Lighting up Sydney

Lighting up Sydney

Sydney Morning Herald 28 May

Nick Galvin talks to the technical wizards who are shining a light on the contribution made by the Macquaries to the history of Australia.

In a windowless upstairs room of a unit in a light-industrial estate in Lane Cove, a small group of designers is staring intently at the screens of their Apple computers. The atmosphere of deep concentration is broken only by mouse clicks as they painstakingly "paint" vivid colours and designs on to some of Sydney's most significant buildings.

Their task is to give historic Macquarie Street a very 21st-century makeover, temporarily turning seven landmark buildings, including Parliament House, St Mary's Cathedral and The Mint, into living canvases telling part of the story of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie and early life in the colony. 

After many dedicated hours, the designs on those screens will be projected on to building facades using massive industrial projectors.

Some 300,000 people are expected to walk the route down Macquarie Street over the course of the four-week event, stopping at each of the buildings for up to 10 minutes. Families in particular are being encouraged to take a look.

The event follows on from last year's Smart Light Sydney Light Walk, which featured 25 light sculptures in the city. Its success took organisers by surprise.

This year's event, part of Vivid Sydney, is called Macquarie Visions and its director, Anthony Bastic, says it will push the boundaries of architectural projection further than has been seen in Australia.

"The events we have had to date in Australia have just been light projections, which is great but what I wanted to do was take the concept to a different level and actually tell stories," he says. "I thought it would be a more interesting way of telling the story of two very visionary people so we're not just having a boring old history lesson but see these two come to life.

"I've always liked Macquarie Street as the ceremonial street of Sydney. It's a great space that a lot of people don't use."

The concept of large-scale projections on to historic buildings originated in France in the early 1950s, where the process was christened "son et lumiere" (sound and light). The shows remained popular in Europe and further afield, using chateaux, churches, castles – even the pyramids at Giza in Egypt.

Peter Milne, the director of Electric Canvas, which is producing Macquarie Visions, says the Sydney show will extend the concept. "The son et lumiere technique that has been so popular in Europe for many years usually uses one building to tell a particular story," he says.

"It is less usual to have a streetscape involved. We have a wonderful opportunity with Macquarie Street being the ceremonial axis of the city."

Bastic researched the lives of the Macquaries in minute detail before coming up with the concept of the hour-long walk down Macquarie Street. The more he learnt about the contribution of the fifth governor of NSW and his wife to the critical early days of the colony, the more impressed he became.

"I thought these two people needed to be celebrated and more people need to know about them. We tend to just skim our history – we know a little bit about things but not enough in depth. I thought it would be great to tell that story in a way that is fun and engaging but is also technologically savvy.

"Then I thought it would be interesting to take different facets of [Lachlan] Macquarie's life and achievements and explain the story on the different buildings we have."

The walk begins at St Mary's Cathedral. Macquarie laid the foundation stone for the cathedral in 1821 and the presentation there, Designing the Nation, will highlight his role in urban design and hundreds of public buildings.

"It's a great starting point for people because they are able to get a quick overview of the Macquaries' role in building the foundation stones of what has become Australia," Bastic says. "I think he was an incredible leader and a great visionary. When the Macquaries arrived the colony was not in good shape. People were starving."

As well as bringing order to the nascent settlement, Macquarie was also a firm believer in giving convicts a second chance. This is celebrated in the presentation at the Hyde Park Barracks called Fair Go.

At the entrance to the Botanic Gardens there will be a tribute to Elizabeth Macquarie's passion for botany; the Macquaries' political, social and economic contributions are celebrated elsewhere.

Nick Tory from The Electric Canvas is one of the artists charged with bringing Bastic's visions to life. It takes between three and four weeks to produce a nine-minute presentation. "We have to trace out every single shape and part of the building," Tory says.

"That takes about a week and a half and then our artworkers have to render and colour and add content to all of those shapes. It is a really fiddly process. You really need to love detail and be obsessive about getting it right."

A small error made by a designer in tracing the building's outline will become glaringly obvious when projected on to the facade, sometimes from hundreds of metres, so starting with a totally accurate image of the building is critical.

"We take a photographic survey of the building, which is accurate from the perspective of the projector," Tory says. "In theory, once we project it back on the building all those elements that we trace out fall in the right place."

The image will match the building exactly only if the projector is placed in the right spot. The projectors used will be a mixture of older French-made PIGI film-strip projectors and more modern digital devices. The margin for error in placement of the massive projectors can be as little as the diameter of a 10¢ coin. "If you don't get the right angle and the right position it simply doesn't fit and there is no optical or electronic adjustment that can be done," Milne says. "It has to be right first time."

It's also vital the projectors don't move during the performances. "We have to be very specific about how rigid the scaffolding towers are," he says. "The tiniest bit of movement is a lot – especially on longer throws."

On top of the technical intricacies of lining up the massive images, designing with light brings its own artistic challenges. "You can't be subtle in your use of colour," Tory says. "You have to be relatively bold. You've got to be mindful of a lot of different factors. "

There is also a balance to be found between the startling "eye candy" moments that viewers used to firework presentations expect and the subtler demands of telling a serious story through images.

Then there is the challenge of making all the images tie in with the intricate architecture of the facades.

"We are using the architecture to inform the story," Milne says. "The challenge though is how to tell the story on an ornate building. Take St Mary's . . . there is very little flat, uninterrupted surface so we have to use certain techniques to make sure the message is not distorted."

Everything always comes back to the architecture for Milne, who adds that they are “absolutely not” using the facades merely as screens.

“I'm of the belief if you look after the architecture first then tell the story, you will be awakening people to the beauties of the building at the same time,” he says.

“In our experience, even when we are just doing decorative architectural projects with no particular theme, people who walk past these buildings every day rediscover them.”