Technical production: A3 Visual
Creative studio: Spectre Lab
Los Angeles New Year’s Eve Countdown with Modulo Kinetic
To celebrate the transition to 2024, the city of Los Angeles offered a night of festivities with live entertainment, fireworks and a New Year’s Countdown projected on the Los Angeles City Hall, climax of the celebrations.
The audiovisual production was entrusted to A3 Visual, a company renowned for its expertise in the field of immersive projects and video mapping. To prepare the mapping show on the 454-feet high City Hall, A3 Visual worked with the Modulo Pi’s Modulo Kinetic media server.
Using the 3D study tools offered by Modulo Kinetic, A3 Visual was able to identify the best projection configuration for the event. Sean Mason, CEO of A3 Visual Immersive Division, explains: “The year before, all projectors were put 30 feet in the air which implied a huge rigging structure. With Modulo Kinetic, we were able to determine that there was no reason the put the projectors in the air, and that projecting from the ground would still look good.”
Based on the projection study made using Modulo Kinetic, 12 x PTRQ35K Panasonic projectors were installed as 6 double stacks in containers, with crowd barricades in front of them to avoid people getting into the projection.
“This helped the client save a lot of money, and that extra money could be dedicated to making the content better” says Sean Mason. “It also shortened the install timeline by a whole day so it saved money there too because we didn’t have to build this giant rigging structure.”
In the early evening, Modulo Kinetic played the content produced by a VJ on Resolume thanks to a low-latency live input embedded in Modulo Pi’s media server. The 5-minute countdown created by Spectre Lab and projected on Los Angeles’ City Hall was then played by the media server.
Modulo Kinetic also triggered the fireworks through a DMX command.
To make sure nothing would stop the show, A3 Visual installed a back-up for the Modulo Kinetic Designer workstation and Modulo Kinetic V-Node server. “We did this backup because it was so important. If anything happened, we know we’d had an instant takeover” concludes Sean Mason.