Our asses were saved

Last night we painted the outside of the building. Our entrance is on the cross street side of the corner; the front is entirely French doors. To the left of the door is concrete until the end of the building. Our landlord, from whom we bought the bar, actually told us we could paint anything we wanted on the side of his building. He had painted a large black rectangle (roughly 12′ wide by 6′ tall) with a large BAR in yellow. We wanted to paint a large BGH with Bar Great Harry beneath it.

The type treatment was done and our artist was planning on making large stencils with a projector and then painting it with the stencils. We decided to skip the stencils, project it directly onto the wall when it was dark, and paint. Unfortunately the projector was a photo projector. With the printout in place on the glass we lined everything up. Then we hit a snag. It turns out that being on a busy corner means that there is more ambient light than you’d expect. We couldn’t see the projection well enough to paint.

It was then that our savior arrived. Some English dude rolls over on a bike. Turns out that he’s a movie maker and likes this sort of shit. He digs our idea but can see that success is unlikely. He then tells us that he has a proper projector that we could connect to a laptop. He says it would be bright as the sun. He goes to his house, gets the projector, and sets up with us. He then begins painting for us. It was pretty sick. We met this guy about ten minutes before the paint hit the wall and all of a sudden he’s part of the project. He stayed with us until about 1AM.

It worked like a charm and now we are branded.

This crazy mix of analog and digital solutions made for a retarded strange chain of events. Image is created in PhotoShop and printed on paper. Paper won’t work with projector. We take a digital picture of the printout and then put it on my laptop, where it is once again in PhotoShop. We fuck with it to repair our parallax problems. Image is projected and painted.

Pretty cool story about our little community, eh?

If you are killing time you can watch a very short movie (MPEG) of the setup.