Rome Reborn is an international project based at the University of Virginia, which aims to create a digital model illustrating the entire urban development of ancient Rome. Its director Bernie Frischer asked us to get some nice HD video out of it. The model is a massive 600 million polygons – for those of you who live in the real world, that’s pretty big! The project has been ongoing for some time (since 1997, in fact) but these renders added elements never included before: some people, some dirt, smoke and some of the latest models from Bernie’s modelling team.

The statistics in terms of data and rendering were astronomical, worthy of Ancient Rome itself, but Klemens managed the monster as efficiently and smartly as we would expect from him. Rendering was a massive task and used up all our machines for a good while, as render farms across the world shuddered at the sight of such a massive data set.

Another interesting boast, we hooked up Louis’ (aged 9, one of our youngest member’s of staff) Kinect to the machine for some motion capture. Klemens (Austria’s answer to Russell Crowe) created a gladiator sequence which is used in the Colosseum shot. For those of you interested in geurrilla-style motion capture we did a lot of fiddling around to get it going but once it was up it took about an hour. The rest of the motion capture was supplied by our friends in GV2 in Trinity who kindly donated some walk and talk sequences.

Overall, we’re delighted with the results and the footage we created will be used for a touring show around Europe on Roman Technology. It was a truly international experience: an Austrian working for an Irish company in Dublin creating shots of Ancient Rome for an American client, and supplying them to a Dutch company for a tour of Holland, Belgium and Germany!

Next up on this project is to create a DVD Rom, iPad and iPhone versions, wish us luck!

Hugh has done amazing work researching and interpreting materials – from archival photos, fire insurance maps and ticket envelopes to physical remnants of the theatre scattered across the gardens of Dublin – and documented the whole project over on the Abbey Theatre, 1904 blog.

Working closely with Hugh, Niall constructed the space in 3D and blogged his progress too. The end result provides a unique view of the original Abbey Theatre as it would have existed at the height of the Irish Literary Revival – a place intimately known by Synge, O’Casey, Yeats, Lady Gregory and many others.

The project launches tomorrow night (April 15^th) at 7pm in the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College. Along with a presentation of the model, a group of young artists and performers will stage a live mixed-media event responding to the 1907 “Playboy of the Western World” riots.

Tickets are available, you can purchase them by clicking here.

In conjunction with Sarah Owens and the Sebastian Guinness Gallery, the curators of the space, we created a 5-minute loop designed to bring the building to life. Traditionally this type of projection would be done on a building with lots of architectural features, so for the first time for us, having a completely flat, blank surface to project on, proved to be a creative challenge! We also faced the challenge of a tight deadline, which gave us very little time to experiment with what looked well on the wall. In spite of this the animation ran successfully for a week over the Innovation Dublin Festival, and now is used as the holding loop for the Art Park between projects.

This month we were commissioned again by the Art Park for a poetry project called Hearts Loop. The loop consists of ten different poems themed around love for Valentine’s Day. We were commissioned to give each of these poems a distinctive look, while still maintaining the coherence of the overall piece. Both were fantastic projects to work on and continue Noho’s expanding experience of large area projections. After the 60m expanse of this one, it’s hard to see how they can get much bigger!

Hearts Loop will run for the next 4 weeks between 5pm and midnight at the back of the Convention Centre on Spencer dock. if you can see the Luas line, you’re in the right place!

Our favorite cameraman Nico Vermeulen is also on the move within the building. Nico will soon be moving his rostrum and motion-control rig from the basement to a new spacious studio upstairs. This will be a more permanent studio for him and Saskia; a dedicated space for their work that will be client-friendly and well-equipped with new lights and gizmos.

In other news, Breffni O’Malley of Silver City fame has recently become a full card-carrying member of the Noho team. This is a great boost to us – Breffni brings research, narrative design, instructional design and writing expertise into the fold. He’ll also look after the website side of things, following on from the great work done in Silver City. We’ve worked closely with Breffni on many previous projects, and this move strengthens what Noho can offer across a range of areas. Breffni will fill you in more himself soon with a blog post on the work he’s up to.

Despite the move and changes, we’ve been busy with lots of exciting projects and have picked up some great press coverage in recent weeks. Saturday’s Irish Times gave us a big spread on the app we developed for the City Walls ( see previous post ). Here’s a link to the article. Our app raced up the charts to number 9 overall and number 1 in the education section as a result.. We also featured in an article for the Italian National Geographic magazine (link). We received a Silver award in the DMAs a couple of weeks ago and before Christmas were nominated for various awards including an Appy, a Spider and an Irish Web award.

Next week we are off to Rome again for the launch of Vmust, a European Network of Excellence for Virtual Heritage. We are frantically putting together the promo video and website for it at the moment……..standby for more news on that in a while.

We shot the videos over 4 hectic days in September and cut them almost as quickly in order to have them ready for our original slot in the expo at the end of September. As always with these shoots, we got to see a little more of the city, with one of the highlights this time being the newly opened National Convention Centre. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure I highly recommend a visit. The views of the city from the top floor are truly spectacular.

A big thank you to everyone who took part, especially the four Chinese volunteers. Thanks also to everyone who showed up to the launch of the videos in the Odessa a few weeks back. For anyone not lucky enough to get to go to Shanghai, or who didn’t get to see them in the Odessa, the videos are available online on the mycity website.

In the meantime the Noho team are looking for ways to work in China again, any ideas welcome………….

