In 2020, we were a proud sponsor of the Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival. When the artist originally commissioned for the Nuit Blanche projection mapping piece fell through a week out from the event, we offered to step in and deliver it ourselves – gratis, as part of our sponsorship.
It was a project we’d been quietly wanting an excuse to tackle, and a week wasn’t a lot of time, but the brief was too good to pass up: project a piece of original work onto the façade of the Napier Cathedral for one of the festival’s signature evenings.
The final piece wove together collaborations with local artists and galleries – including the Boyd-Dunlop Gallery across the road from the Cathedral – and built toward a finale we were particularly proud of. We captured a photogrammetry model of the Cathedral itself, took it into Houdini, and ran a full destruction simulation – bringing the building crumbling to the ground as though it had just been struck by an earthquake. Projected back onto the real building at scale, the effect was something Napier hadn’t seen before.
From our little projection booth on the night, we could hear the crowd cheering and applauding through the walls. For a community project pieced together in a week, that was the result we’d hoped for.
We’re keen to meet you, hear your story and help you make your mark.