Visual production expert FIX8Group successfully managed and delivered a complex
projection and content management project for an event staged by Turkish
construction group Polimeks for the Government of Turkmenistan to launch the
country’s brand new, state of the art international airport.

FIX8Group sent in one of its top projection mapping teams for the unusual ten-day
project, which culminated in a mixed media spectacular that centred around
Turkmenistan culture and history. Held on 17th September at Ashgabat Stadium,
the event was attended by more than 20,000 people.

Leading the team was FIX8Group’s media server engineer Nick Charalampidis who
was accompanied by projects director/projectionist guru Paul Williams and media
programmer Fraser Walker. Working closely with technical director Sedat Gunduz
and creative director Candas Sisman, FIX8 liaised with Turkey-based rental
company Phantom Event Engineering and creative content creators NOHlab and
Illusionist. FIX8Group’s responsibilities were to line up and blend the 40 high output
stacked projectors in order to evenly cover the whole stadium floor, manage the
content and media programming, and ensure the seamless delivery of the many
graphical elements of the show.

Prior to the team’s arrival at Ashgabat Stadium, Gunduz organised for the entire
104x70m projection area to be mapped out into a 2x2m grid, which was then
marked out with small studs hammered into the floor. This helped the FIX8 team to
pinpoint where each projection plate would start, end and blend.

“FIX8Group is my company of choice for these large scale projection projects,” says
Gunduz. “I knew this would be a challenging project. Nick Charalampidis was kept
extremely busy as the video and music content was constantly being updated
throughout the production process. In total nearly 735GB of content had to be
managed across 16 servers. As ever Nick managed to make sure every piece of
content was encoded and ready for the ten-strong content design team to view on
the system.”

To ensure high impact visuals FIX8 worked with forty 20,000 lumen Panasonic PT-
DZ21k projectors, supplied by VER and Phantom Event Engineering, and these were
arranged in 10 stacks of four. Williams and Walker worked from dusk ’til dawn over
seven sessions to align and warp each output.

At the control end of the system Charalampidis selected eight Hippotizer V3 HD i7
Media Servers to encode the huge variety of content: “I chose the rock solid
workhorse Hippotizer V3 HD i7. We air freighted eight of our own units in a system
that FIX8Group designed and built to handle 16 machines in total. Phantom then
supplied eight back up machines, which I patched in on site. The whole system was
controlled from a MA Lighting Grand MA2 Light console. We have invested a lot of
time designing our own console profiles (GUI interfaces) and layouts in order to
cover all possible requirements across both lighting and video enabling us to
speedily adjust a lot of parameters at once. This came in very handy on this
particular project.”