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Permanent museum and exhibition displays have evolved in recent years into one of the most creatively and technically complex display categories in the entire video universe. Most museums are exhibiting their multimedia shows almost exclusively in various video formats — usually digitally projected — but their approach to producing such content has never been more open, flexible, creative, and sophisticated than it is today.

“The shift has been large and pronounced over to video display in new construction and new exhibits,” says Tom Tait, show systems manager for BRC Imagination Arts, Burbank, Calif., a major player in the production, installation, and presentation of permanent video exhibits. “HD is, of course, a relative newcomer on the block, but newer facilities are all gravitating to it, even those that aren't are displaying material in standard-def, not film. The advantages of digital projection, from a maintenance and cost of operation and consistency factor, are so great that we always try to use some kind of digital approach in anything we come up with these days.”

For Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, video producer Mini Lipschultz worked with an advanced spherical projection system based on government-developed technology. Four projectors controlled with PCs and proprietary edge-wrapping software project seamless images onto a polycarbonate sphere.

This rise of HD and digital projection options has led to a host of unorthodox and unique displays at facilities around the world — 360-degree and spherical projection, unusual screen shapes, materials, textures, and surfaces. According to many industry professionals, acquisition of such display material in film remains a popular choice for many producers. But imagery that originates in virtually every available format from MiniDV to HD to 35mm film and everything in-between is now finding its way into major exhibits.

All of which begs the question of how producers of such content collaborate with system integrators and designers to create and display imagery that meets the thematic, creative, budgetary, and architectural needs of specialized museum exhibits. To find answers to this question, Video Systems recently spoke with several well-known producers of museum video displays about the challenges, trends, problems, and solutions they encounter daily while developing unique displays.

At the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, producer Donna Lawrence's imagery for the multimedia show Freedom Rising is projected onto scrims. Above: Nine NEC Nighthawk Series XT HLO projectors display her 360-degree race imagery at the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville, Ky.

Everyone involved with development of the Seattle-based Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame knew the museum's signature video exhibit needed to be impressive.

“No need to do flatscreen,” recalls the project's executive producer Larry Gertz. But it wasn't until the museum's founder, Microsoft's Paul Allen, saw a cool, spherical projection system at a trade show that organizers felt they had found a way to present a video overview of the museum's entire content in a single exhibit.

The system, adapted for the museum's use as “Science on a Sphere,” was invented and is owned by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA had exhibited the sphere showing scientific images, but the organization never used it for the type of entertainment application that museum organizers had in mind.

“In its final version the sphere presents museum visitors with an 8-minute video consisting of film clips, TV clips, CG graphics, scientific images of outer space, and animated window panes, all detailing the hundreds of books and shows and movies that are presented in greater detail in the museum,” says Mindi Lipschultz, content producer on the project. “We play pieces of these movies and show images from literature and space, much of it playing in mortice windows around the globe, along with 3D animated backgrounds.”

A mock-up of the design for the National Museum of the American Indian's exhibit combines video projections onto a dome, a rock, and four waffle-cloth center panels.

When the Science Fiction Museum team approached NOAA officials, it learned the agency wanted to make its technology more widely known and was happy to help adapt it for the museum's needs.

“[The museum] needed to add audio and synchronize it with the images, which was something we had never done with our application,” says David Himes, senior software engineer at NOAA, who helped write the original software for the system, which permits seamless curving and blending of images across a sphere at 2K-level resolutions. “The nuts and bolts are not that complicated: Four projectors projecting across the equator of the sphere, controlled by PCs, and projecting onto a sphere [a simple polycarbonate, painted white]. But the key is in the software and the algorithms we developed that permit the projectors to wrap images around the sphere while minimizing distortion.”

Gertz, Lipschultz, and their colleagues spent about five months writing, locating, viewing, editing, and compiling the clips that make up the sphere's content. They then hired design firm Fuel, Santa Monica, Calif., to edit and composite the material together, and up-rez it using NOAA's proprietary software to be bright enough to work with the system.

Although the system is designed for four projectors, the museum is currently using five. “Four projectors cover all of the sphere, except the top and bottom 18in.,” Gertz says. “The top doesn't matter since the audience can't see it, but we added a projector at the bottom to fill that little hole.” Himes adds that the system can work with most standard projection systems.

“Fuel delivered the final media in a 2K HD format, and after running it through the NOAA software, the material was nuanced so that images that look fine on a small screen won't fall apart when projected on a sphere,” says Gertz. “There were issues about banding, and there was compression involved, but through our testing we eventually developed a system for figuring out how much compression was acceptable, and Fuel spent a lot of time eliminating anything beyond that.”

