Post 43: Bottom Line, and technical specs

    I have to admit I was rather disappointed overall with the Festival of Lights 2011, and I heard many people around making the same comment... This is supposed to be one of the oldest, largest and best Festival of it's kind in the world. Only the largest and probably most costly show on the "Place des Terreaux" impressed me. According to my calculations, just the 4 day rental for the 7 projectors used would be in the $200,000 range. I brought that up with the Artist, and she told me they got special deals on rental, and that her total budget including production costs was 160,000 Euros, about $210,000. One of the other Artists told me a minute of show cost around 10,000 Euros, which explains why the show was only 5.5 minutes long. 
  In my opinion, the global budget was split between too many shows, a total of 70 in all, scattered all over town, many of them rather uninteresting. Granted, big Architectural projections are expensive, but I would personally much prefer only a dozen really impressive shows gathered in the walkable downtown area.
   Nevertheless, this visit was very important and valuable because of the first hand information I gathered from the Artists themselves, that changed our approach to the Alys Stephens Center Project, and made it feasable. The main info was that they used only between 50 and 65 lumens per square meter, which translates to 4.7 to 5.5 lumens per square foot. Granted, they all agreed they would love to have twice as much, the brighter the better, but we are far below the 20+ lumens per square foot used in the American estimate. The info I found on the Coca Cola Projection in Atlanta seems to have been correct after all.
   I immediately got in touch with the suppliers in Birmingham and the Alys Stevens Center to get revised estimates with half the power we thought we needed, and that brought the project within budget. Using only two 20, 000 lumens projectors on the 4250 sq. ft of facade would work out at 9.4 lumens per square foot, almost twice the French figure. We have a good deal of ambient light, but that still should give us a reasonably bright image. Of course, the more outdoor lights we can turn off near the building, the better the show will be.
 The big show used two stacked 35,000 lumens Christie projectors for each half of the large 32,000 sq.ft facade , or 4.4 lumens  per sq.ft. That was sufficient, as the square was very dark, but the HD image didn't look very sharp at such a scale. We will get almost 4 times more detail on our "small" 4250 sq.ft wall...