Camargue flamingoes and Santa Claus – depicted in the brightest of colors

Each year since 2004, the French city of Arles treats its inhabitants and visitors to ‘Drôles de Noëls’ – a four-day festival with art, music and spectacles centered around the theme of Christmas. One of the highlights of the 2016 edition was a colorful video mapping onto the facade of the city’s town hall created by designer Christian Gimat. It featured Santa Claus – and Barco – in leading roles.

Barco solution

• HDX-W20 projector

Why Barco?

• Brightness

The journey of Santa Claus
The pink flamingoes and white horses so typical of the Camargue region around Arles, multi-colored elephants, coral reef fishes and snowmen with parachutes: video mapping expert Ad Lib Créations gave them all starring roles in the story of how Santa Claus left Arles to explore the world. To help the show designers depict the story in bright, true colors, Abaques Audiovisuel installed two of our HDX-W20 FLEX projectors.

More pink than ever before
As the projectors could not be set up directly in front of the building, the installation was pretty challenging. Yet the experts succeeded in showing the images seamlessly on the two parts of the façade, thanks to two independent warpings. Our compact, 20,000-lumen projectors were so bright that the show designers used the FLEX light-on-demand feature to reduce the contrast and colorimetry. The result: an animated Christmas story in vivid, crisp colors. The Camargue flamingoes never looked pinker and Santa Claus’ costume never looked redder than they did during those four nights in Arles!