Trunk Animation Create Animated Projects For Madness’ Queens Diamond Jubilee Concert

The team at Trunk Animation, commissioned by Sam Pattinson at Treatment Studio, have just finished work on creating two of the 13 projections for the Queens Diamond Jubilee Concert. The two projections which accompanied Madness as they were playing aloft Buckingham Palace, shone out over the 20,000 strong crowd, and were seen by a 17 million viewers.

The ‘Our House’ projection, Directed by Rok Predin and Layla Atkinson, showed Buckingham Palace falling to the floor as though on a stage curtain, revealing rows of terrace houses and council flats which opened up like dolls houses to reveal big jubilee parties inside. Layla created the architecture for the collaged streets which were taken from a multitude of different locations to build the terraces, whilst Sara Savelj worked alongside designing characters. Rok Predin built all the 3D rooms and projected Layla’s terraces onto geometry before creating the dropping motion in C4D. Rok then went on to composite everything together adding detailed effects and grading the overall piece to look fantastic.

‘It Must Be Love’ Directed and designed by Alasdair Brotherston and Jock Mooney, turned the Palace into a colourful romantic setting, adorned with heart shaped hot air balloons, swans, cherubs and even palm trees all forming love hearts, as they emanated from the palace. Their animation started as line drawings scanned and coloured using Photoshop. These were then traced and animated using Flash before being taken into after effects and heavily composited.

Both videos were set at a huge resolution at double HD (4096X1046). The videos were projected by d3 control system and crew, using an array of 36 projectors set just inside the gates of Buckingham Palace.

Geoff Posner, the BBC show director and Sam Pattinson, Treatment Studio’s Producer and Art Director came up with the initial “Our House” and “It Must Be Love” concepts and we produced each piece in just under 4 weeks.

For Trunk this was a momentous occasion for all of us involved. It was also a great thrill have been a small part of this huge team effort along with many other technicians, animators and directors in this momentous BBC production.