Professional Lighting & Production - Spring 2018 | Page 23

Background
“When I started at Westbury, I had to inevita-
bly learn video, and the projection projects
started getting larger as our clients’ needs
were getting larger,” begins John Coniglio, a
senior account representative with Westbury
who specializes in, among other things, pro-
jection mapping applications.
As one of Canada’s leading produc-
tion technology suppliers and audiovisual
integration firms, Westbury has an extensive
background with projection and video and
has been expanding its services in tandem
with the evolution of display and processing
technology.
As Westbury’s Systems Installation Man-
ager, Guy Wallace, explains, this trend as we
know it started to emerge a little over a de-
cade ago. “You started to see projectors with
warping technology built in, which allows you
to manipulate the image in a non-2D manner
instead of the traditional keystone control of
your four corners. You could actually start to
adjust the image on a point-by-point basis
down to some very fine granularity to map
onto unusual surfaces,” he explains. “So it’s
within the last 10 years or so that you’ve start-
ed to see it; now, it’s becoming more popular
and [the technology is making it easier to do.]”
The company’s early benchmark pro-
jection mapping project was the system
design for Ottawa’s Scotiabank Place (now the
Canadian Tire Centre) back in 2006. The NHL’s
Ottawa Senators had approached the com-
pany about on-ice projections to enhance
the in-game experience for fans after seeing
something similar at another arena.
That system was put into action for the
2006/07 NHL season and was a significant
showpiece for Westbury that led to other pro-
fessional sports teams tapping their services.
In fact, the Senators faced the Anaheim Ducks
in the Stanley Cup Finals that season, and the
Ducks rented an identical projection system
from Westbury for its home games at the
Honda Center. Now, over a decade later, the
company boasts a diverse portfolio of unique
projection mapping projects.
In addition to permanent or semi-perma-
nent in