Sharing 3-D storytelling in a different light
Ancient castles crumbled into piles of dust. Exploding asteroids hurtled over the heads of the crowd. Giant hissing snakes slithered down the side of a building. Loud, pulsating electronic music caused the sidewalk to thrum. Beams from powerful projectors sliced through the inky night sky like Jedi lightsabers, transforming high granite facades of landmark buildings into canvases of intense 3-D animation. Welcome to LUMA Festival, now in its fifth year. It turns
downtown Binghamton into an optical illusion, an ethereal visual landscape that feels like you walked onto a “Transformers” movie set. It was my first visit to LUMA and I was blown away by the visual spectacle. It is one of the largest projection mapping festivals in the country.
Luma means light in Latin. This was light on steroids. A diverse crowd showed up to experience the free light shows. The audience skewed youngish, a mix of curious college students, steampunk devotees, computer programmers, visual artists and hipsters in
search of the next big thing.
The after-dark street fair drew an estimated 50,000 people over two nights, Friday and Saturday. It transformed the city’s neoclassical architecture into a mindbending futurama of high-tech fury. A common narrative theme was the clash between technology and humanity. The outcome was often violent.
It’s difficult to describe, but think of projection mapping artistry as a mashup of video games, action and adventure movies, rock concert special effects, a magic show and virtual reality goggles.
It’s a kaleidoscopic illusion that invites the viewer to suspend disbelief. Or, as the LUMA founders – a street photographer, film editor and event planner – describe the experience on their website: “We believe when we give artists the freedom to play, the results are incomparable.”
“We’re super-proud that we created LUMA in Binghamton. We’re building something beautiful through a collaboration of a lot of creative people,” said Jesse Corbin, a 20-something tech director of the Court Street mural mapping site, which featured paintings from 29 local artists ranging in age from 10 to 70 projected with special effects.
The 2018 graduate of Binghamton University majored in English and is a self-taught tech guru. He works in IT at a local hospital. It pays the bills, but projection mapping fuels a passion. “It’s creative problem-solving,” he said. He especially enjoyed incorporating music from artists in France and Australia who teamed up on a score that he described as “kind of disco meets lo-fi electronic.”
A few blocks away, Dave Dimmick, founder and producer of Favorite Color, a design studio and
production company in Binghamton, marveled at how far LUMA has come in five years. “The first year we were one of the only ones and now we have a dozen projection mapping shows,” Dimmick said.
Dimmick’s company works for clients including HBO, ESPN, Disney, Adidas and Ralph Lauren. He assigned four staff members, including 3-D artists, a sound designer and a compositor to create their LUMA show. The quartet logged a couple hundred hours cumulatively creating their fiveminute 3-D animation show titled “One Giant Leap,” about a manned rocket launched into outer space.
“The guys love to work on it because they have freedom to play and do what they want, which they can’t do with our clients,” Dimmick said. “It’s a hometown pride thing for us and we want to entertain this big crowd.”
“It’s fun because you can go a little crazy with it,” said Josh Recene, a lead artist on the projection mapping project. “It’s all about manipulating geography.”
The Favorite Color team transformed a neoclassical granite bank building into a space ship that paid homage to Star Wars. A few hundred people packed an intersection at Court and State streets. The crowd roared its approval when the bank building’s façade spun around like a roulette wheel and transformed into a rocket ship shot into deep space.
Besides storytelling and artistry, there’s complex engineering and tech behind the eye-popping visuals. Projection mapping projects objects onto an uneven surface using a variety of technologies.
Extremely precise measurements (“mapping”) of a building façade’s roof line, windows, columns and contours are entered into a computer program. That allows for a more textural, or 3-D experience. The moving images are then synchronized to a soundtrack and projected onto a building, which gives the illusion that they wrap around columns and mold into the shape of arches, moldings and architectural elements.
A building façade is transformed into an extraordinary display of 3-D interactive visuals. It was unlike anything I had seen before. The LUMA Festival presents storytelling with a dazzling intensity and mind-blowing permutations from the most innovative projection mapping artists from around the country and internationally — including Hungary, Turkey, Spain, Azerbaijan and Serbia.
The LUMA Festival grows and pushes the creative boundaries more and more each year. Fans are taking notice.
“We love it because it’s cool, it brings a lot of tourists to Binghamton and it’s unique in the country,” said Cheyenne Simmons, a longtime resident of Binghamton who has come with friends for the past three years.
“It’s gotten bigger and better every year and it’s nice that they still keep it free,” Brad Sherman said.
“Hotels fill up. Bars and restaurants get a lot of extra business. It’s great for the city,” Antoinette Alequin said.
Street vendors sold everything from glow-in-the-dark necklaces to fried dough to gelato.
“We’re doing very well. It’s one of the biggest things in Binghamton each year,” said Antonio Gobbo, owner of Antonio’s Bar & Trattoria in nearby Endicott. He sold out nearly all his gelato flavors Saturday night.
For two nights at least, “Bing,” as the city is nicknamed, had its creative juices flowing and seemed more like Brooklyn or Seattle or Austin, Texas. In the shimmering light, it shed its image as a fading, financially struggling Southern Tier community. LUMA injected mojo.
My visit was a fact-finding mission. We’ve been talking with a philanthropist who asked: If Binghamton can do it, why can’t Albany?
Why not, indeed? Stay tuned.