Raymond Proudly Spotlights Melissa Schmitz - Technical Director LUMA Festival 2021

We are proud to spotlight Raymond associate Melissa Schmitz for her work as a technical director for this year’s LUMA Festival. Melissa’s roles at Raymond include Emerging Technologies Engineer and Virtual Reality Technical Lead. Melissa’s background and skillset made her a great fit for taking on an integral role with LUMA.

The LUMA Festival is an annual projection arts festival, during which custom animated art displays are projected onto buildings in downtown Binghamton. LUMA is an acclaimed festival that draws significant attention to the city of Binghamton, with 50,000 people attending in 2019. Melissa’s involvement with LUMA began in 2020, when the street festival format was unable to occur due to COVID-19. As LUMA sought an alternative offering in 2020, Melissa assisted in the team’s creation of a virtual reality experience in concert with Tri-Cities Opera that viewers could enjoy at home. The end result was an opera performance that looked like a video game, achieved through motion-capture performances, face tracking, live vocals, and live movement of 3D characters.

For this year’s upcoming festival, Melissa was asked to act as a technical director to manage her own site. Melissa has been leading the planning for a project that will be projected on the building at 49 Court Street. The project is called “Duet in AI” (Artificial Intelligence) and is being developed by Sila Sveta, a renowned media and design company whose clients have included prominent companies such as Samsung and Under Armour as well as music artists such as Billie Eilish, Drake, and Cardi B. LUMA’s website describes “Duet in AI” as a “bold never-before-attempted experiment” in which Sila Sveta will build the world’s first AI projection mapping feature to facilitate a visual conversation between its human creators and the machine learning the art form. The show is a modern interpretation of the classic Edgar Allan Poe poem "The Raven."

Raymond extends our appreciation to Melissa for her work with LUMA and lending her expertise to support art in the community. Associates can check out Melissa’s project at LUMA on the nights of September 10 and 11. Visit lumafestival.com to reserve a free ticket for this year’s festival.