Behind The Scenes of MOSAIC Showcase at Audi

Producing an immersive performance for Audi is all about the result. But with our large projects, it’s not always apparent that we produce the project right from concept to the finished thing.

So here are some photos taken during the creation of the project…

“…We started with the storyline that Richard came up with and went from there. There were weekly demos where we worked out not only what the content would be, but also how we would go about achieving the projections as we wanted to keep a small footprint on the car showroom floor – which was technically challenging because the area that we wanted to project over was really large…”

Toby Gardner | Technical Lead, Conical Sphere Media

We set to work creating two visual elements for the projections. There was the central screen which combined clips cut together from a range of Audi adverts. To compliment this, we ran up a series of CGI effects that would act as supporting textures. This involved 3D camera work within AfterEffects and the creation of over 150 individual clips to add together.

“…Usually with projection mapping you are working on the outside of a building. But with this project, we wanted to showcase our ability to transform a space inside. So the first thing we did was to measure the showroom and generate a 3D model. This gave us the dimensions we were working with and allowed us to work out the lenses for the projectors we would bring in…”

Richard McLester | Creative Director, Conical Sphere Media

But there was a twist…

“…As we wanted to showcase how accessible our system is, we were strictly limited on the budget we could use to hire additional kit in. So rather than hiring a few large expensive projectors which obviously would have been easier, we instead put together 8 smaller projectors to do the job.”

Sam Tucker | Communications Lead, Conical Sphere Media

The video clips are all triggered live via MIDI from Ableton Live clips. This is done by sending the MIDI to a DMX board, which then in turn triggers our MOSAIC interface modules. There’s one module per projector (or sometimes screens).

A huge amount of the R&D work that went into this project was in order to get two video clips to seamlessly fade between each other creating the appearance of a single video.

We also added in features such as edge feathering and image masking so that we could blend or map the projections. Again, as the modules would be situated remotely, these features were all programmed up to be triggered by DMX commands.

Here’s one of the projectors situated 40 metres away from the main computer (projector circled in orange):

“…This has been a fun project as it’s involved a lot of low level programming – DMX protocols, Bash scripting – which makes a nice change from SQL, Javascript & PHP Frameworks that I’m usually dealing with…”

Toby Gardner | Technical Lead, Conical Sphere Media

Get In Touch