As to what producers learned about spherical projection, Lipschultz points out there are not a lot of role models for this kind of presentation in the world of permanent displays. “But the process of testing, mocking it all up — that was central,” she says. “That was what made this work.”

Few content producers for permanent exhibits have more recent experience with creating imagery for display in 360-degree settings than Donna Lawrence of Donna Lawrence Productions, Louisville, Ky. Among her 360-degree gigs in recent years have been two high-profile displays at the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Both projects presented unique challenges as to how material was acquired and put together, and then displayed.

According to Lawrence, the first thing smart producers do on such projects is work closely with designers and architects to figure out answers to three crucial questions before they produce any content. “Those questions are quite basic: First, decide what the desired creative outcome of the display will be,” she says. Next, figure out the scale of the projected image in the theater in relationship to the viewer. “For instance, you might be projecting a very large image that, in most theaters, might require you to project in HD, but if the audience is seated far enough away, standard-definition images might be perfectly acceptable.” The third question is the budget.

“But the point is, the intersection of those three factors will eventually lead you to the result you need in terms of figuring out what formats you will acquire and project in,” says Lawrence.

At the Kentucky Derby Museum, the film created by Lawrence's team in 2000, The Greatest Race, plays in the central atrium theater at the Derby Museum. The oval shape of the screen mimics a race track, so producers decided to make it one of the world's first permanent installations to project 360-degree imagery in HD, relying on nine NEC Solutions Nighthawk Series XT High Light Output (HLO) projectors with 4500 ANSI lumens.

The original content, however, was all shot on a combination of 35mm and Super 16mm film, and then finished to HD at Film Workers Club, Chicago.

“Given the oval shape of the screen, one of the first design decisions was that most of the time in the finished show there should be a clear point of focus, as if you are blocking a play,” Lawrence explains. “Then, of course, at other times, the continuous 360-degree surround images intentionally create the opposite effect. Regarding format, extensive testing with similar subject matter and lighting conditions showed that acquiring on film and finishing to HD would give us the best resolution and look, and almost more important, the ability to reposition and crop images without losing HD video resolution in post. This was a few years ago, and there have been a lot of advancements in HD since then. We did tests in HD, along with Super 16 and 35mm, and at the time, we just felt that film looked crisp and beautiful when transferred to high-def, even when cropped or reformatted. On scenes where we knew we would need a lot of flexibility to go in and crop, while still maintaining a crisp film resolution, we shot Super 35mm. Otherwise, Super 16mm worked well, especially in brighter outdoor situations. Today, we might choose a different mix of HD, 35mm, and Super 16mm, but at the time, this method made the most sense.”

The more recent NCC installation, on the other hand, features a 360-degree multimedia show called Freedom Rising, presented in a theater-in-the-round setting. Donna Lawrence Productions produced the video content in collaboration with New York-based theatrical designer Dave Sirola, mainly shooting 35mm film and combining it with archival material before mastering it to HD for presentation at the exhibit.

“In the case of the NCC, the theater was designed as a theater-in-the-round, before we came into the project, with a 360-degree screen around the perimeter, above and behind the audience,” says Lawrence. “So we started with those givens, and began asking ourselves how best to use the space, given the audience orientation. Since the audience is facing center and the 360-degree screen is partly behind you, much of what you are focusing on is the center of the room. From that fact emerged the idea of dropping scrims down into the middle of the space and also projecting imagery onto the floor, using the floor as another main projection surface. So, the final design includes floor projections, a five-sided scrim unit that drops into the space at a peak moment in the show, plus the 360-degree projection and theatrical lighting — all interwoven with and supporting a live actor.”

According to Sirola, 16 projectors were used for the display: 10 for the 360-degree show, five for the scrims, and one for the floor. The production opted to use LCD projectors rather than DLP, largely the result of budget considerations.

“It all worked out great,” Sirola says. “They were high-end projectors, and there was no real edge-blending to be done on this show. We just did projector image off projector image. In fact, those kinds of economic limits actually helped Donna get more creative with the presentation.”

Lawrence says her experiences on such projects have taught her some important, basic lessons in preparing content for such displays. “First, only work with an engineer [for system integration] who has a great deal of experience in specifying projections for different sizes and different ambient conditions and different resolutions. Second, you must model the display in detail, whether electronically or with physical models, or both. There are lots of things that can surprise you when you leave standard screen sizes and typical situations. Only by modeling the whole thing in a scaled context can you work out what those might be. Finally, test all projection conditions at full scale. If you can't mock up the entire situation at full scale, mock up all the separate elements to verify things like brightness, resolution, viewing distance, and crispness.”

