The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, known more commonly as HSBC, was established and based in Hong Kong since 1865. To celebrate their 150th anniversary HSBC commissioned a light show for their headquarters to tell the story of the bank and explore how HSBC’s history is linked with the fortunes of the city where it was founded.
Seventeen floors of the building were transformed into an enormous video screen with coolux Pandoras Box providing the pixel mapping and Widget Designer providing all of the interface.
The scope of the project included the installation and system design, content management, re-lighting the building, and creatively integrating the lighting system with the media wall. Illumination Physics were in charge of the project employing Rohan Thornton to look after the implementation and programming of the media.
“It’s a project that we have been working on for the past two years,” remarked Rohan. “Initially Illumination Physics were approached to turn thirty floors of the building into a giant video screen but that was cut to seventeen. However, instead of running for just ten months as initially planned it will now be a permanent installation.”
During the installation period, the team were asked to redesign the lighting within the building which was a bonus. The interior twelve-story high atrium was consequently relit with LED fixtures and this too was pixel mapped with coolux.
Purchased for the project were five Pandoras Box SERVER PRO, two Pandoras Box SERVER STD and a Widget Designer PRO.
“The brains of the system is the Widget Designer controlling the scheduling and integration,” said Rohan. “We fed timecode into Widget Designer and used that as the heart to control the different players. As the Atrium came as a secondary project we made it into a separate system. It hadn’t different requirements in terms of playback and access. We created a flexible schedule for use on a variety of events through Widget Designer. There were also special requirements for things such as emergency shutdown and we ran them through Widget Designer too.”
Andrew Hebblethwaite assisted with the implementation of the Pandoras Boxes and programming of the Widget Designer. Steve Hendy was also of invaluable assistance.
“I have to mention the support from Show Technology’s Simon Barrett and also Harry Helmut from coolux as they’ve both been great,” commented Rohan. “When we were having some initial problems with the latency of the mapper, they were continuously giving us software updates and turning things around extremely quickly. We were really happy with the backup service.”
