The Ascension

Upstream stands the Dragon Gate. No carp crosses it alone. A thousand swim as one, each lifting the next, until together they rise as the dragon.

We told the legend of the carp that becomes a dragon (ca chep hoa rong) in the visual language of Vietnamese water puppetry (mua roi nuoc): segmented wooden bodies swaying on the water. Then we pushed it through the eras of computer graphics we grew up with in Hanoi, from Nintendo to PlayStation to PC. Each act “levels up” the image: a terminal boot, an 8-bit pond, a holographic city, and finally a realistic, high-resolution mecha dragon.

The story began as The Journey, our entry for Malam at Singapore Night Festival 2026, where it was a finalist on The Cathay: a 60-second piece about a Vietnamese creative’s path from home to arrival, told through the same carp and the Dragon Gate in neon, hologram and cyberpunk. Lightbloom was our second projection mapping competition, and the chance to take the story further.

We rebuilt the N1 facade as a 4096 × 3011 px template with 17 vertical lanes (L01–L17) and laid out every shot lane by lane.

Lane tops, lane focus (all 17 narrowing to the centre 5) and line reveals are keyed to the building’s architecture, so the image moves with the columns instead of across them.

Before the story was locked, we tested interface looks directly on a mockup of the building at night.

Dragon

A puppet-style segmented body driven by a sine-wave spine, with user-data controls for the wave and a transformation rig for the carp-to-dragon reveal.

Fish race

One Python effector on a MoGraph cloner drives the whole school from a single control panel: carp count, size and size variety, schools, speed, burst-and-glide swimming, overtaking, and the abstraction of fish into dots and dashes.

The show opens like a computer starting up. The prologue is a deterministic, code-driven terminal boot (JS canvas rendered to a PNG sequence with Playwright and ffmpeg) that types the story, the credits and stitched ASCII pictures of the carp and dragon onto the lane grid.

The outro plays it in reverse. A shutdown command types under the final frame, a round glitch wipe opens from the black sun, and the image rewinds through the graphics eras (colour ASCII, EGA, CGA, amber terminal) to “IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OFF THE FACADE” and a CRT power-off.

Act 3 puts the audience in the mecha dragon’s cockpit. Its eight screens (six displays and two holograms) show real data: speed, altitude, heading, bank, the pilot’s head-tracking and target ranges are exported per frame from the Cinema 4D scene and drive a code-based renderer, so the interface stays locked to the camera and the story.

The layouts are designed for the lens. Outside the rack-focus moments the screens sit in depth-of-field blur and read only as big blocks and colour; the fine text pays off when the pilot looks down and the focus racks onto the panel. Labels are Vietnamese-first with English, and the screens move through the story’s states, from cruise to pursuit to anomaly, as the black sun closes in.

RONG-OS HUD

Over the cockpit sits the pilot’s heads-up display, which follows the same states: boot, cruise, first contact and target lock.

Every section has its own sound palette, so the audio travels through the same graphics eras as the picture. PC-speaker beeps and a 50 Hz hum run through it all. The carp close-up uses real Hanoi street-vendor calls, heard through a crushed 2-bit speaker, dry for the puppet and smeared through a loudspeaker for the hologram. The race turns synthwave, and the eclipse goes sacred with a temple bell, mo and chieng.

Every tonal effect is tuned to the music’s F minor, and cues are timed frame by frame from the animation and interface data, so each relay tick, stamp and bell lands on a picture event. Mixed for an outdoor PA.

The facade’s extruded grid over glass panels didn’t take light well, so much of the fine detail was lost on the night. Competitions rarely offer an on-site test, so there was no chance to check it beforehand. What worked: bold vertical forms that followed the building’s columns.

Three rules for next time

• Design for the building, not the screen
• The smallest detail is one column
• Simple shapes, high contrast

Out of the top 10 finalists projected onto the UEH campus building, The Ascension won Best Technical Execution at Lightbloom International Projection Mapping Competition 2026, organised by ArtTech Hub and UEH University as part of the Alight ASEAN Network.