The tech powering Vivid Sydney

Sydney’s annual festival of light Vivid ends this week, after delivering its brightest year yet.

The celebrations were powered by Technical Direction Company (TDC) which provided projection mapping, LED screens, and media server technology linking 50 installations and projections across the 8km Vivid Sydney Light Walk.

According to festival director Gill Minervini, “For 12 years we’ve relied on TDC working behind-the-scenes to deploy the brightest, most powerful technology on a grand scale helping to reinvent Sydney’s urban landscape and using it as a unique and colourful canvas capturing the essence of Sydney’s soul.”

TDC deployed 110 projectors across 27 sites, including Barco laser projectors for extra shine.

Karl Johnstone, technical project manager at TDC said, “With the added brightness uniformity and design we can configure them in different ways that better serve the imagery on the buildings. They are more compact, more heat and energy efficient, can be positioned in any configuration and produce a much brighter, bolder colour.”

This year was Vivid’s first year of celebrations since then pandemic, which added an extra layer of work for the project managers, creative technologists, designers and engineers working on the project said Toby Waley, operations at TDC.

“Making sure that each installation is perfect to the exact millimetre is what we do at TDC.
“There’s understandably a lot more detail and fewer last-minute changes that can be made working in a post-pandemic environment,” he said.

Some of the technology involved behind the scenes included RFID inventory tracking solutions to help with logistics and tracking equipment, as well as custom-designed projection equipment housing to protect the electronics from bad weather.

“This year, we’ve upgraded the image resolution for monitoring of all sites to 4K resolution,” said Drew Ferors, technical manager at TDC.

TDC also worked with creative studio Spinifex Group at three Vivid locations, including the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Customs House and ASN Co Building clock tower.

According toJason French, creative director at Spinifex Group, “We’ve worked with TDC for a decade and they are the very best in Australia. The team of experts always come up with trumps delivering first-class projections. At Vivid Sydney, we worked with TDC for the best possible scenario maximising the surface areas of the buildings for the artwork.”