3D projections add magic to Maple Leafs’ pre-game show
A dozen powerful projectors put on elaborate display, at a cost of more than $1 million, to add excitement to the game
It may be the best part of going to a Leafs game these days.
About five minutes before puck drop, the lights go out. On the sixth floor of the Air Canada Centre, Steve Edgar, manager of game presentation, gives the signal to operator Ben Robertson. Robertson clicks his mouse.
In the rafters, amongst the banners of Toronto Ma- ple Leafs greats, 12 projectors light up. (“You can see two of them hanging between Salming and Sundin there,” Edgar notes.) Each one produces 20,000 lumens of brightness.
What follows is a roughly three-minute movie projected onto the ice, full of optical illusions and fist-pumping Leafs propaganda set to the throbbing beats of the techno hit “Tsunami.”
The faceoff circle at centre ice lights up; then the blue lines. A curtain of luminescence spreads over the ice like Zamboni water. This is when the 3D trickery starts: weird wriggling noodle-shaped things; spinning disks of whiteness; a montage of Leafs players scoring goals (this presumably took some digging on the part of the research team.)
Not among the players shown last Tuesday night: Cody Franson and Mike Santorelli, traded a day before, and so excised from the light show at the last minute.
“It’s good that we’re nimble enough to do it,” said Kevin Mones, the creative genius behind the spectacle.
What the Leafs are producing is the latest in pre-game entertainment. Everyone from the Cleveland Cavaliers to Katy Perry’s halftime show at the Super Bowl employs 3D projection.
“Probably about 10 years ago, projection was big. Not 3D projection, but just projecting on the ice. It kind of went away a little bit,” said Edgar. “Then a few teams did this 3D stuff and it’s just had this resurgence. It’s this huge thing now.”
The Leafs debuted their system on opening night against the Montreal Canadiens last October. The technology and content development, put together by the MLSE tech team and Montreal firm Solotech, cost more than $1 million.
Now the Leafs crank out the on-ice spectacle before every home game. The Raptors also got the full treatment for their home opener and Retro Night. Even the Toronto Marlies got in on the action with a Legothemed spectacle before last week’s Family Day game at the ACC.
The recent surge in 3D light projections comes down to technological change.
“It’s really been the culmination of a few things,” said Scott Williams, co-founder and COO of Virginiabased Quince Imaging, which has produced light shows for a host of major league teams. “It’s the threshold of the projectors being bright enough and the strength of the media server.
“Only recently did the projectors develop to the point where they’re bright enough and have enough pixel intensity.”
The 3D tag is misleading, he says. What fans see on the rink isn’t Avatar or The Hobbit.
Instead, it’s all about light contrast: very dark and very bright, producing the illusion of depth.
“We can create powerful dimensional effects,” Williams said. “You can fool the viewer into thinking the surface is moving.”
Ice is particularly good for these kinds of optical tricks. NHL rinks are big — 61 by 26 metres — and close to white. (The world’s largest IMAX movie screen, by contrast, measures 35.7 by 29.7 metres.)
Hardwood is less amenable to light projections, but it’s NBA teams that have gotten the most out of the new light shows. The Sacramento Kings, Miami Heat, Brooklyn Nets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Philadelphia 76ers and Atlanta Hawks have all deployed the technology.
In Toronto, the ice projection command centre on the sixth floor is in the same room as the stadium organ, old and new sitting cheek-by-jowl.
Standing next to the organ, which is draped in a Leafs blanket to keep the keys warm, creative director Mones explains how the computer spits out parts of the video to the projectors, all 12 of which are synced to create a coherent image.
He describes the “lag times” required by the media server and how much detail the projected images have compared to high definition (they’re six times as sharp as HD).
But at the end of the day, he and his team are producing a souped-up version of what organist Jimmy Holm- strom does with “Hava Nagila” or “Go Leafs Go”: getting fans pumped up for the game.
“It is designed to create energy prior to puck drop,” said Edgar. “We think it’s added a lot in that regard. If you listen, when it ends, the crowd loves it — they cheer, they go nuts.”