The imaginative minds at Obscura Digital will be lighting up City Hall.
Once the sun has set on Friday, City Hall — with its ivory pillars and detailed friezes — will become something of a canvas. The story of the past century, during which the building has stood open to the public, will move across its facade in an intricate light show nearly two years in the making.
“City Hall is the exact opposite of a movie screen,” says Ben Stokes, creative director at Obscura Digital, the company behind the project. But a movie screen is exactly what the building will become.
The spectacle — which coincides with the U.S. Conference of Mayors — is meant to celebrate the centennial of City Hall, which rose up after the chaos of the 1906 earthquake and was dedicated and opened to the public in 1915. (The mayor at the time, James Rolph, called it “the finest public building in the world.”)
As city real estate Director John Updike explains it, along with more mundane upgrades such as a new paint job and some energy-efficiency retrofits, “We were looking for a wow factor. We were looking for something truly spectacular to showcase the building.”
The whole package, paint and all, is expected to cost $4 million. The city is putting up $1.8 million of that, and the rest must come from fundraising. If the goal is met and some red tape is cut away, the projection system, which costs about $2 million alone, will be installed permanently and used when the occasion calls for it.
“It’s a living canvas, you know?” says Matty Dowlen, Obscura’s chief of production. “You can make it a canvas that celebrates life in San Francisco.”
No small thing
Turning a building, with all its grooves and planes, into a backdrop for a light show is no small thing. The task involves detailed digital scans of the building and 18 projectors. Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of condensing 100 years of history into a narrative that lasts just minutes. Obscura has had some experience with City Hall — dressing it up for the Black and White Ball, for example — but this is a whole different beast.
“It’s a big job,” says Travis Threlkel, the company’s co-founder. “As far as architecture goes, it’s very complex. It’s one of our harder projects.”
“You don’t want to fight the architecture because it’s already a beautiful building,” adds Marc Melzer, Obscura’s director of media arts. “There’s no way we’re going to make the building itself disappear.”
Threlkel interjects: “Well, actually we could make it disappear.” Camouflage, maybe? It’s hard to tell if he’s joking.
Threlkel and Melzer are sitting around a conference table at Obscura Digital’s offices with much of the rest of the team. They’re informal. They joke. They have fun. If anybody in San Francisco knows how to pull off something like this, it’s Obscura Digital, one of a few companies in North America that can work on such a scale — not that Threlkel ever expected he’d be running a company that twists light around massive buildings.
“There wasn’t really a business plan,” Threlkel says. “But there was a lot of ambition, not from a business standpoint, but from a standpoint of wanting to make ideas happen.”
Thelkel first started playing with light when he was a teenager, hanging out in the San Francisco psych scene. He and his friends would have shows at the Peacock Lounge in the Lower Haight and set projectors up all over the place.
Lots of projectors
“Everybody had a projector, all the different artist friends,” he says. “Somebody’s got a slide projector, somebody’s got a Super 8, little 16mm projector, overhead projector, and we’d basically just cover our little venues.”
He moved for a time to the Midwest, where he met Melzer. “We were thrift shopping and going to flea markets, and we would buy $5 projectors and films and such,” Threlkel says. At one point he had a warehouse full of the things.
It was a hobby that became an obsession — and obsessions burn fast, always craving more fuel. Threlkel set off in unexpected directions.
“I started looking at domes,” he says, “and thinking about other formats beyond rectangular movies.”
So, naturally, he got in touch with Chris Lejeune, whose family owned a dome company. (Yes, a dome company.)
“We ended up talking on the phone for hours one night,” Threlkel says.
“It was just a really perfect mix of media and something that excited me personally,” says Lejeune, who would go on to co-found Obscura with Threlkel. “It was a much deeper furthering of the things we were already into.”
It wasn’t long before they were all in a huge warehouse on Bryant Street, manipulating light, chasing crazy ideas. Fifteen years later, they’re doing projects all over the world, inventing techniques as they go and at home in a new space in the Dogpatch that once won the title “World’s Coolest Office.”
“This is like the clean, slick version of us now,” Threlkel says.
As you walk through Obscura Digital’s converted warehouse, you get a sense of how technical all of this is. On one floor, there’s the art department, working on the visuals, what the projections should look like, how they should run across a building. At the heart of the showroom is a huge dome for trial projections. Behind some other doors, people work to put the guts of the computers and projectors together.
Fabrication facility
The company also has a fabrication facility in Oakland — there’s no place on the Internet to buy the sorts of things they’re dreaming up, so they make their own.
“It’s not like we want to build our own computers and s—,” Threlkel says. “But we have to.”
While projections are a big part of what the people here do — they’ve cast them on the Sydney Opera House, Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Guggenheim, to name just a few — they’re involved in other mind- and lightbending projects, too. Take the car with its bioluminescent paint job or the video “robot” they created for a sports stadium.
All this limit pushing, Threlkel says, “it’s a compulsion. I really want to make these ideas happen.” Otherwise they just rattle around in his
head. “They bother me.”
Designing something for City Hall will be a landmark of its own for Obscura. So far as anyone knows, this would be a first for a civic building — assuming it becomes permanent.
“We’ve been thinking about that space, specifically, for a quite a while,” Lejeune says. “One of our goals is to actually impact cities. ... By having it be a civic building, it starts to get into the mainstream consciousness around people accepting that something like this can be part of a city.”
There is some indication the system could be used to raise money by allowing groups to commission their own projections for a price, but city officials, and the Obscura team both say anything like that would be tightly controlled.
They all see this project as a permanent art installation, drawing attention to big events — Chinese New Year, Gay Pride, the Warriors being in the finals — and possibly turning City Hall into a showcase for other San Francisco artists.
“We want to transform it into being more of a canvas that tells more of a story, has more of a living, breathing art form to it, instead of just being a platform for advertising,” Obscura production chief Dowlen says. “The city doesn’t need more signage. The city needs more art.”