In mid 2015, ZHA approached Minmud with an unusual project. They were developing a signage board for JCDecaux to be built on West Cromwell Road in Earls Court, London. This site is on the A4, a busy thoroughfair linking central London with Heathrow. JCDecaux had asked Zaha Hadid Architects for a unique to design a unique and scuptural signage board to replace the existing building which had been repurposed from a street cleaning depot into a advertising board. The existing site had poor pedestrian access and was dark and forboding at night due to the imposing building.
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/09/06/zaha-hadid-billboard-advertising-board-london-jcdecaux-architecture/
Minmud engaged Rob Howard to photograph the site to use as backplates in our work. Rob was briefed with the positions and time of day to take the photographs. He was also asked to try different shutter speeds to vary the blur on passing vehicles and to take many shots from each position.
Once we’d chosen our selects, we blended the different shots of each location to remove the cars from the shots. We then carefully selected which cars to add back in to give the best composition. We had a wide range to choose from in different parts of the frame meaning that we were not cheating the lens distortion or trying to match lighting.
We did a large amount of testing to get the material looking right and spent time on the landscape to match the information from ZHA.
The result was a skillfully crafted, accurate and realistic visualisation of the scheme that closely resembles the finished design. Please read more and see photographs of the completed scheme at ZHA’s website.