Dazzling video honors British film legacy
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a prestigious champion of film culture, specializing in the preservation and dissemination of classic movies that span genres and countries. It also provides film education and encourages cinematic creation throughout the United Kingdom. Although the charity manages many facilities and initiatives, BFI Southbank is perhaps most representative of the BFI's presence in the film arena. The theater features critically acclaimed, under-shown movies from around the world and distributes films to over 800 venues annually. The BFI's management wanted the theater's exterior to capture this artistic flavor and turned to a design that incorporated — what else — moving pictures. They called on design firm Haberdasherylondon and Color Kinetics LED luminaires to create the show-stopping installation.
To embody the theater's identity as the premier institute of cinematic arts, Haberdasherylondon designed a giant cube-shaped installation, which stands between the building's main and riverside entrances, creating strong visual connectivity between the spaces. To illuminate the three exterior-facing sides of the cube, the design team threaded 51 strands of Color Kinetics iColor Flex MX throughout the structure. The strands, which comprise over 2,200 compact, color-changing LED nodes, are paired with a third-party controller to produce dazzling video sequences. A grainy old film-reminiscent countdown prefaces a succession of canonical movie scene snippets, revitalized with bold color from the iColor Flex MX strands — exemplifying the rich film culture that the BFI honors.
