The Man Who Lit the Washington Monument Like a Candle |
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There is nowhere to hide at the base of the Washington Monument.
And so, on the early-early morning of New Year’s Eve, a gregarious but bleary-eyed video producer from Florida named Kyle Barrett shifted side to side, bracing against a bitter wind while waiting on edits from senior administration officials. In less than 24 hours the obelisk would be bathed in moving light.
This was the only dress rehearsal for what organizers called the “Illumination of America,” a titanic spectacle of living images projected directly onto the monument above and the kickoff for the 250th anniversary of the United States. This made Barrett, at least in that moment, the man most responsible for the story Trump’s America tells about herself.
“In the middle of the night, 3:30 a.m. on the 30th, was when we finally, for the first time, saw any of our content up on the monument,” he told RealClearPolitics of the rush job that he had accepted only three weeks prior. It is the crowning achievement of his career. Five years earlier, he was making television commercials for Ashley Furniture.
Congress had only just passed a special authorization into law allowing the monument lightshow on Dec. 2. Barrett and his team got the call five days later, leaving them just under three weeks to develop a visual script and execute it. Christmas was postponed for their families. Long nights and work on the weekends, guaranteed. Up until that moment in the cold, no one had seen a preview of their work.
The digital files were so massive that they couldn’t even fit on a single server. The show could only be previewed directly onto the 555-foot marble canvas in the middle of D.C. A grid that had been projected onto the monument for digital mapping earlier in the week was immediately spotted and had sent the Internet aflutter. To avoid ruining the reveal, the first preview of the show had to be done in the middle of the night at the last possible moment.
They threw the switch. Light and sound exploded. The monument transformed into the open ocean, and Christopher Columbus discovers the New World. Next, hooves pound the........