Colossal Characters for Overwatch Game Launch

[JonnyMac]

Our friends at Alliance Studio were tasked by Blizzard with creating three colossal characters from overwatch for a world-wide marketing campaign. The client wanted a bit of lighting and sounds to play, so Alliance gave me a call.

When I say "colossal" I mean it. The characters are 12 feet tall and are housed in enclosures that are 16 feet tall. The combined weight of each enclosure and character is almost 6000 pounds! Special steel-reinforced shipping crates and cradles had to be built to prevent the 1-inch acrylic windows from flexing in transit.

Here's a picture of all three at the test fitting in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. For scale, the guy to the right of Pharah is Steve Wang who is 6' tall.



I worked with the Hollywood setup team for Tracer. We arrived at 10PM Thursday evening and had it completely setup by 8AM Friday morning. By the time I left the sight at 10AM there was a crowd of about 200 enthusiastic Overwatch players enjoying the display. One of the first to arrive was a young man named Jeremy who drove up from Orange County. He snapped this selfie.



Lighting in the displays is controlled by an HC-8+ with audio from an AP-16+. We don't use a lot of lighting channels in any character, but we are running a fair bit of current. The AP-16+ line-level output feeds a large power amp (provided by EGADS who built the enclosures) to run eight speakers and a sub-woofer.

The programming wasn't difficult at all, and that really doesn't matter. Crowds in Hollywood (Tracer), Busan, Korea (Pharah), and Paris, France (Gengi) are loving the displays. That makes us very happy, and always proud that Alliance displays are powered by EFX-TEK.