CMT's project manager Richard Hawkins says, "Cake's Gary Wilson approached us saying that they wanted to achieve a transformation of the city skyline using projected images of the phone and the Motorola 'bat wings' logos."
The targeted buildings were: the Old Stock Exchange (two fascias), Tower 42 (aka The Nat West Tower), Deutsche Bank, Lloyds and the old Barclays HQ. Two locations were used for rigging the projectors - on top of the Royal Exchange, and the roof of a derelict building across the road, at 67 Lombard Street.
Fourteen 7 K Hardware For Xenon projectors were used in total, running in pairs with the images overlaid for maximum brightness on each surface. Eleven were on top of the Royal Exchange and three on the roof of 67 Lombard Street. The Lombard street projectors were trained on the Barclays building. The throw distances varied, with the longest being 460 metres to the top of Tower 42.
Working with a crew from Gallowglass, the CMT team (also including Gino and Ram Malocca and Alain Bardouil) of eight people manually humped nearly two tonnes of projection kit up seven flights of stairs - the only mechanical aids being a tiny lift in both buildings, too small to fit most of the gear! At the Royal Exchange, they then had to construct a box truss rig on the roof over the top of the skylight, to hoist the kit up the final few metres and onto the roof.
The artwork - a series of static single 6 inch square slides was produced by Gary Oldknow, consisting of photographic images of the phone handset and Motorola's famous 'bat wings' logo. The images of the silver phone had the contrast boosted to enhance their impact on the primarily grey and glassy buildings, and they also had to contend with most of the offices' fluorescent lights.
(Jim Evans)
