How Darth Vader ended up projected onto the side of the Empire State Building
This Big Apple landmark has gone from static lights to swinging lightsabers.
The Empire State Building can now be lit with moving images, with the crystal clear silhouette of Darth Vader projected on its side Monday serving as only a taste of what’s possible with today’s laser technology, experts said.
The image of the “Star Wars” villain — displayed to memorialize the passing of actor and Vader voice artist James Earl Jones — was recirculated Monday as an example of the latest use of high-tech projectors that weren’t even imaginable when the skyscraper opened in 1931.
“The impact of the display is pretty impressive, especially when you are projecting upon an architectural piece that has so much, you know, impact and notoriety,” said Peter Lund of Barco, a tech company that produces intense projectors capable of screening such images.
A long, long time ago in a galaxy not-so-far away, the skyscraper began regularly lighting up in brilliant colors to commemorate global milestones, anniversaries and events. Yet, movie-like images are still a relatively new sight at the popular tourist site.
Several digital shows have graced the 102-story skyscraper’s facade over the past few months, most recently a three-minute animated video dedicated to Formula 1 that organizers said was one of the “brightest” ever seen.
The detailed image of Darth Vader — which featured the villain’s glowing red lightsaber and billowing cape — was a recycled projection from a Star Wars-themed light show in March. The Superbien creative team responsible for the impressive imagery had also plastered a gigantic monster on the Empire State Building two years earlier to promote Stranger Things.
The process is called “digital mapping” and involves dozens of high-tech laser projectors.
The technology works in the same way that movie projectors operate, but on a much more massive scale and with a regimented crew behind it.
For the F1 show in April — which featured emojis and stars from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team — organizers stacked 46 UDX-4K40 projectors on the roof of a 42-story apartment building on 31st Street, according to Chris Peterson of Fuse Technical Group, which organized the show over a span of months.
An estimated 120,000 lumens, the amount of light emitted per second from lasers, is then blasted across two city blocks and onto the facade of the Empire State Building — and nowhere else.
A team “crunches” the animation so that it perfectly fits the frame of the canvas, a scale the projectors then keep in check.
“They’re precision projection units, so we control exactly where the light goes,” said Peterson, who worked with Fuse to illuminate Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show.
“There’s a specific lens that we use and we position the projector physically and electronically so it doesn’t shoot off the edge of the building.”
While the technology isn’t new, advancements have boomed in the last three to five years to make stunning shows like those screened on the size of the Empire State Building possible.
Demand has also skyrocketed — meaning iconic landmarks like the Empire State Building could serve as a movie screen more frequently in the future.
“We weren’t really able to do a lot of this in the past because we just didn’t have the horsepower or the light output of projectors until we started working with late with laser projection, as opposed to lamp-based projection,” explained Lund, adding that the switch was only certified within the last eight years.
“That is really the kind of the key to how good the image quality looks and how bright it is. Laser projection has really made a difference. We’re starting to see more and more and more mapping projects because there’s just more access to high-quality output projection.”
