Four Chambers Studio (GIGAmacro’s parent company) has been involved with SIGGraph, in the advanced technology area known as the Studio, for almost 20 years. When we decided that SIGGraph would be the venue, we imposed a huge time constraint. We had to capture all the photographs needed – over 629,000 – in less than four days.

The only way to make that work was to construct a special rig. We used three standard Magnify2 systems and linked them together so that the mosaic panels passed under all three rigs. Each rig had a view of, and photographed, one 24″ x 16″ panel. So we shot three panels at a time. The design of the ‘big’ rig was such that the gap between each of the three systems was 16″, so after all rigs had finished photographing the panel, we simply slid the whole mosaic ‘forward’ and a new panel slid into place below each machine to start over again.

The preparation, feeding and sliding was completely manual, so every three hours or so, one of the team had to be on-site to do the sliding. Once again the benefits of teamwork came to the fore. Gene is more of a night person, and Graham is a very early morning person. So with suitable planning and scheduling, we ran almost 24 hours per day.