Panasonic projects in the OPT

In order to improve visitors' experiences, The Oriental Pearl Radio & Television Tower (OPT) in Shanghai turned the inside of the lower ‘pearl’ on the ground floor foyer into a single 2,500m² projection surface. To achieve this, OPT brought in Maxin10sity and Motion Magic, who chose projectors from Panasonic. Collaborators Ouchhh and Mindscape Studio were also chosen by Maxin10sity to help with the project.

‘The entire process started with a storyboarding phase where the four of us stayed in Shanghai for a month,’ said Agnes Szentannai, project manager at Maxin10sity. ‘During this period, the client had to approve each storyboard as a sketch version, then the second step was adding more colours and details. Every few weeks we gave a presentation about the current state of the project and based on the client’s feedback we then modified some parts. Maintaining good communication, both internally and with the client, was essential during this process; particularly as we were using cultural elements and symbolic patterns that had to be represented correctly.’

Motion Magic chose 30 Panasonic PT-RZ21K projectors to cover the entire façade, which were all operated by Dataton’s Watchout media servers. ‘Both the dimensions and the shape of the surface brought us numerous challenges throughout this period, mainly because the façade is huge, yet close enough to the audience to require high resolution content,’ commented Szentannai. ‘We had to experiment a lot with the technical setup, which forced us to think outside of the box sometimes. We also had to consider the different points of view for the animation, as the audience had access to see it from two levels, each of which offered different angles. We had to consider the best option to avoid distortion as much as possible.’