There’s something beautiful about a simple brief. This one was almost as simple as it gets:
‘Netflix wants to make a billboard disappear.’
For a brand new all-LED billboard thrust into the vibrant sky above LA’s Sunset Boulevard, the goal was to make the physicality of the thing vanish, for the content to seemingly float, tacked invisibly to the peaches and whites and teal gradients of the California sky behind.
For AV&C and partner Daktronics, who boldly said yes to what was in reality a pretty crazy idea, we built a 24/7/365 automated self-color-correcting video pipeline that made the thin borders of the giant display vanish into the air, against, it seemed, the will of science itself.
Many said it couldn’t be done, and they should go out to Sunset Boulevard and bring a crow to eat and send us a picture of them eating it, because we did it.
To be totally fair, this was a quixotic mission. The type of PTZ cameras that can withstand 24/7 operation aren’t famed for their accuracy and don’t sport the kind of ultra-precise controls one would want for a task like this, and the kind of LED displays they install for roadside billboards are similarly not instruments of great subtlety.
But there was a great amount of will, so we found a way, using truly exotic LED color science, arcane camera control APIs, grilling the LED manufacturers at length about edge cases and undocumented behavior, astronomical calendric automation, and endless testing through countless sunsets and sunrises in Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and LA.
Drive East on Sunset, do a double-take, and think of us.
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NETFLIX: INVISIBLE FRAME
Client: Netflix
XD, Software, Systems - Design & Implementation: AV&C
Technical Direction: Noah Norman / Hard Work Party
November, 2021
Made with love and TouchDesigner.
