Once every five years, Canon puts on its Canon Expo. It’s an all-encompassing trade show where Canon shows off the latest and greatest tech across all of its domains – photography, printing, medical equipment, commercial surveillance, and so on.
This year, the event was held at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. Over 100,000 square feet of the convention center was converted into a hustling and bustling trade show floor. It took 11 days, hundreds of workers, dozens of cranes, tonnes of scaffolding, a hell of a lot of coordination and probably more swear words than you can imagine.
To capture the chaos, Dentsu America, the agency in charge of Canon’s operations hired Blue Barn Pictures to create a time-lapse video. From the initial construction of the walls to the final day of the show, the time-lapse gives us a birds-eye view of the incredible amount of work it takes to set up one of the biggest company-specific trade shows out there.
Director of Photography David Castillo said the most integral part of creating the time-lapse was pre-production. The Blue Barn team had to become extremely familiar with Canon’s blueprints to ensure every camera was mounted in the right place. The problem was, not everything went according to plan and certain cameras would sometimes become obstructed as walls were adjusted or moved entirely.
To simplify the process, the Blue Barn team used Canon 7D Mark II cameras, which have built-in intervalometers for capturing time-lapse images. To make sure no second was left uncultured, the team opted for 64GB Compact Flash and SD cards inside the 7D Mark II cameras, with the latter acting as a backup for the former.
Another challenge was lighting. Lighting varied from one area to the next, so a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second was chosen to prevent the cycling light sources – such as tungsten and halogen – from banding.
The lenses used were as follows:
- (6) Canon 8–15mm f/4L Fisheye
- (4) Canon 14mm f/2.8L II
- (4) Canon 24mm f/2.8L II
- (2) Canon 35mm f/1.4L
- (1) Canon 16–35mm f/2.8L II
- (1) Canon 24–105mm f/4L
- (1) Canon 50mm f/1.2L
In addition to monitoring all of the mounted cameras, two members of the Blur Bird team also walked around the trade show floor to capture visitors throughout the length of the expo.
https://vimeo.com/144127894
In total, over 120,000 photos were captured over the course of 16 days.
Image credits: Photos by Blue Barn Pictures used with permission
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