La Tour est Belle – ETC Paris helps celebrate 120 Years of the Eiffel Tower
As part of its annual Bastille Day celebrations, the City of Paris commissioned a breath-taking mixed media spectacular which also commemorated the 120th anniversary of one of world's most iconic buildings, the Eiffel Tower. This show-stopping event combined giant video projection by ETC Paris – a world first for the Tower – stunning pyrotechnics and a specially composed soundtrack.
Witnessed by over 700,000 spectators gathered on the Champ de Mars in front of the Tower, "La Tour est Belle" was the brainchild of Christophe Berthonneau, founder of pyrotechnic specialists, Groupe F.
Berthonneau chose the expertise of ETC to realise the large format video projections, utilising specialist digital artwork and graphics produced by Cosmo AV - combined with Groupe F's elegant pyrotechnic illuminations. The close collaboration between such a serious technical and creative A-Team promised the extravaganza proportioned event that all were expecting.
The compelling scenography embraced a myriad of historical and contemporary moments that have affected the City and its most famous monument since 1889. The story also celebrated Paris's richly multi-cultural make up, with the final stages paying tribute to the engineering genius of the Tower's creator, Gustave Eiffel.
A 320 metre high curved, near transparent structure - with a framework of more air than dark iron metalwork - is not a surface any projection expert would select by choice, but accomplishing what is thought to be impossible has become somewhat of a tradition for ETC!
ETC's crew of 8 was faced with many challenges, with an extremely tight production schedule topping the list. ETC works regularly on large-scale events, but the pressure was on to achieve absolute perfection for such a high profile show put on by the Mayor in their home town.
27 video projectors were used to cover the entire south-west façade of the Tower. Using a combination of Christie 25, 20 and 18Ks, the projectors were divided into 8 groups - triple and quadruple stacked - with their images overlaid in different formats depending on their focus onto the Tower.
The ETC Paris team collaborated closely with designers, Cosmo AV, who produced the show's custom artwork to bring the Tower to life with graphical vibrancy, animations and effervescence.
Show programming began a month beforehand utilising ETC's versatile control platform, Onlyview, which also handled all the image distortion and perspective correction for the artwork. The media was programmed into a fully redundant system of 8 Onlyview servers (one per group of projectors). A ninth Onlyview server carried the sound-track, with timecode from Groupe F's control position under the Eiffel Tower run via fibre optic link.
The Eiffel Tower danced its way through a series of awesome projection and pyro effects, laced with drama, theatre and snapshots of an amazing story about a beautiful structure, presented and enjoyed in a unique event.
Stéphane Chave, Events Director for the City of Paris, comments, “Beyond the technical challenge related to the complexity of projecting images onto a monument such as the Eiffel Tower, the honour bestowed upon the edifice’s beauty by E/T/C was a moment of pure magic enhanced by the perfection of the projections."
Click on the pictures for the large version
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