A Pirates Score Remembered

It’s not everyday you get to work on a project that has a special connection to the city your company is based in. For Pittsburgh-based Filmet, however, that opportunity came last summer when it took on the task of re-creating a small-scale scoreboard from the Pittsburgh Pirates' victorious final game of the 1960 World Series against the New York Yankees.

The job: Create a scoreboard façade to cover the face of the PNC Bank branch within PNC Park, the Pirates' home field. The scoreboard would be installed just in time for the team's 2008 series with the Yankees, the first time the teams had played each other in Pittsburgh since 1960.

PNC specified that Filmet had to create a solution that would still allow for seeing out the windows from inside the bank, says Andy Bachelder, marketing director. So, Filmet began by measuring the dimensions of the branch face and observing which sections could be covered with Alcan Sintra and which sections required Flexcon SeeThru Sign vinyl due to the opacity restrictions.

For artwork, “PNC provided a photograph of the scoreboard taken from the original game, and we used that as the basis for the art that we created,” says Bachelder. His designers used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to reconstruct the image. Filmet provided PDF proofs to the client showing the concept by digitally placing its new images over a photo taken at PNC Park. Once the concept was approved, “we provided color swatches of the Sintra and SeeThru Sign vinyl to show how the color would match across the substrates.”

Final output was done on the aforementioned 1-mil Sintra and Flexcon vinyl, using the company's EFI Vutek QS2000 with ColorBurst RIP and Inkware UV inks, at 540 dpi. Total output time: four hours for the 190 x 301-inch graphic. A Zund digital die-cutter was used for finishing, which took two hours.

“It was an interesting challenge trying to determine the exact measurements for tiling everything, especially with complexity of the different substrates having to lie next to each other and having to maintain color consistency across the entire project,” says Bachelder. “It was like a 3-D puzzle we created and then had to put together.”

The graphics were installed by four Filmet installers in a single day. Bachelder says that lining up the two substrates was not the only challenge; the overall image was a scoreboard so the horizontal and vertical lines had to intersect at the right points. Plus, he says, “The bank was open during the install work so the crew had to work around people using the ATM machine.”

“It was a big day for Pittsburgh,” says Bachelder, “and to relive that was a special moment for all of us at Filmet.”

Filmet was incorporated in 1910 and the shop, which currently employs 60 staff members in its 50,000-square-foot location, specializes in dye-sub fabric and high-quality digital printing for retailers, ad agencies, and corporations.

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