Archive · Studio Babelsberg · 1995
Schering IMAGE 100
A large corporate multimedia production in the Marlene-Dietrich-Halle: 36 projectors, a 16 × 16 metre image field, purpose-written orchestral music and four-channel Ambisonic reproduction.
Schering AG’s IMAGE 100 event marked the centenary of cinema with an audiovisual presentation at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam. The surviving programme, headed The Century of the Image, credits Event Production — Anthony G. Morris, AGM Digital. Contemporary Systems Contractor News coverage likewise credits Anthony Morris with the event production and soundtrack.
Making many machines behave like one presentation
The trade report describes a presentation for approximately 450 delegates. A 16 × 16 metre screen was fed by 36 slide projectors under Dataton control. The important practical point was scale: dozens of image sources were being coordinated as one visual composition in a large film-studio hall rather than shown as a conventional sequence of individual slides.
The presentation combined that multi-image field with film and music. Morris composed the soundtrack, which the article says was recorded and mixed at Trixi Studios, Munich, mastered to DAT and encoded for four-channel Ambisonic surround-sound reproduction.
What the audience actually encountered
The surviving specifications describe two deliberately integrated layers: a very large image field and a spatial soundtrack. Rather than treating audio as reinforcement sitting underneath pictures, the music and surround reproduction were part of the structure of the presentation. That combination — authored media, show control and spatial sound — is why IMAGE 100 belongs in the AGM archive as a production rather than merely an audio installation.
Contemporary record
The principal surviving press reference is Kevin Hilton, “Schering Celebrates 100 Years of Cinema”, Systems Contractor News, p. 38. The exact issue month, volume and number have not yet been recovered, so this archive does not guess them.