Avenger Assembled!

As part of the rollout of this summer’s Captain America blockbuster – or, in this case, the rollout of the toy tie-ins – Toys R Us wanted to cover its Times Square store’s windows in Manhattan with a giant graphic advertising the movie. For the job, the toy retailer turned to out-of-home marketing expert Clear Channel Spectacolor, which, in turn, engaged Big Mountain Imaging to do the print work.

“We have a strong partnership with Clear Channel Spectacolor in their New York offices,” says Big Mountain president Jason Cardonick. “We produce the majority of their work that is installed in Times Square.”

The physical description of the Captain America job only hints at its complexity. The final graphic comprised 35 panels, each of which measured 35 feet long, across 150 feet of window space, for a total of 5250 square feet of printed area. The panels were printed with Big Mountain’s EFI Vutek 5330 printer onto Cooley’s PVC-coated polyester Coolmesh fabric, finished with pole pockets, and reinforced with seam tape.

Just producing the panels took 22 hours of print time and 14 hours of finishing time. But in addition, Big Mountain spent six hours making sure the panels lined up and color was consistent across the entire image expanse.

“When you do a billboard, for the most part you can run that on one printer on one roll of material,” explains Cardonick. “But on a job of this size, you’re going to run multiple rolls of material – we used three rolls all told. With that many rolls, you sometimes get variations from batch to batch.

“When you’re talking about this many panels being this close together – and they’re a lot closer to the ground than a regular billboard, only 10 or 15 feet up – it’s very important that each panel be laid out on the shop floor to check alignment and color consistency throughout. We did produce a few bad panels that we caught in our QC process that we were able to reprint to make sure the colors matched.”

In spite of, or because of, the challenges, Cardonick takes pride in the job. “It’s extremely flattering to be able to work on such a high-visibility location,” he continues. “It’s a great opportunity to work with so many quality companies – Clear Channel, Toys R Us, Times Square, and Marvel Comics, and Warner Bros.– all on one project.”

Big Mountain Imaging 
www.bigmountain.com