This is a GigaPan shot of St. Pauls Cathedral region of the north bank in London, taken from the roof of the Tate Modern (by Nathan Gallagher). If you zoom-in you should be able to spot about 25 people hidden amongst the landscape, holding large banners containing words. These words are from the last paragraph of Stephen Kings new novel Under The Dome and this event marked the end of an extensive real-life and online game of "hide and seek" for fans of Stephen looking to find clues into his latest work before the UK release (I also hid an extract on Unity's landing page)
Our responsibilities were to produce the banners (using our recently purcased vinyl cutter) and to make sure it would all work technically.
The brief was made interesting by a number of limiting factors - the magnifying power of the camera's lens; the length of banner that an individual could comfortably hold; material usage; getting permission from property owners; the periphery of the frame (i.e. how the photo would be cropped) and differences in scale: I wanted to be sure that the closest and furthest banners appeared to be the same size. - some rudimentary geometry was going to be required.
Using a sample shot provided by Nathan I was able to use the CITY OF LONDON sign west of the millenium bridge as a marker which - though out of reach - I measured up close in relative bricks (bricks= 60mm, mortar=10mm: x-height=170mm, effectively 640pt in Helvetica), and then used Google Earth to approximate the distance between the two points (~340m). I used photoshop to approximate that anything below 80% of this font-size risked becoming illegible. This gave me a distance-point size ratio that I could apply on any banner.
After checking round the office, the minimum span of most peoples outstretched arms seemed to be over 1.4m. By threading together aerial photos and cross-referencing a sample pic I was able to work-out which locations lay under the field-of-view triangle of the camera, then cropped this within the maximum radius that the shortest extract could lie within, whilst being large enough to read and yet remaining within a managable sized banner. This gave us our working space and helped identify which buildings we might want permission to use.
The extracts were arranged in longest-closest order (longer means smaller pt size if fixed width) and then they were placed on a map. The ratio was used to find out point size and then this was cut into the vinyl rolls. When cutting, the highest banners were doubled up with the shortest into vertical pairs to minimise on vinyl. The text was reversed out - white against black - because due to an optical effect this *should* make them easier to read.
This Project has a Flickr Set.
The gigapan has been featured this week on Wired and The Guardian.
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