John set about developing the application working from some wireframe sketches rattled out on a long journey to China. Dara worked away on the design with Niall interfering here and there. We design and create content for a wide range of different media so making a switch to iPhone wasn’t a major leap. In fact our experience in both video and interactive design gave us the skills to immediately get some working models done quite quickly. From a design point of view, we had to ease off on the ‘ye-olde’ look of the medieval dublin project, but not go too cold or clinical as a City Council signage strategy. We also found that clarity at such a small scale is an issue, so problems need to be figured out in terms of scale even when you have the facility to pinch in.

Video and file-size was also an issue. The app is quite large (at 85mbs) and we agreed early on that the video should be contained within the app so that if using it on the street, the user is not streaming video, particularly if they are a visitor at the mercy of roaming rates. So it’s a little heavy on the initial download.

We have been doing the location-based before and after video clips for many years on the Medieval Dublin project and were always looking at ways of showing the video at the actual location. The iPhone’s video and GPS functionality enabled us to do this in a nice little interface. From a usability point of view we wanted to get across the before and after simulations as best as we could. These are a little tricky because you need to stand in a specific spot that is different to the actual hotspot. We solved this by creating a different icon on the GPS interface specifically for the before and after sequence.

Another feature of the App shows a high resolution image of Dublin in 1500. The image is packed full of historical detail taken from our work with experts on the Medieval Project and is an great way of exploring the medieval city (go and see the Dublinia exhibition if you get a chance for the real thing).

So, go and buy it, it’s only 3 euro and if you have time, give us some feedback, or even better, give it a good review and tell your friends.

Now that we are back we are about to launch the second edition of Medieval Dublin. It’s ready to go to press and check out here for the latest on the website. Dublinia launched their new exhibition which features some of the content from the DVDs. In other medieval news, John, Dara and myself are jumping on the iPhone app bandwagon and designing an app for the Medieval City Walls. It features content from the Medieval Dublin Project and will be our first foray into the App business. It’s looking good so far and we will keep you posted on how we get on.

The Innovation Dublin video is online now and we are hoping to do something special for this years festival. In the meantime, Dara, John and Brefni are working away on the website.

Nico Vermeulen is our favourite cameraman, and we are delighted to announce that he is now a resident in our basement where he has set up his Rostrum and Motion Control Rig. The Motion control rig is called a ‘penguin’ and is a very versatile piece of kit. We will post up some more detailed information on this in the next few weeks.

We’ve also completed work on the National Leprechaun Museum. We created high-resolution video content for a 4 minute sequence on Ireland’s mythical landscape which was designed to project on a circular centre-piece of a relief map of Ireland made in maple wood. Our cosmic designer Dara, designed and animated the entire sequence. We also provided visuals for the ‘Bronze Room’ which is a 4-projector-360degree-moving panoramic projecting onto a copper surface. Again the subject matter was Irish Mythology and Folklore, and once again Dara (a true Fairy) designed and produced this piece with the help of some 3D. There is also a wishing well with interactive watery simulations (created by magic John)  that will be installed over the summer.

We have been commissioned by Martello Media to create and install content for the Irish Pavillion in the World Expo in Shanghai. It’s a great opportunity for us and we will be updating this Blog with bits and pieces, while we are there. We have created some great looking content that will be spread across 3 main installations within the Pavilion.

The Atlantic Light corridor features a 6 projector-long looping video projection on the floor. The projection mixes CG elements such as flowing grass and raindrops with live-action of gushing rivers shot on a Red camera. The picture below shows Klemens checking out his work projecting on the floor in the office. The projection in the exhibition will be 30X2.6 metres. We learnt a lot in terms of creating content for a particular scale, context and technical specification. We are also triggering an LED light display to go with the video and John Lynch will blog about this, no doubt, in the next week or so.

Klemens admires his handiwork

In the urban-vistas area we created a 3 projector wide video that gives a flavour of what an Irish city is all about. We mixed content from the MyCity exhibition, the Medieval Dublin project, and new timelapse shots of Cork. We also used the wooden CG model we have of Dublin and rendered it in high resolution 4:1 widescreen. TrinityHaus, a research group in Trinity, supplied us with information to create a vision of a sustainable Dublin in the future (thanks to Emma and her team). Similarly, the Metropolis project from the GV2 guys in Trinity college, gave us some great renders of their amazing CG environments of Trinity, complete with students hanging around and posing on campus. Kila (Bail O Dhia ar an obair) supplied the music and we hope the visuals show off our cities in their best light.

The largest of the installations is a 6 projector corridor which gives the viewer a taste of everything they have seen so far in the show. As the content floats towards us it is mirrored on the floor to give depth and a feeling of infinity to the work. It is interspersed with full high resolution (4K) video, which was shot especially for the piece. Jammily (is this a word?) we got access to Croke Park to shoot Ireland beating Wales in rugby. Niall C, Danielle and Nico setup behind the goalposts with a Red camera shooting at full 4K. (Glenn McQuaid, esteemed horror director, FX artist and massive rugby fan, reckoned the guys needed a hand and came along to help out).  We also got out and about in Newgrange and other locations. Again we had to shoot and design for a specific scale and context, so it keeps things interesting. The high resolution 8:1 video is immense and we cant wait to see it installed.

We will get some pics up as soon as we can, once we get on site and start to install. Now we sit and wait for the volcano ash to pass, so we can get on a flight…………