INTRO
125 DYNASTY closed Luxembourg's year-long celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Luxembourg-Nassau dynasty. On three evenings, 8 to 10 December 2016, URBANSCREEN turned the façade of the Grand Ducal Palace into what the team called “a dynamic architectural album”.
The album was built from images few people had seen: footage from the Grand Ducal family's own archive, together with photographs and film from the collections of the Grand Ducal Court, Luxembourg's National Archives and the National Audiovisual Centre, and contributions from numerous photographers. Directed by Beryl Koltz, with URBANSCREEN responsible for design and sound and a main theme by composer André Dziezuk, the architecture projection mapping traced 125 years of the dynasty's history on the building where it resides.
Key challenges
Unpublished archive footage on a palace
A 3D scan as the canvas
A distributed animation team
OPENING NIGHT
The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess opened the show on 8 December, together with Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Luxembourg City's mayor Lydie Polfer; the city followed with a public reception at the Christmas market on Place Guillaume II. The projection ran as part of Luxembourg City's Light Nights, each evening until 11 pm. More on URBANSCREEN's project page and in the court's announcement.
Before any animation, the palace was 3D-scanned, with support from OE Planung + Beratung GmbH and Leica Geosystems, and then designed in 3D by Thorbjörn Geisler. The multi-layered 2D animation came from a distributed team including Guillaume Crespin, The Visual Truth and Xenorama. Art direction was by Till Botterweck and Alexander Trattler, sound and music design by Anders Wasserfall and André Feldhaus; Codex Events S.A. set up the projection.
