X-Men Days of Future Past Premiere

A red carpet first for our holographic technology

Overview

The all-star premiere of Twentieth Century Fox’s latest installment in its X-Men franchise transformed the red carpet into a holographic experience.

With 500 A-list guests and VIPs from the film world in attendance, the premiere for Twentieth Century Fox’ Hollywood blockbuster – X-Men: Days of Future Past – completely redefined the red carpet experience. Our Eyeliner system was featured as a large-scale installation, thrilling guests with mind-blowing holograms featuring Cerebro – the mutant-tracking machine designed by Professor X, the founder and leader of the X-Men.

About the X-Men premiere

For undoubtedly the biggest X-Men movie so far, Twentieth Century Fox and its agency, Samantha Sackler, wanted to create the largest publicity event they could put together. Firstly they chose New York’s internationally renowned Javits Center, a truly gigantic world stage.

Couple the location with a desire to mirror the mind-blowing special effects and visual impact of the films, the team behind the premiere set about exploring how they could bring holographic projection onto the red carpet – a world’s first.

And what a colossal success. As guests entered the VIP gala premiere they were greeted by a giant holographic sculpture of the mutant-tracking device, Cerebro. The sculpture then displayed key scenes from the film and presented some of the key actors as larger than life holograms within our installation’s stage.

What’s more, the premiere not only launched the new film, but it was the start of a series of worldwide premieres: the X-Men X-Perience tour. In keeping with its hi-tech launch, the tour streamed premieres and used digital content to help fans feel like they were in every premiere city and part of a truly global experience.

Our technology used for the X-Men premiere

For the red carpet premiere, an 8m x 8m installation of our Eyeliner system was used. The holographic installation setting the scene for the futuristic and visionary cinema premiere that the guests would later see onscreen.

We also used a groundbreaking combination of kit on this project: the Revolution Display 3.5mm product – the first time we’ve used Eyeliner alongside this small LED. The result was a superb level of photo-realism. The absolute clarity and sheer brightness of the holograms, enabled by Revolution Display, a perfect match for one of the most successful franchises in the Twentieth Century Fox movie empire.

With Revolution Display the image we project is able to be over eight times brighter than that provided by a 20,000 lumens projector. What this means is the holographic effect is that much stronger – and less vulnerable to strong set lighting or ambient light pollution. The full HD image is also much bigger – projected at nearly 8m wide by nearly 5m in height (whereas a normal single HD projector’s maximum image size is 5m x 2.8m).

Reactions

With international press and media present, and with social media already a-buzz in anticipation of the film’s launch, the premiere attracted worldwide attention.

Post-premiere reaction from fans focused on the holographic films that were shown on the opening night. The films were immediately shared across the web, thrilling fans with super-detailed representations of each character’s latest costume.