Following on from our success at the London 2012 Summer Olympics, in June of 2013 we were asked to tender for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Our brief was to reproduce St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow as a floating group of 15 domed towers coming together, as well as 30 large sealed ground based characters. These latter units were a mixture of animals and articles brightly artworked with a famous Russian pottery design that is the equivalent of Wedgwood in the UK. We were given some basic scenic images to work with at the tendering stage, but little information as to how they would be used/handled/interacted with on the Field of Play.
There were 15 domes all together that would come together to create St Basils Cathedral. They had a small amount of print on them and the rest was hand artworked. We had 2 artists working 7 days a week for 3 weeks along with others helping out as much as possible. Knowing that nothing like this had been done before we had a lot of prototyping and test lifts to do. The helium filled domes had a big weight to lift with the skirts attached.
Some of the domes were 3D, We were able to create this effect in production and then hand paint the necessary areas. The one below was made up of hundreds of individual chambers, the base was then painted a pantone matched blue to leave the chambers yellow.
