#grand-format

Avalon Communities Project By Gretchen A. Peck

(Part 3 of 3)

Founded in 2004, Mammoth Media’s roots are in jumbo print. The Pembroke, MA-based wholesale print supplier produces billboards and building wraps for a national customer-base of creative and advertising firms and property managers and owners.

Mammoth employs an array of print engines from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and EFI VUTEk, including an HP Scitex XP5100 and a VUTEk PV200. Most recently a VUTEk QS3200r was installed.

Today, Mammoth’s nearly 30 employees produce a slew of print products including banners, vehicle and transit print, wallcoverings, trade show displays, floor and window graphics, as well as billboards and building wraps.

Avalon Communities is a property management firm that is a repeat customer of Mammoth’s. "We do building wraps all across the country for them—CA, IL, and NY. I believe they have at least 350 properties throughout the country," confides Kenneth Rowell, VP, Mammoth.

Last February Mammoth started a job for Avalon at the Prudential Center in Boston, MA. The building was being renovated with new luxury condo units and the company needed a creative way to draw attention to it. The application was targeted to last two to three years, with some of the graphics changing out periodically.

The job was printed on the QS3200r using One Way Vision perforated window film from Clear Focus Imaging, Inc. The One Way Vision film solved the initial problem of obscuring the views of the building’s tenants. Media choice is especially critical to building wraps.

Rowell recalls that pre-production challenges were immediately apparent. "It’s a glass building, so there was no way we could just drill in a mesh banner or stick a giant building wrap up without obscuring the views of the people inside. Another challenge was that the residential complex doesn’t have the benefit of height. Visibility would therefore be limited to street-level traffic—less than 20 feet high," he explains.

An initial site survey included a photo shoot, so Mammoth could refer to digital photos and mock-up schematics of the building throughout production.

Results from the survey led Mammoth to designing templates for seven types of windows, based on different dimensions. These were first done to scale and each window literally became its own image file.