Video mapping pioneers Glowing Bulbs embrace Disguise’s Mapping Matter solution

The prestigious European Capital of Culture accolade can be a game-changer for host cities, offering a chance to boost international visibility, support the local community and foster lasting change. When the Hungarian city of Veszprém was chosen to be one of 2023’s celebrated hosts, the visual art collective Glowing Bulbs were brought in to put on a dazzling display for locals and visitors alike. Using Disguise’s seamless workflows, Glowing Bulbs realized an ambitious vision.

Summary

Since its inception in 1998, Budapest’s leading visual arts studio, Glowing Bulbs, has been delivering groundbreaking projects. Born from the city’s vibrant underground art scene, the group’s ambitions often outreached the capabilities of the technology that was available to them - urging the team to improvise. Initially working with still images and S8/16mm film projectors, the collective found clever hacks and tricks that allowed them to deliver their innovative work, upgrading as technologies became more affordable, and their success brought bigger budgets.

But still, their ambitions stretched beyond current capabilities, and Glowing Bulbs found their own way of delivering projects that ranged from underground raves to experimental art installations. They were pioneers, using their own approaches to image distortion technologies, long before mapping became a commonly used tool.

Eventually, technology caught up with Glowing Bulbs’ bold vision, and the collective’s experimental tendencies saw them testing out the practical applications of new mapping tools like Disguise’s Mapping Matter solution. When Veszprém came calling with an ambitious project that would celebrate their role as a European Capital of Culture, Glowing Bulbs knew they had the best way to deliver an entrancing show.

The challenge

Where many cities benefit from large open spaces that can host central events, Veszprém’s relatively small layout presented a distinct challenge. The expected audience would need to be scattered amongst a number of smaller stages across different areas of the city.

The team settled on five locations that would each host different performances and feature different stage designs, all running simultaneously. 

“We decided on an open-air immersive experience for the spectators,” says Tamas Zador, founder member of Glowing Bulbs and director of the Budapest studio. The team worked to a storyline drafted by Can Togay, the season’s director. Incorporating music, dance, live performance art and video projection, the experience would see Zador’s team working to project stunning visuals onto a broad range of structures across the city.

Delivering this ambitious programme represented a big technical challenge that would include scanning most of the streets of Veszprém’s centre while deploying more than sixty projectors across the route.

“The surfaces were also diverse and challenging,” says Zador. “A 1000-year-old cathedral, a 300 metre-long street with sixteen different facades, and a twenty-storey house from the socialist era were just a few of the challenges we had to deal with.”

The solution

The team set about preparing for the project, which would see them create an hour-long video production to play out across a sprawling canvas at 14x4k total resolution. Zador saw the work as a great honor, and the fulfilment of a long-time dream, and so made the most of a ten-month pre-production period that left plenty of time for template setup, concept and mood preparation, research and experimentation.

Nevertheless, the project’s sheer scale led the team to fully rethink their workflow and operating standards.

Disguise’s workflow proved key, enabling the team to use patches to adapt to last-minute changes, inserting them into the show automatically with frame precision. “We saved tons of time and sweat not having to re-render complete scenes,” Zador adds. “As content creator and director, it was the most important feature both before and during the event.”

Mapping Matter’s precise details also helped the Glowing Bulbs team greatly reduce their lensing inventory, enabling them to understand their exact needs. “Having back-up lenses for sixty projectors would have made the project we envisioned cost prohibitive,” says Zador. “We would have had to cut down on projection surfaces.”

Results

Though Glowing Bulbs are no strangers to ambitious approaches and big projects, they had known from the start that Disguise’s tools would be the key to success for the European Capital of Culture project in Veszprém. Streamlining complex workflows and planning every aspect of the project down to the smallest detail, Disguise simplified what could have been an exhausting process.

“I think the biggest success was that despite the increasingly intensive process we were able to maintain the focus and quality of the production,” says Zador. “The projection itself was a great success. The projector view export streamlined setup, helping the team pre-map and pre-align all the projectors before the servers were even in place.” This meant that by the time the servers came online, all forty-four of the staging areas were ready to go without the need for any physical adjustments.

This is the reliability the team came to rely on. With the minutiae of set-up made easy, there was more room to focus on delivering the visuals that would blow audiences away. 

For Zador, the project was an unqualified success. “We were able to pull it off exactly as we intended to,” he says. “We had no hiccups at all thanks to the rigorous planning, our professional and dedicated crew and, of course, the high-quality AV gear we chose.”

Credits

Farkas Fülöp: General technical lead designer, pre production and template designer, and on site technical production leadFerenc Sárkány: Projection technical manager
Viktor Drimmer: Lead Projectionist
Andor Zekany: System Engineer
Peter Perjesi, Tibor Fulemile, Majo Tamas: Project Manager
Libor Zsolt, Gwilym Huws, Marek Jankowski, Henrik Nagy: D3 operator
Zoltan Nagy, Peter Kaloz: Mbox operator
Gyorgy Karaffa, Laszlo Perjesi, Tamas Kovacs, Gabor Marton, Norbert Kozma, Istvan Fazekas: Projector technician
Tams Dunajcsik, Marton Naszvadi: Network technician
Andras Lerner: Electrician
Soso, Andras Megyeri: Pani Technician
Balazs Varga: Lighting Designer
‘Pite’: Staging Lead Engineer
Zsolt Szicso: Stage Manager
Brigitta Major: Assistant Stage Manager
Tamás Zádor: Content and Stage Design by Glowing Bulbs Art Director and Production Manager
Márton Noll, Tamás Zádor: Stage Design:
Marcell Andristyak, Istvan Rittgasszer, Zsolt Csajagi, Balazs Szőcs, Eszter Szabó, Eszter Papp, Pablo Campos, Gábor Kitzinger, Fanni Bajer, Soma Sárffi, Péter Reichardt, Tamás Zádor: Animation
Péter Zabó, Gábor Farkas Varga: Graphic Designer
Krisztina Heckler: Production Assistant
Attila Pacsay: Music and Sound Design
Projection Setup by VisualHumans
Projector Equipment provided by LANG
LED equipment provided by VEG
Staging and Scaffolding provided by VEG
Can Togay: Event Creative Director
Adorján Tóth: Event Lead