Projected Gobos Showcase "Photosynthesis" At San Francisco’s Conservatory Of Flowers

The San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers is a botanic greenhouse renowned for its vast collection of rare, tropical plants. The non-profit arts group Illuminate SF (who also conceived the famed Bay Lights project), and Obscura Digital, a world-renowned creative studio specializing in large scale light-based art, used the white wood of the conservatory’s elaborate Victorian architecture as the canvas for a spectacular light and projection show entitled Photosynthesis: Love For All Seasons that featured numerous Rosco Custom Gobos.

The Conservatory of Flowers consists of a central dome that rises nearly 60 feet (18 m) high and two arch-shaped wings that bloom out from the dome into a building that’s 240 feet (73 m) long. In order to design the projected gobos, Obscura Digital created a 3D model of the building from a laser scan and used image warping and masking technology to create flower-inspired graphic files that would project perfectly onto the building’s front façade. The team at Rosco’s gobo manufacturing facility in Texas then keystone-corrected the graphic files to account for the projection angle and turned those graphic files into Multi-Color Custom Glass Gobos.

The gobo artwork was inspired by the changing seasons and showcases the fascinating aspects of a flower’s life cycle. Throughout the show, the audience experienced projected gobos of a new plant sprouting from a seed, the emergence of its leaves and the budding of its blooms - in a cyclical repetition that evoked the changing of the seasons.

Designers at Obscura Digital chose Rosco Custom Gobos for Photosynthesis: Love For All Seasons because they offered superior color consistency than the other gobos they were considering. Shannon Densmore, Producer at Obscura Digital, commented: “We chose Rosco gobos because Rosco did a way better job of matching the colors our artists had selected.” Our incomparable ability to match colors is due to the fact that Rosco is the only gobo manufacturer that makes its own dichroic glass. This enables us to tweak the cyan, magenta and yellow layers any way we need to in order to achieve the best possible match to the requested color.

To learn more about San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers and their upcoming exhibits and events, visit their website: conservatoryofflowers.org. For more information about the products Obscura Digital used to immerse the Conservatory of Flowers in colorful flower images, explore the Custom Gobos page on the Rosco website.