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Showcase: Moon Landing
Client
BBC Studios Creative
Discipline
Immersive · Projection · CG · Experimental Sound Design
Challenge
To mark the anniversary of the first Moon landing, BBC Showcase staged a special celebratory event featuring a personal appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Spherical projection mappings of all eight planets and the Moon were created, each revealed one by one above the stage, with a bespoke NASA-inspired soundscape completing the deep space environment.
Approach
Buzz Aldrin was in the room. That's the fact that shaped everything else — an event marking the Moon landing, attended by one of the three people who made it, can't treat the subject as spectacle alone.
Spherical projection mapping was chosen over flat screens for the planets because a sphere lit by a projector behaves like an object rather than an image. Revealed one at a time above the stage, they read as present in the room, at a scale the audience could place themselves against.
The 50 metre screen behind carried the corresponding fly-past, so each reveal had a journey attached to it rather than arriving as a static object. The soundscape was built from NASA reference rather than orchestral convention, sitting closer to the recordings than to a score.
The evening ended with an astronaut suspended above the audience on wires, moving as though weightless. After an hour of projection, the most effective image in the room was a physical body in the dark.
Sequence Stills
Showcase: Moon Landing
Showcase: Moon Landing
CG Work
Motion
Results