Sails Pitch

There's been a lot of discussion recently about some of the potentially disastrous consequences of 3D printing, though there are plenty of people offering support to the technology and reaping the benefits of its less violent applications. Leo Warner, a founding director of 59 Productions – one of the world's leading companies specialising in video and projection design for stage and live event environments – is one such person.

59 Productions have worked on everything from the touring show of Sigur Ros' Jónsi to the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, and can now add the prestigious honour of lighting the sails of the Sydney Opera House for the duration of the 2014 Vivid Festival.

Being presented with one of the world's most iconic pieces of architecture as a canvas for your own art is a daunting enough prospect, but becomes even more so given the fact UK-based Warner has never set foot in Australia, let alone Circular Quay.

“I have personally never seen it, so this is a big exciting step!” exclaims an excited Warner, on the phone from the UK.

While 59 Productions producer Richard Slaney has been over to examine the site, the work on the project has been developed on a 3D-printed 1:300 scale model. As mentioned, since their inception in 2006, 59 Productions have worked as part of some incredible productions. For Warner, Vivid has provided the perfect stage at the perfect time.

“It's one of a small number of quite large projects now which we are leading artistically, that we have conceived and developed, so in a way it's like a flagship of that.”

One such project is a large-scale stage adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 sci-fi novel, Solaris.

“It's very interesting to come to this point now where, as primary artists, we are able to lead with our own ideas. That really is where we've been heading all this time and it's great to be stepping into that arena on such an extraordinary stage.”

That momentous shift at 59 Productions has also influenced their approach to the task of lighting the sails.

“We've looked at what defines us creatively as artists, some of the techniques and processes used before successfully which are distinctive and separate our work from other creators of this kind of project, and tried to pick up on some of those ideas. For example, the temptation is doing everything digitally: to do all the content in 2D or 3D and then map it back onto the building. Something we're very interested in is using live action filming, so, making scale replicas of the building which we then subject to various processes and film that before depositing that back into the final piece, so we're mixing digitally-created elements with quite a lot of organic or more naturally-created elements, which is something that to some extent has always defined our work – quite often we spend considerable energy hiding the digital nature of the technology and making it feel as organic and tactile as we can.”