June 17, 2022 | By Joyce DiMascio | Image credit: TDC
Vivid Sydney festival director Gill Minervini is delivering her first event and the lights have aligned for her in 2022 after the disappointment of having to cancel the festival last year. The festival was also canned in 2020, due to the pandemic, before Minervini took on the top job.
Minervini, one of the country’s most accomplished major event creative directors, has this week acknowledged the contribution of one of Vivid’s major technology providers.
Home-grown company TDC has been part of the evolution of the event for over a decade and this year its tech innovation has reached new heights.
“For 12 years we’ve relied on TDC working behind-the-scenes to deploy the brightest, most powerful technology on a grand scale helping to reinvent Sydney’s urban landscape and using it as a unique and colourful canvas capturing the essence of Sydney’s soul,” Minervini said.
A major part of TDC’s involvement centres on the spectacle of the 8km Vivid Sydney Light Walk that links over 50 projections and installations between the Sydney Opera House and Central Station. TDC has 110 projectors deployed across 27 sites on the Light Walk.
Driving the technical achievement are around 30 TDC staff who have milked the capability of the latest Barco laser projectors which provide high brightness.
Karl Johnstone, technical project manager at TDC, says with the added brightness uniformity and design, they can configure the projectors in different ways that better serve the imagery on the buildings.
“They are more compact, more heat and energy efficient, can be positioned in any configuration and produce a much brighter, bolder colour,” he says.
TDC is a significant hirer of young designers and is delivering career development opportunities to its young staff through work on festivals such as Vivid Sydney.