Last week, New Yorkers might have looked up one night and seen a huge illuminated billboard floating along the west skyline, over the Hudson River.
Industry friend Will Amos of Diversified sent me a smartphone video that was, as he advertised, crappy, and had him guessing way off in the distance was a plane towing an LED light array, a modern spin on the decades-old business of aerial advertising using cloth banners. He
https://twitter.com/wamos80/status/768770379565400064
Turns out it wasn’t LEDs or a plane. It was projection mapping – with a chopper pulling along a 250-foot-wide white fabric banner and a second chopper flying alongside, keeping the same speed and altitude and blasting a stacked, edge-blended video on the floating screen.
It was an over-the-top promotion for a show the is all about over the top – the MTV Video Music Awards which went off last night in NYC.
The effort broke the Guinness world record for the largest aerial projection screen – with me guessing there wasn’t a previous record to break.
The campaign was executed by the Aussie firm Branding By Air, in collaboration with Remarkable Media.
https://twitter.com/brandingbyair/status/770190751489781760
Here’s a Gizmodo piece that goes into more technical detail.
I’m guessing this costs a couple of bucks to pull off, as you don’t just hire any old “Fly By The Statue Of Liberty!” chopper pilot to fly the chopper with the projection unit. But doing it gets attention and free media (like this).