Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Video / Projection Design · Bath Light Operatic Group
The main challenge was to make a stationary Chitty appear to travel through changing landscapes, with very little time to produce the content after We Will Rock You.
The technical story
Creating the illusion of movement
We projected animated scenery behind the car using a 20,000-lumen Panasonic projector on the circle rail. With a tight turnaround between productions, I used AI-assisted image generation to create scenic image plates, then edited and animated them in Adobe After Effects to produce layered movement and a sense of depth.
Projector lens repeatability
We experimented with using Art-Net to recall the projector’s stored lens presets and move the image between different projection surfaces. In practice, the projector could not reproduce the positions reliably enough for accurate alignment.
What I would do differently
For a future production requiring repeatable changes in lens position, I would specify a suitable stepper-motor-driven lens system rather than relying on a DC-motor-driven mechanism. It was a valuable lesson in considering positioning accuracy at the equipment specification stage.
System at a glance
- Projection
- 1 × 20,000-lumen Panasonic · circle rail
- Content
- AI-assisted scenic image plates
- Animation
- Adobe After Effects
- Control experiment
- Art-Net · lens preset recall
- Key learning
- Lens position repeatability