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The Art of Projection Mapping

Building with Christmas video mapping with Media Stage Logo

Why project onto a flat, white screen when you can project onto…anything else? We’re taking a dive into projection mapping for our first blog post of the decade! A timely topic for us here at Media Stage, following what our team put together for our holiday greeting this season.

Projection mapping, or image mapping, is the art of using technology to display images by transmitting them onto or wrapping them around everyday objects. These could be a wide variety of “surfaces,” including buildings, cars, foam shapes, custom scenic pieces, etc. It’s a memorable way to tell a story, advertise a product or set a really cool backdrop for an event space.

We’ve done quite a bit with projection mapping over the years, and the most recent example from our portfolio is the cheery, upbeat, “not your typical e-card,” holiday greeting we created called Project Peppermint.

Like most of what we talk about regarding AV for events, there was extensive planning and pre-production that went into this shoot. Our video engineer indicated that it took roughly 15 hours to create the content ahead of time.

The purpose of the shoot was to display our image mapping capabilities onto our office building in Sunrise, FL. We filmed outside in the evening so we had to wait until it got completely dark, and also had to adjust scheduling with some brief delays due to rain. We used a media server to load the content, two Barco 20K Lumen projectors to transmit the images and a Sony HDX 100 camera to record, in addition to some drone shots.

We added time code to our music and then distributed that time code to our video and lighting (all moving lights: Mac Aura XBs and Quantums). When these synced together, our intended blend of audio and visual effects was created to produce our finished product. And, of course, there was a little magic in post.

Even though the holidays have come and gone, we encourage you to check out Project Peppermint, below! Our team really enjoyed putting this together and we’re looking forward to doing more projection mapping in 2020.