As the final winner was announced, the face of Winston Churchill, voted the all-time greatest Briton by the public, was then projected onto all three buildings - in London, Liverpool and Bristol - in a simultaneous live broadcast.
The project followed on from E/T/C’s work with the BBC for the first programme in the series - on Viscount Horatio Nelson. They projected the face of Nelson onto the Shell Building on London’s South Bank. This projection was such a success, that the BBC decided to publicise the finale using the same hi-impact promotional techniques of large format projection.
The London site was Wellington Arch, at Hyde Park Corner - where E/T/C has previously projected for the Poppy Appeals 80th Remembrance Day anniversary in 2001. The Liverpool site was the Holiday Inn City Centre hotel, which has also been utilized for this purpose before, whilst in Bristol they found a new site in the former Bristol & West Building Society tower.
The projections were all achieved using PIGI 7kW xenon projectors with double scrollers. At Wellington Arch, the hardware was rigged in the back of a truck parked in front of the arch whilst in Liverpool, the projector was installed on the fifth floor of an office block opposite the hotel, with cables fed up from the ground below. In both cases generators supplied by Cat Rental Power powered the projectors. In Bristol, meanwhile, a company boardroom opposite the tower provided the optimum position. Here a mains feed had to be specially installed to run the projector.
(Ruth Rossington)
