Rock Werchter through the eyes of a graffiti artist: live at demorgen.be

Possibly drawing inspiration from last year's successful Audi A7 campaign, Flemish media company "de Persgroep" invited Antwerp based graffiti artist Steve Locatelli to repeat his tour-de-force at Rock Werchter 2011. In the course of the 4-day festival, Locatelli is drawing festival-goers to the stand of newspaper "De Morgen" by spray-painting a fresh canvas each day. A few metres above their heads, a silent witness is capturing and broadcasting this ongoing artistic event to demorgen.be in a 4-day non-stop live stream.

For the setup and management of the live-stream, event agency Happy Few contacted Rambla. At the festival ground, we installed an Axis IP camera which captures video, encodes it into an H.264 video stream and broadcasts this stream to the Rambla CDN.

But since most of us are too time-pressed to linger for more than a few minutes watching the live stream, we were asked to handle the creation of a daily time-lapse movie which compresses the 12-hour live stream into just a few minutes. To this end, the camera posts snapshots every couple of seconds to the Rambla CDN. At the end of each festival day, thousands of still images gathered during the day are routed through the Rambla transcoding engine, resulting, only minutes later, in a caffeine-driven journey from blank canvas to finished work of art.