Virginia Tech creates immersive display for 80th anniversary of D-Day

We are at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, working on a project to tell the story of D-Day for the 80th anniversary, projected up here on the National D-Day Memorial. We thought it was a great fit with the mission of Virginia Tech as a land grant university to collaborate with our regional institutions, specifically, nonprofit institutions, and we started the conversations with the National D-Day Memorial Foundation about doing something special. They knew we had done large scale projection projects on campus, and they wondered if we could do something special here. D-Day is such a huge narrative. So how do you do that in 25 minutes, for example? And so there was a lot of collaboration, a lot of brainstorming. "Suddenly a runner poked his head to the tent opening and said, This is it. Let's go." My role has mostly been creative direction and creative team project lead. Tanner Upthegrove, has taken on more of a technical and logistics lead, co-project lead, and has done all the audio engineering on the project. We have Ethan Candelario, who is a wizard motion designer, did all of the motion work for this project. And then Harshal Pilania, who is a graduate assistant with the Institute of Creativity, Arts, and Technology, helped us a lot behind the scenes with digital modeling. And Gustavo Araoz, who is our production coordinator. And then we had Carter Roberts, who is an undergraduate student in the school performing rts, did original music composition and sound design. "The Ground was vibrating. Just shaking something awful." As far as a professional level. I mean, getting to do this as a rising senior is incredible. This is nothing short of an honor, and it hardly feels real to be doing something of this scale this early in my life. One thing really special about this project is that we're doing it on site at the memorial. It is a huge venue, which presents a lot of challenges, but also a lot of creative opportunities for us. For example, we've engineered several large projection screens to go on the arch, and we've also designed a 14 channel loudspeaker array to go around the audience so they can have surround sound or immersive of sound, kind of like if you're in a movie theater. "Without warning. *explosion* A blast shook our craft from stem to stern." We've worked on projects that either surround historical subject matter or are centered on historical subject matter, but nothing of necessarily this importance on both a national and international level. We could not be more pleased with the creativity and what they have put together, and it's been a great partnership working with the ICAT team at Virginia Tech.