Trollbäck + Company: Wall of Vision

For centuries, artists have bravely confronted blank canvases. But what if the canvas is 120 feet long, 11 feet tall, and demands constantly shifting images?

That’s the challenge recently faced by Swedish-born DJ-turned-designer Jakob Trollbäck and his colleagues as they created content for one of the world’s largest video walls, located in the lobby of the new Frank Gehry-designed Manhattan headquarters of InterActiveCorp (IAC).

In the past few years, Trollbäck + Company, a New York design studio specializing in motion graphics and branding, has accomplished such high-profile projects as a recent rebranding campaign for CBS, live-action ads for Infiniti and Nike, and innovative motion graphics spots for MetLife and Volvo.

Both the company’s design principles and its technical resources were put to the test on the IAC video wall. “We try to have everything mean something,” Trollbäck explains. “If you do something beautiful or add some decoration, it needs to serve the purpose of making people feel a certain way when they look at it. My role, more than anything, is to figure out what that response might be.”

As an identity piece for a media juggernaut with more than 60 individual brands, including Ask.com, Citysearch, Evite, Match.com, and Ticketmaster, the video wall needed to reflect IAC’s diverse activities while presenting the company as a coherent whole. To meet this challenge, T+Co grouped the content into a series of themes.

Video wall for IAC’s new headquarters.

“There’s a little segment about dating, for example, and there’s one about shopping,” explains Trollbäck. “It was a branding project, but also an art project, because we needed to create something that was just as beautiful as the new building.”

A Great Wall

Final file dimensions for the wall were 12,912 x 1,200 pixels, rendered out in nine pieces to meet the requirements of the projection system, says T+Co Senior Designer Tolga Yildiz. “For the video wall’s iUniverse, iDate, iShop, and iConnect modules, we used After Effects for animation, and Illustrator and Photoshop for designing the elements used in the modules. The compositing was done in After Effects.”

The rendering tasks were daunting: Some modules required as much as an hour per frame. At full capacity, every processor in the studio’s network, including the designers’ workstations, was devoted to crunching the massive files. “The wall is physically very large and most of the motion is horizontal, so we had to render almost everything in 60 fps,” Yildiz notes. “The fact that Mac OS X is UNIX-based proved very useful, because we used Terminal to remotely send different pieces to render from a single location on the network. At one point during a long holiday break, I sent more elements to render from out of town by using Terminal, connecting to our network via SSH, and controlling After Effects via Command Line.”

The resulting video montage is a deceptively simple series of clear visual messages with universal appeal. A gracefully unfurling flower connotes the romantic hopes behind a dating website, while quickly moving icons of chairs, shoes, and other consumer goods suggest an online shopping experience.

“At night, you can see the whole screen from the street,” says Trollbäck. “It’s on the West Side Highway, so there are people walking by, cars driving by, and it just looks beautiful.”

From Music to Motion

Trollbäck’s design career started in the mid-1980s when he began creating flyers to promote his Stockholm dance club. “I used rub-on type and images from pin-up magazines from the ’50s,” he recalls. “Then someone brought in an old, crappy PC so we could make a database of our members. I’ve always been interested in technology — when I was a teenager I built a synthesizer, guitar effect boxes, stuff like that. So I grasped the idea of computers very quickly.”

Trollbäck’s self-tutored design approach was simple. “It was the same way I learned to play guitar, which was to listen to records, figure out what they were doing, then do it myself. I got a lot of books of famous designers’ work and started to copy their stuff. And before long, my own aesthetic started to seep into the mixture.”

With his expanding design and Mac skills, Trollbäck began consulting with magazine publishers in Stockholm, helping them convert from galleys and wax to Macintosh page layout programs. Finally, in 1991, he decided to take his design portfolio to New York. He landed a job at R/Greenberg Associates, then a leading agency for film titles and optical effects.

“I got the job at R/Greenberg because my design was decent,” Trollbäck says. “But another big reason was that I had done it all on a Mac. At the time, they had computerized cameras for shooting title sequences and a Sun Microsystems setup for special effects, but the design department didn’t have any computers. I helped get the whole design studio on Macs.”