Post 39: The Logistics

  My Alys Spephens contacts Jessica and Adam came to my studio to talk about the projection, and view a projection of my Red Cross Show, and liked my proposal. The big question now was the cost of the project. I tried to get an estimate on equipment first from the guy that rented the projectors for the Red Cross PTTR, who told me he understood what I needed this time around, but in the end, he dragged on giving me a quote, I got tired of calling him back, and he still has not called me back. I guess it was out of his league, and he got scared...
   Adam suggested I call Holt Audiovisual, the oldest in the business in Birmingham, whom he had worked with before, and felt were very reliable. We had a meeting in front of the building to talk to them about the project , measure distances, look at possible projector locations, etc... They came back with an estimate of $42,500, which they found too high. So I got another estimate which was lower, but using only 30,000 lumens instead of 80,000lumens. I also contacted LG Systems in Texas and Obscura Digital in California, which are the big players in the US and have done major shows internationally. Only Lg Systems answered my enquiry, with an estimate that blew mw away: 200,000lumens(10 projector), and $469,000 for one night with 4 minutes of custom show with 15 minutes of "filler" images playing for about 6 hours in a loop. Plus $166,000 extra for a week, and $25,000 to $50,000 per minute of extra custom material...So a 20 minutes show for 4 days would be over a million dollars! No wonder we see so few Architectural Mapping Projections in the good old U.S.A...Only Coca Cola and the movie studios can afford them.
  So the other question was: do we need 30,000lumens, 80,000 lumens, or 200,000lumens? Quite a range for the same 4300 sq.ft of facade...
  My own guess would be about 80,000, 20 lumens per square foot being the average standard for a dark area.