Playstation: Play Has No Limits - Paris, France

The Play Has No Limits event in Paris was an interactive arcade basketball game made using disguise and Notch VFX, it featured 66 Astera Light tubes and 8 custom PlayStation symbols that had been filled with LED tape that had been built by Cucumber Productions. The show took place at Trocadéro square in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, which made for quite the Hero shot!

The main concept was to create an interactive gaming experience for players, with their respective sides responding to scores, game wins and set wins. This information was then displayed on LED screens decorating each stand, with one being a clean, brand friendly screen and another being a classic arcade style screen in front of the player.

To create a streamlined and updateable system, we utilised a spreadsheet to organise and display names and fed it through Notch, this also let us create pre-set scaling options based of a value in the spreadsheet that Notch would read and apply to the text, after some testing in rehearsals we were able to find a comfortable set of 3 values for small, medium and large names.

Creating content for the show was relatively simple due to the workflow chosen. Treating the Astera lights as one single object in Notch allowed us to paint the UVs, opening up the ability to create sophisticated lighting looks such as chases and sine wave patterns, but without needing to use a lighting desk.

The Playstation symbols were handled a little differently and were treated more like simple 4 channel fixtures. Because of this it was easier to create the majority of content entirely within disguise using block colours, with some of the more complex animations being created in Notch.

As a final flair for the show and its location, we created a look to match the Eiffel tower sparkle, timing its activation each hour with the tower itself.

The final challenge of this build was that the entire production was to be wireless. Cues were triggered via a custom TouchOSC patch on Ipads, all hardware was powered internally with batteries and the Asteras ran via wirelss DMX.


CREDITS ///

Client - Amplify
Project Manager - Pod Bluman
Production Manager - William Moyse
Producer - Ruth Mariner
disguise Technician - Kreative Visuals
Notch Designers - Kreative Visuals & Charlie Smith
Electrician - Jim Fisher
LX Tech - Rupert Dean
LX Tech - Will Pratt