Large Format Fabric Printing for Superbowl 2014

Superbowl time has come: and so has the time for the amazing commercials that are made just for that one single game. We had the chance to print some fabric for the Pistachio Wonderful Superbowl commercial (as seen HERE). Our main man Stephen Colbert is staring in the commercial, with his eagle costar, wearing a custom made suit that we printed.

We were given the feat to print multicolored prints on a large roll of fabric. Although this was superbly impossible for most printers to take on, we feel differently about custom jobs as this one, and we took this job on, ready to rock it!

STEP 1: Prepping - Doing this wasn't easy, as we weren't set up for it and really had to improvise with our materials and process of getting this done. First step: Getting a pallet (table) to attach to the press in order to print on, and fit the screens on. This was done by us cutting down some piece of wall in our shop in order to get a smooth surface to attach to a piece of wood.

STEP 2: Setting up the screens - This was a tedious step, as the screens are VERY large custom made screens and having them fit onto the press was difficult enough, let alone registering them together AND making sure nothing moves during production.

STEP 3: Printing - Whenever anything this large is being printed, there are always difficulties with the print either looking too LIGHT, or there being lines in it from where the squeege passed thru the image (depending on the size of squegee there is). Luckily with this print, we were able to use a small squeegee and go over each individual word to make it look thick but without lines. After this, flash drying it in between colors took a while with our small little flash, then printing the 2nd color was stressful, but overall we really got a handle on the printing of this and really busted it out.

STEP 4: Finishing - properly curing the fabric AND finishing it up with the presentation was key for us. It doesn't come everyday where you get to print for a multi-million dollar Superbowl commerical, and we wanted to really impress the clients here.

Its jobs like this that we REALLY love to take on, say YES to when most shops say NO (since they dont want to waste their time doing anything outside of the norm), but we LOVE doing custom jobs like this, cause not only are we able to venture outside our "screen printer" selves and really touch the inner "Artist" that we are to help create something like this, but we also learn SO much and thus, become much better printers because of it! (Next time someone asks us to print multi-color large format printing on fabric, we can say YES with confidence! :)