London-based visual artist Ross Ashton from The Projection Studio designed and created a record-breaking video artwork featuring 32 animated mosaic portraits of HM The Queen that was projected onto Buckingham Palace.
The “Face Britain’ project was instigated by The Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts and brought to life by PhotoBox. It enabled over 200 000 children to make their faces famous on the front of one of London’s most iconic landmarks.
It also marks the first time that video has ever been used to project on the front of the Palace.
Ashton has previously projected onto Buckingham Palace three times – notably for the first time during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002 – for which he used PIGI projectors.
This time leading UK video rental specialists Creative Technology (CT) supplied the mix of 24 Barco and Panasonic 18K and 20K video projectors.
The video montage of the 32 portraits broke the Guinness World Records title for the Largest Collaborative Artwork – the most artists working on the same art installation. The previous record stood at 28 267 artists.
Ashton said he was “Hugely proud’ of the achievement and “Delighted’ to be involved in the collaboration, and to work directly for one of HRH Prince Charles’ charities.
“With many creative and technical challenges involved it’s very satisfying to get the opportunity of pushing the boundaries and breaking new ground,’ he concluded.
Children aged 4 to 16 were invited to produce their own self-portraits by Face Britain encompassing all levels of skill and in any medium, including drawing, photography, textiles, painting and graphics. These were uploaded to PhotoBox.
The animated mosaics were Ashton’s concept. He worked with Moscow-based Boris Glazer to create a bespoke version of Glazer’s Mazaika software to encode all the photos and then compose the 32 images of The Queen from the 200 000 or so self-portraits that were submitted.
Ashton specifically wanted to see the individual photos make up each portrait montage flying together as they formed onto the fascia of the building.
The 32 portraits were composited into a 32-minute long video file which ran as a loop, Ashton treated each individual portrait of the Queen as a separate colour way, containing 6 400 children’s portraits. This enabled him to get the desired movement effect.
The template portrait of The Queen was supplied by the Sun newspaper’s legendary royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, and The Queen herself had to approve all stages of the creative process.
Ashton and CT’s Scott Burgess designed the projection system. CT supplied all the hardware including weatherised hides and crew for the installation, and the projectors were ensconced as unobtrusively as possible behind the pillars of the Palace’s front wall.
The video was run via a Watchout control system programmed by Dave Boeck.
The overall image covering the Palace measured 110 metres wide and 25 metres tall. Filling the spaces around the actual Queen’s head portraits were a series of animated backgrounds and other picture “frames’.
In addition to the Buckingham Palace projections, the 32 portraits were simultaneously shown for 24 hours on BBC big screens in 18 public locations around the UK.
Face Britain celebrates the UK’s children and young people in the run up The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June and the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games in August.
