Tracés Mirifiques: Magic in the Snow in Quebec City

During a recent trip to Quebec City, Michael and I discovered their latest tourism campaign: QuébecAdabra! A fitting name for the campaign, as coloured lights and interactive installations brought old European architecture to life.

One such installation was an animation projected by four large projectors onto the side of a church, telling the very sad tale of the Little Match Girl. It was well-done, the animation an older style of drawing, inherently disturbing as the tale being told.

The installation that got us excited, however, was entitled Tracés Mirifiques, and involved you colouring in the face of another church, Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. How? With a provided iPod Touch in hand, you select a template of the church face in front of you, which has stars, candy canes, squares and other shapes marked out on it. You then select the colour you’d like to use to fill in a particular section of the church, and hit the corresponding shape. It fills it in for you on the iPod. When you’re done, you submit the image along with a phrase and your name (if you like), and within 5 minutes, the image is projected onto the church.

You can see ours here. If you look closely (at the full-sized image), to the right of the centre of the crowd, you can see a tall man with a small light square (that’s our camera)… I’m the short one in a black coat with a light pink stripe around my head, next to him.

What got us so excited about this installation, is that we’re working on a very similar concept for an installation at an event that is coming up at the end of January. It was gratifying to see that the concept really is possible, and it also helped us clarify the system flow for ours. We’re super excited about this project, and can’t wait to announce it. You’ll have to wait a couple more weeks though – stay tuned!