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Outpost VFX Pays Tribute to WWII Code Breakers with Watergate House Project

21/02/2017
Post Production
Bournemouth, United Kingdom
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The work can be seen at Watergate House, 13-15 York Buildings, London

Outpost VFX announces that they have completed the code breakers project with Simon Green of Moho London.

The idea was essentially to create a client list / welcome board for the foyer of Watergate House, a beautiful Edwardian building that was the home to the code breakers at the beginning of WW2 - before they moved to Bletchley House for safety.

The interior design of the house is heavily based on the 1940s period and uses the code breakers as a central theme through its graphic language where signage is used.

For this new installation Alan Turing’s famous code breaking ‘Bombe’ machine forms the central idea behind displaying the client list.  A bank of screens displays this in an electronic version with a mass of turning dials each with a circumference of letters. When a code is ‘broken’ the dials stop and reveal the clients name in the display in a combination of CGI and software programming.

Green of Moho London approached Outpost VFX about this project and the result exceeds his expectations: “The brief to recreate Turing’s code breaking machine as a graphic contemporary interpretation was in itself a huge challenge and needed the mind of a code breaker to crack it."


He went on to say: “In a sense the easier part of the brief was the design look - a kind of crossover using elements of 1940's mechanical language but interpreted electronically. We eventually settled on a look that was based on the old war time cathode radio screens but now 21st century. We even went as far as building reflections of the space into each of the large lenses holding the dials so as to totally integrate the machine into the space.

"The real challenge was how the machine moved. I was really pushing for complexity of how the names 'decoding' were revealed on screen. No two names would ever come up the same. Letters out of order so that there was a sense of the viewer having to decode to guess the name. The movement of the spinning dials had to have a clunk mechanical feel as if cogs clicking into place and all at different speeds. I can’t thank Outpost enough for the consistently great attitude to 'getting it right' and constantly looking to make improvements despite going way beyond what had been budgeted for.”

Danny Duke MD comments: “This is a particularly interesting project to be involved in as it’s so very different from anything we’ve done before.  It has huge historical significance as an art installation that encompasses technology and is also a VFX project. With our in-house programming team working across VR and App technologies were excited to be bridging the gap between traditional VFX and more immersive media experiences”.  

The work can be seen at Watergate House, 13-15 York Buildings, London WC2N 6JU

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