Minister John Howard praising it as the best yet.

The centre-piece for the pavilion, the Data Forest, was developed as a huge, high-resolution 'forest' of vertical video totems made up of over 80 plasma panels. These totems presented a digitally driven, tesselated show where the 80 screens overlap and fragment to create huge, three dimensional imagery. These animations were produced as massive 'superbitmaps', or single completed scenes that were then diced up into the 80 separate feeds, resulting in a 360 degree display, far exceeding the HD format or even iMAX film with a total resolution of 36 Megapixels running at 25 fps - making it the world's largest single moving image to date.

The final act also required character animation of the official mascot (originally designed by Nathan Jurevicus) to appear in various projected videos.

I was commissioned by think!OTS in late 2004 to produce the animated content for all three acts of the Australian pavilion. Working alongside fellow creators David White and Martin Buchhorn, the Data Forest team were also involved in the development of the overall concept which included all acquisition and creation of hundreds of original design and animation components. Operating as a separate unit out of Chroma's Sandilands office the team worked tirelessly to produce the 13 minute presentation, making use of 3D visualization tools and a scaled-down 'Mini Totem' to present work to the client in this unique vertical format.

The project was completed on budget and schedule in December of 2004.