2019 Christie® Design Award winners announced

Daniel Recchia wins Christie® Design Award for the second time and is awarded $2,500 for his projection mapping composition, "Mystic Muse".

The Christie® Design Awards kicked off the Project Showcase that featured 45 student projects and welcomed over 30 industry partners and 160 total attendees to the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business on April 2. The awards – open to third and fourth-year Global Business & Digital Arts students – offer the opportunity to create projection mapping content that is projected onto a 3d model of a New York City brownstone building.

Projection mapping is an innovative way to project content onto non-traditional objects. Typically, digital images are viewed on a screen; however, with Christie® Digital and their projection technology, students were encouraged to see everyday objects, such as buildings as potential canvases for their content. 

“Christie® is really proud to be part of [the awards]…To encourage students to be utilizing the tools within the [Global Business & Digital Arts] program that they have been working in and to put them into good practice,” said Arlonna Seymour, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Christie® in her opening remarks at the award ceremony.  She continued to communicate the importance of this technology and the content created for it by saying, “It’s not just a really fun little exercise for us to do, projection mapping is real, it’s live, it’s everywhere.”

Corporations and organizations are continually looking to include projection mapping in entertainment segments, and even museums are using it to create greater engagement and understanding for their users.

Daniel Recchia, first place winner, commented that “The incorporation of projection mapping in my portfolio makes for an interesting talking point because of how challenging it is to produce content using a building as the canvas.”

The GBDA program’s interdisciplinary skillset helped prepare Recchia to create his piece. “I leveraged some lessons on storytelling and mapping the series of events, which was essential to condense a story into a one-minute show.”

Recchia’s submission, “Mystic Muse” is a story about the balance of absolute chaos and order, represented by the original characters Sam and Bob designed and made specifically for this project.  “This process was challenging, and on occasion, I thought that I had bitten off more than I could chew, but Sam and Bob wound up being a surprising success.” 147 computers were used to render “Mystic Muse,” taking the render time from weeks to a matter of hours.

Second place was awarded to Arturo Salek’s Solstice – a piece that depicts the changing of seasons, giving tribute to cyclical change by the passage of time – earning him $1,000, while the $500 3^rd place prize was awarded to Emily Hunt’s Astral projection mapping highlighted the relationship between humans and the astral world.

Salek commented, "This competition has always had the most supportive contestants. I am very happy to consider both winners my friends... The biggest value of GBDA is actually the talent and support of fellow students that pushes you to become better."

“This has been a great experience provided by Christie® Digital and the University of Waterloo, especially knowing Christie’s deep involvement in shaping world-class entertainment through their technology,” said Recchia of his involvement.

Seymour concluded her introduction, by saying “maybe we’ll be seeing big projects with students that are out of [Global Business and Digital Arts] as the content creators, content managers… because a program like this exists and we’re happy to partner with it… In the digital realm, this is a space where you can only continue to grow and take what you know and really be anything that you want to be.”