Spain, at the Shanghai Expo, through the eyes of three filmmakers

A Universal Exhibition is always an excellent showcase for audiovisual and presentation systems. Inspired by the general Expo theme “Better city, better life”, the contents of the Spanish Pavilion have been placed in the hands of three of the most prominent Spanish film directors: Bigas Luna, Basilio Martín Patino and Isabel Coixet.

A spectacular nighttime ceremony with a visual staging of dance, light, water and fireworks on the Huangpu River, which runs through the site, served this weekend as the official opening of the Shanghai Expo, already considered the largest Universal Exhibition in history. At the moment, it has already set a record in terms of the number of participants, with 189 countries and 50 international organizations, and now it has the challenge of being the most visited, hoping to exceed 70 million visitors.

As for the Spanish Pavilion, responding to the theme of this Expo “A better city, a better life”, it has three rooms (with an area of ​​2,500 square meters) that show the change experienced by Spanish cities from the sixties to current times under the motto “From the city of our parents to that of our children.”

The objective is to transmit a modern and contemporary image of Spain and its cities through understandable and attractive content for a Chinese audience that, for the most part, barely knows the Spanish reality.

After a public tender called by the SEEI, the execution of the contents was awarded to the UTE EMPTY-NOE. Its formalization is not limited to the use of audiovisual media, but is combined with spectacular installations, special effects and live performances that will surprise visitors.

EMPTY entrusted Sono, a company specialized in audiovisual engineering and consulting projects, with the technical design of the project and execution of the audiovisual means of the Pavilion.

An ambitious project

In 2008 the Sono engineering team together with EMPTY and the creatives (Bigas Luna, Martin Patino and Isabel Coixet) began to define each of the spaces. Sono engineers began to provide possible solutions to the needs of creatives. As the design progressed, prototypes were assembled and a number of tests were carried out for which Barco collaborated by lending material and moving its product engineers to Spain. This process ended with the completion of a detailed executive project and an exhaustive work plan.

The first room visited in this Spanish Pavilion has been called Origen, and was commissioned from Bigas Luna, with a journey through time that aims to tell what identifies us compared to other countries: the strength, the DNA of Spanishness in the world. This room consists of 19 CLM R10 projectors projecting on two screens with curved shapes, each of the screens measures about 50 meters long by 5 meters high and a very high resolution video signal is projected. The signal is generated by the Wach out system and sent to the projectors via fiber optics.

The projections are part of an audiovisual show, which has 24 independent sound channels, mechanical elements to move objects, spectacular lighting and an exclusive Sono system to make the floor vibrate synchronously with the content of the projection.

For his part, Basilio Martín Patino has been in charge of designing the room Cities. Presenting the changes experienced by Spanish cities in the last half century in just seven minutes is not easy and who could do it better than the veteran filmmaker. Combining archival and filming material, Martín Patino draws an ironic and tender portrait at the same time of today's Spain, intentionally fragmentary and which, again, aims to excite more than explain.

A helical room equipped with a multi-screen system will condense the film of an entire urban life into seven minutes of footage. It consists of five rectangular screens of different sizes located irregularly in space. The projections are made with 25 Barco CLM HD8 projectors.

Watch out technology has been used to generate the video signal and the control of all elements is carried out using the Medialon control software.

Like the previous show, it is a show that masterfully combines sound, video and lighting.

The Spanish Pavilion at Expo Shanghai 2010 closes with a dream. The future, as seen by filmmaker Isabel Coixet, is a place of hope and the promises of a better world. The room called Children, therefore has an absolute protagonist: Miguelín, a baby who dreams of his surroundings, the cities in which they will live, in which our children are already living.

A curtain will project images of small children greeting visitors, “Hello”, “Nihao”, in Spanish and Chinese, creating an atmosphere of magical dreaminess sought by the director. Miguelín presides over the room from his overwhelming and enormous hyperreality. This room consists of three projections on curved wire screens. For the projection, 3 Barco CLM R10 projectors were used. The rest of the room is equipped with a large animatronic (Miguelín) 7 meters high and various plasma screens.