This last weekend I was in Barcelona and went on a tour around the Nou Camp stadium. This has to be one of the best value sight-seeing events I’ve ever done, the highlight of which is the museum leg of the tour and the truly outstanding multimedia installation.
The first thing you come across is a darkened room with a long table with an iPhone-like touch screen interface where you can navigate through hundreds of video ’tiles’ showing famous goals, games and highlights throughout the history of Barcelona FC right up to the most recent milestones. You could spend hours exploring all the content here.
The next installation is hosted in a long narrow dark room with 11 enormous screens laid out side-by-side down the length of the room. Along the other side are a series of benches to sit and standing room from which to view a continuous loop of high definition film celebrating Barca’s record breaking 2008/2009 season when they won all 6 trophies they competed for.
The film utilises the platform provided to the maximum interchanging shots from different angles, wide screen pans and time lapse shots across the 11 screens. In combination with dramatic, inspirational music this creates an outstanding mesmerising effect that you just want to watch over and over again.
The final amazing feature is a long room parallel to the previous room which, once again, hosts a wall of screens which present about a hundred head-and-shoulder sized videos of fans singing the famous ‘El Cant del Barça’ anthem. Whilst they were recorded individually, this creates the effect of a larger crowd singing as one.
In front of the video wall are hundreds of tiny digital photo frames, about the size of a mobile phone screen, poised at the top of long thin stalks, creating the effect of a garden of flowers. These frames show randomly changing images of (I think) every player to have represented the club in its 101 year history.
All in all a brilliant experience and one that I highly recommend if you visit the city, whether you are a football fan or not. More information is available here and through the official site.