For the presentation of the online-knowledge portals of the fact-book publishing house "BertelsmannSpringer" on the german computer tradeshow "CeBIT" 2001, we were in charge of the large scale projection that was a major part of the booth concept that "tecton GmbH Berlin" designed.

A projection of 11 x 3 meters, with the biggest available projectors at that time was realized with "soft edging", blending the three parts together seamlessly. 3 synchronized harddisk recorders delivered the video to the projectors as well as the 4-channel surround sound, that was designed to "flow along the booth with the animation".

The complete concept of the animation was created by us - with the great support of Reinhard Meerwein, the managing director of the tecton GmbH, my partner Susanne Kohl and Markus Helzle, who did an amazing job on the Sound and some of the symbol animations.
We had 3 months for the concept, design and production of 12 minutes of seamlessly looping animation, covering the topics:
"Science, Medicin, Traffic, Business, Wellness, Architecture, Technology and PR/Media"

The original idea, to put the existing online portals on the screen, was soon dropped - their look was too different.
And the main goal was to present a coherent impression of the BertelsmannSpringer knowledge portals to the audience.

Finally, we were going in a different direction: for each topic/portal, we designed an animated symbol, rendered in a wireframe look, that we blended on top of a flying stream of light, the company name and ones and zeroes - the basic particles of all computer data. Strong, warm colors were assigned to each topic to make it a real eyecatcher.

To be able to deliver the high resolution in best quality, we did the whole piece with uncompressed material - this left us with a total of about 350 GB of data - quite a lot back in 2001 ;-)

Thanks to the unbeatable reliability of Adobe "After Effects" and its network rendering capabilities, we were able to manage this huge amount of data.

The 3D-animations were done in Newteks "Lightwave 3D" and Maxons "Cinema 4D XL" and then everything went into After Effects for the final compositing and the type animations.

The special thing about this trade show booth was that not only the upper half was almost completely covered with the video projection, but that the screen was half-transparent and behind it was the VIP-lounge. Its walls were mirrors so the animation was all around you and the strong colors painted the interior with everchanging hues.

Since this was the area for the "serious business", our animation was very calm and smooth flowing - no customer should become annoyed with hectic flickering. Also, the sound just added a gentle atmosphere to the environment, to prevent driving the people on the booth crazy after a few days ;-)

We were very proud that the booth won the "iF Exhibition Design Award 2001" in gold from the "iF Industrie Forum Design Hannover". The tecton GmbH really did a great job with the design - it was well earned.

Some Impressions from the trade show and the booth are captured in this video in Windows Media 9 Format (9.3 MB):

• Booth-Documentation