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[Italy] Although best known for its beaches and club scene, the Italian city of Rimini is also of considerable cultural interest. As well as Augustus’ triumphal arch, its Roman monuments include the Bridge of Tiberius, which broke ground in 14AD and was completed in 20AD. Built with Istrian marble, this bridge is a fine example of the architectural expertise of the Ancient Romans, a marker of which being its survival through the centuries.

Incredibly, the bridge is still open to vehicular traffic and as part of its extensive 2000th birthday celebrations (that began in 2014), this year saw the opening of the first section of pedestrian paths and vantage points round the bridge, in order to make it more accessible to tourists.

To coincide with Rimini’s extensive New Year celebrations, local authorities staged a multimedia event at the bridge, including high-impact projection mapping designed to tell the bridge’s long and fascinating history.

The task of detailing the monument’s glorious past via AV was entrusted to creative artists Roberto Costantino and Sara Caliumi of Bologna-based Prospectika, specialists in architectural projection.

Regular readers of LSi may well be familiar with the pair’s work following previous coverage of their high-impact 3D visual design for Theodoric the Great, an event staged at the mausoleum that the king of the Ostrogoths - ruler of Italy, regent of the Visigoths and viceroy of the Eastern Roman Empire - had built in 520AD as his own tomb in Ravenna (see LSi November 2012).

Caliumi gives an insight in their modus operandi for this type of project: “We don’t trace the lines of a building’s façade and fill them with 2D content - instead, we create 3D or particle-formed objects that are produced and animated along with a model of the architecture

we are working on. We start with the virtual modelling of the monument on which we have to create a visual, treating it like a sculpture on which we can modify virtual lighting and change the materials. Roberto and I work together artistically, from concept to editing. We establish the ideas, creating a canvas with times, variations, concepts and styles for each scene. At the last stage, we decide together what to keep and what to eliminate.”

For this project, the artists were contacted by a manager of Rimini Municipality, with whom they had worked in the past on such projects as Luci sul Galli and Luci sul Palco, both staged at the city’s Galli Theatre.

The visual installation on the bridge is part of the Regional Operational Programme of the European Regional Development Fund project Città Attrative e partecipate Laboratorio Aperto Rimini Tiberio.

“Before creating the visual ‘scenes’ that will eventually animate the job, we carry out an in-depth study of the form of the monument. And, above all, we must always bear in mind from where it will be viewed. Spectators’ distance and viewpoint give us our starting point. Usually, at that stage we

have already met the client, who gives us the key topics and the concept. Then Roberto and I share a draft from which we start work on the creative and implementation parts of the mapping. Every one of our projects is therefore unique and site-specific - tailor-made,

Mapping a monumentMike Clark discovers how AV technology helped to bring one of Italy’s ancient Roman monuments to life . . .

B Prospectika’s Roberto Costantino and Sara Caliumi

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starting from the location’s limits and potential.”

For the Rimini installation, the surfaces of the bridge, with its five semicircular arches, became a gateway through which spectators were ‘led’ on a unique immersive experience. The journey was a round trip featuring themes of renewal, change and continual transformation, based on the long history of Rimini, a city also open to the future and technology. To reflect this, the Bridge of Tiberius was partly transformed into a wooden structure, then a metal and a glass one as part of the show.

Costantino takes up the story: “The projections began by showing a system of wooden pulleys - with which bridges were built in those days - that we modelled on reconstructions we found during our research. All the animated scenes were created using particle effects created using bits, numbers, codes and dimensions linked

with calculus and connections.”He continues: “To represent

a combination of the innovation of the bridge in Ancient Roman times and compare it with the present day, we reconstructed four versions of the bridge as it could have been throughout its history, including at its peak of splendour, complete with decorations of the Ancient Roman period.”

Video, lighting and audio equipment was supplied by Alter Echo. The video set-up comprised four Panasonic DZ21KE 20k video projectors with ET-D75LE30 lenses, a Dataton Watchout server, Mix server, three Mac Book Pros with Retina, two Kramer VM-400HDCPxl DVI distributors, five Optics fibre converters and a Cisco SD216 Linksys switch.

The pair used various software for the realisation of the video content, including Maxon Cinema 4D to create the virtual content, then Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and

Final Cut Pro for compositing and editing on the audio tracks.

Music for the event was produced by Gipo Gurrado, who says: “All the music was original and composed by me, with the exception of a short piece by Harry Gregson-Williams. I produced the music in my studio using Apple’s Logic Pro and numerous virtual instruments, particularly Native Instruments’ Kontakt library, and also played real instruments, such as guitar and bass.”

Gurrado has collaborated with Costantino and Caliumi numerous times, and the three enjoy a sort of entente - sharing a common language based on direct experience and the ability to refer to other projects on which they have worked.

Gurrado continues: “We normally begin with a series of suggestions which they [Prospectika] send to me to network on the dynamics - the ‘full’ and ‘empty’ parts and the

‘peaks’. Once I’ve identified the overall mood, I put the first arrangement together, and then we bounce ideas back and forth, exchanging files and adding stuff. We worked like this on the Bridge of Tiberius project, leaving the pure sound design aspect to the final stage of the work.”

Gerardo’s music was fed out via a JBL Vertex line array consisting of 36 JBL 4888s and 16 JBL 4880 subs, powered by 34 Crown I-Tech 8000 and 18 Crown I-Tech 6000 amps.

Throughout December and well in to January, every corner of Rimini was brought to life with art exhibitions, festive markets, music, theatre and illuminations as part of the city’s extensive New Year celebrations. Key to this was the illumination of the Bridge of Tiberius that saw 21st century technology utilised to highlight the city’s rich heritage and charm in a way modern audiences could engage with and enjoy. IP www.prospectika.com