LACMA ART+FILM Gala 2018

For the fourth consecutive year, Electronic Countermeasures was back working with LACMA and PRODJECT to pull off one of Los Angeles’ premiere events of the year; LACMA’s ART + FILM 2018 Gala. This year, rather than creating a design that responded to the work of the honorees, we would look to engage the city itself by way of its iconic sunsets.

The projections would continually change over the duration of the six-hour evening, beginning when guests arrived and ending just after the last had left. Additionally, we would be synchronized with the architectural lighting team, TEM, that was lighting the exterior facades of the campus. To preserve flexibility to create the color palette that responded to the conditions onsite, Instead of attempting to pre-render a single monolithic piece of content we opted to create the subtlely shifting Rothko-meets-Ruscha sunset in real-time with Notch. This allowed us to fine-tune both each color but also the timing of the evening while we were on-site while providing quick and easy color scripts for the lighting team to follow.

The special musical guest this year was Beck, with Dave Grohl on drums and St. Vincent on guitar. As we were also provided the video art Beck’s latest tour over the summer, it was fantastic serendipity to be both the video designer for the performer and for the event. Beck’s team brought in their lighting and video package and our work for him was projected on the Ahmanson Building with our animation taking over the facade while sharing space with Sam Durant’s Like, man, I’m tired (of waiting). The set included some crowd favorites including Loser, which we had created an infinitely scrolling California desert landscape with surreal elements and E-Pro which was a snappy stop-motion paper cut out extravaganza, which included locally sourced Japanese origami paper from LA’s Little Tokyo community.

Credits

Producer: PRODJECT
Video Design and Realtime Artistry - Electronic Countermeasures
Architectural Lighting - TEM
disguise d3 Operator/Programmer - Jason Davis

Beck Lighting & Production Design - Steve Mills
Beck Video Design & Animation - Electronic Countermeasures

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