At press time, work was wrapping up on the various multimedia exhibits at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., slated to open spring of 2005. The facility includes a host of video presentations, including two major bigscreen shows and several interactive exhibits. All of them are being produced by BRC Imagination Arts, Burbank, Calif., under the supervision of creative director Charlie Otte.

In recent months, Otte's team developed content for two major automated presentations — Lincoln's Eyes and Ghosts of the Library. Otte says those two shows will be projected in high-definition using Sanyo UF10 LCD projectors and involve content that mixes HD imagery with film.

Tom Tait, who supervised systems integration for the project, says the Sanyo projectors and the LCD approach were partly a budgetary decision. “The versatility in the lensing options with those projectors was also attractive to us,” he says. “This project has so many different physical configurations and constraints with the different video exhibits that we needed projectors that can offer a wide range of lens options.”

Lincoln's Eyes, according to Otte, is a complex, multimedia affair. “Lincoln's Eyes uses three projectors, all projecting HD onto scrims, projection panels, and on moving scenery,” he says. “We shot the actor in Super 35mm on a greenscreen set. We then project him with 3D elements on a scrim with scenery behind him. The piece also includes still photos that came from the library and some stock footage elements. It's a complicated show, with flying scenery and moving elements, so it requires a lot of editing expertise, digital work, and compositing.”

Ghosts of the Library, Otte adds, will primarily involve a mixture of HD and DV elements. It will be presented at the library using BRC's Holovision 4D system, a special effects process on a specially designed stage that combines live actors with sophisticated video projection and reflected imagery.

“Constant experimenting with playback on the projectors is unavoidable,” says Tony Mitchell, a producer on the project. “For Ask Mr. Lincoln, we mastered the video at 30fps, but played it back with a 60fps refresh rate, since that is what works best with the Sanyo projectors. But that caused slight artifacting. We wanted to match the output of the server to what the projector was doing. That's where you get into pixel mapping, especially since we shot that one HD. The whole thing can get very complex. Don't just read the projector specs and forget about it. Sometimes, things are slightly off. You need to go into the actual environment and prove how the projector will work, in collaboration with your system engineers. And don't assume that one approach, using a format you have used before, will work just because it worked last time.”

The themes incorporated into the design of the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington D.C. required “innovation and experimentation,” according to Linda Batwin, co-owner of New York-based production company Batwin & Robin and creative director/producer of the multimedia content on display at NMAI. The museum eventually chose to use three different, unorthodox projection surfaces for the facility's main presentation — simultaneous projection onto a 40ft., 360-degree dome; onto four center screen panels made out of a specially configured waffle-cloth material, and projection onto a specially designed rock on the theater floor.

All three surfaces are part of a preprogrammed, choreographed, interactive show called Who We Are, which details the history, beliefs, and journeys of Native people in the Western Hemisphere. Batwin explains the complexities of the presentation and how the use of highly unusual display surfaces directly impacted the production plan. The show's content was acquired in a combination of formats — 35mm, high-definition, and standard-def — over the course of several shoots at 11 locations in 13 countries spanning about seven months. Batwin & Robin teams shot some of the material, mainly using 35mmn film, and the rest was collected from Native American filmmakers shooting a variety of video formats.

“It's a fully immersive environment,” Batwin explains. “The dome is pretty big, while the rock is a prototype, and the center screen is a very unusual projection surface. It's a specially weaved material, and the effect is to make it feel like a tapestry. For the dome, which displays largely environmental imagery, we shot Super 35mm using an SL Cine super lightweight camera with 6mm dome lenses. When transferred to the digital environment as 2K files, that imagery looked very good in our tests when projected. When we started that testing process, the dome theater was not built yet, so we took our tests to the Natural History Museum in New York and projected material there. It was not the same size dome, but it gave us a good idea of what worked and what didn't.”

The rock on the floor of the presentation area displays more environmental imagery that interacts with the center screen's imagery. Batwin says a great deal of R&D went into simply figuring out how to build the rock in a way that would make it an interactive projection surface.

“It's a 6ft. clay rock that is a grayish, neutral-density color, made out of a fiberglass material,” she explains. “We project moving water, ice, grass, flowers, fire, and other things onto it with a BarcoReality Sim 4, single-chip DLP projector and a mirror. Seven of them are used for the dome projection, and four projectors for the waffle-cloth panels.”

Batwin emphasizes that her decision to shoot film was based largely on the availability of more flexible lenses for shooting the dome material. “This was some time ago,” she says. “In the future, I'd probably shoot HD, since the lens choices have rapidly advanced. But on this project, for this kind of shooting and display, with the film material going to 2K files, I felt we'd get better resolution this way.”

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