The night London turned green

The United Kingdoms National Directory Enquiries service has changed, a new kid is on the block, 118888.

To assist it's UK Press Launch the London based agency PR-21 commissioned the services of Laser Grafix to produce and execute the worlds biggest ever Non-Permissible Guerrilla Lighting PR stunt!

PR-21's Ian Twinn came up with the vision of illuminating the BT Tower green and projecting the telephone number onto the tower, and the subsequent spin in the press being "BT Turned Green with envy at rival's half price calls".

A simple enough idea?? But how do you light a 628ft tall tower, all the way around with four projection points, with no permission, except for CAA notification, and what kit would you use?

Laser Grafix decided that the most suitable piece of kit capable of lighting a building of this size and height was the IREOS PRO 7000-Watt Space Cannon.

The tower was broken down into 4-quarter areas for projection and illumination; this in itself then posed problems with the logistics of getting the kit to where it would need to be in order to project onto the tower in the right positions with no overlapping of images. Eventually 6 proposed sites around the base of the tower were established of which 4 of these would be used for the event.

A total of four 7.5T flatbed trucks, four Transit vans with a 7000-Watt Slide Projector in each, two 5-watt Laser Diodes, four road towable 100Kva generators, 24 Space Cannons, 4 Avo Pearl 2000 desks and 28 crew would be needed for the job in hand.

Not a massive list, but then we had to get it all to the tower without arousing suspicion knowing that having space cannons strapped to the back of lorries looked rather sinister to the unknowing general public and panic was the last thing we wanted to create.

The flat bed trucks would each have 6 of the Space Cannons installed along with the suitable power distribution and lighting control via the Avolites Pearl 2000 desk. 

At each location the flat bed truck would be joined by the generator truck and slide projection vehicle to create one lighting projection rig at the base of the tower.

Space Cannons in action

Laser Grafix contacted slide producer Gary Oldknow for the production of the slide artworks consisting of the numbers "118888" which would be projected onto the tower. Knowing that they would need keystone correction for each site a further site visit was arranged to produce the correct calculations for each site, and armed with this information Gary returned to his studio to create the slides.

As with any PR Stunt, nothing can ever be completely guaranteed no matter how hard you try. The good old London Traffic intervened creating a delay with getting all 12 vehicles to their specific sites from different routes to the tower. The varying routes were planned so that we would create little awareness of what we were about to undertake.

Finally, once in position the cue was given and the tower was bathed in green light and projection from all four sites, and to round it off Laser Text imagery was beamed onto the tower displaying various strap lines from the national advertising campaign.

After 90 minutes of illumination with no interference the tower lights were extinguished, cables pulled in, and the crew headed for the next location…

Thirty minutes later all the equipment arrived opposite the infamous structure of Battersea Power Station. One of the Space Cannon trucks was duly despatched to the rear of Battersea with a generator leaving the remaining trucks and vans on the North bank to project onto the front of the building for more publicity shots.