World Record Blog: Helen Marshall, Lead Artist
Helen Marshall is a woman with a plan, she’s the artist that has got to take all of your photos and turn them into a World Record breaking mosaic. It’s a huge and complicated process, and we’re glad that she’s agreed to blog abut it for the Big Picture site.
Once we had all the images, they were downloaded from the website and sent to Helen. From then on, it’s (almost!) all up to her…
Helen says: So far the greatest challenge of this task has been the sheer scale and the timescale — it’s never been done before. We are dealing with tight deadlines and precision of planning. There is no room for error and that is scary. I don’t think it’s possible to imagine the scale and complexity. Technology is still in it’s dark ages for processing at this scale and size and right now our machines are struggling with the overload of images.
It’s a pretty crucial time… but every moment is and that’s the thing, we won’t breathe easy until we know it’ll work. It’s taking lots of teamwork to ensure that human error is ruled out, the complexity of the whole task requires experts and there is no way I’d be able to do without my team here.
At the same time I have been working on the incredibly difficult task of choosing the final image, which, well … will speak for itself.
When we have the final image the software breaks it down into cells and then trawls the archive of available photos for the best match for each cell. For a mosaic containing 2,000 images the process can take a couple of hours. For a project of this scale we were talking weeks of processing time — imagine a system crash when you’re halfway through a job that size.
I am working closely with PollyTiles, Blocwork and Jessops to deliver the final images as over 110000 individual photo prints; the whole method has taken weeks of planning, but it’s ingenious!
Watch this space…
Look out for other blog posts from Helen, and maybe other members of the team, as we get nearer the big day.
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