To demonstrate my experience in printing, I ‘d like to describe how I tackled Nintendo’s E3 booth for 2009.

There was a tone of art files delivered in batches of two to three DVDs at a time for over three weeks. Because of the antiquated PC I was using, It took nearly an hour to process and prep each piece of art. Some of the larger tower walls took over nine hours of printing to complete all three panels each of the tower faces was composed of.

Some of the files were up to 2.5GB uncompressed. Illustrator would regularly reach its memory limit and die. I ended up saving copies of all the placed images and scaling down the pixel count of the linked images just to load the Illustrator layout files. I’d then export as EPS, rasterize in Photoshop and recompose all elements scaled to final output resolution and paste all the vector elements that needed critical color matching to Pantone spot colors. Anything that had a placed photo ended up being a TIF as the final print file, while anything that was 100% vector ended up as an EPS.

ErgoSoft PosterPrint 12 was used as the rip on a Mimaki JV3-250SP and a Mimaki JV4-180. PhotoPrint DX was used to power a Infiniti Fina 320.

Coordination was a major concern. At times, the printing department I lead was the lynch-pin by which all the other departments at Warp revolved around during final construction off-site. There was no sense in building frames for panels we would get art for last, even though the frame department tried very hard to get ahead as best they could. At times we were printing up to 20 hours a day on three of four printers non-stop on this job alone, depending on if we had enough art provided by Nintendo at any one time to pull it off.

I believe the final tally came up to over 34,000 yards of stitching to put together all of the fabric covers for the build. I honestly lost track of how much fabric we transferred all the dye-sub printing onto. Keep in mind that this was done while we had other paying jobs to produce.

IGN has an excellent photo gallery of the final build at the show.