FREMONT, Calif.— “Texas Legacy in Lights,” a new live action projection mapping film, was captured with Blackmagic Design URSA Cine 12K LF and Blackmagic PYXIS 6K digital film cameras, the company said today.
Director John Franklin Rinehart of Austin Film Crew created the project for the Gonzales Memorial Museum, producing a first of its kind narrative film that’s projected twice a day against the large exteriors of the museum.
Rinehart collaborated closely with director of photography (D.P.) Alex Walker for the project. “When we first conceived ‘Texas Legacy in Lights,’ the world's first live action projection mapping film, which covers the Texas Revolution of 1835, there were a lot of technical questions and challenges that came up right off the bat. Alex and I were pioneering something together, solving problems that didn’t yet have answers. There were moments on set where we’d look at the monitor and realize we were capturing something that had never existed before,” said Rinehart.
The project’s main challenge was properly shooting for the architecture of the Gonzales Memorial Museum, which is 96 feet by 32 feet, about one and a half times the size of an IMAX screen.
“When you’re shooting for projection mapping, you’re shooting for the architecture of the building itself. We picked different points in the building’s architecture and different surfaces that would house various parts of the story, with the plan to blend the images together so that you could see the whole narrative on one giant canvas. In a way, we were shooting multiple films simultaneously and then compositing them into a single experience,” said Rinehart.
Rinehart selected the URSA Cine 12K LF as the A camera due to its large format RGBW sensor, oftentimes shooting with up to five URSA Cine 12K LFs at once.
“There’s something about shooting large format that you just can’t replicate: the shallow depth of field, the scope, the cinematic feel. Even though we were doing something very foreign to audiences, as people aren’t used to seeing multiple pieces of the story on screen at the same time, we still wanted to keep it incredibly cinematic and familiar so the audience could lose themselves in the story. At the end of the day, this wasn’t about being a technical marvel. It was about telling an incredible story in a different way,” he said.
The PYXIS 6K was an ideal workhorse B camera, complementing the URSA Cine 12K LFs, said Rinehart. “We loved the PYXIS’s form factor; it was very stripped down and nimble. We could rig it up in different locations, do overheads and move it around without requiring a lot of crew.”
The URSA Cine 12K LFs’ sensor quality and high resolution capabilities were paramount as the team had to shoot very wide to allow for the building’s architecture. “Having the ability to crop into the image became the backbone of our editing process. Since we had that extra resolution, we were able to be very creative in how we problem solved in post, in a way that no other cameras currently on the market would allow,” said Rinehart.
“For example, at times we would use a tight shot on the right of the building and a wide shot on the left, showing the exact moment from two different framings simultaneously. In traditional filmmaking, these are shots you would usually cut back and forth between. But in this case, we had both images playing simultaneously. The audience on the left side of the museum would have a different experience from those on the right.
“To make that work, we needed to shoot wide because there are different areas of the building’s architecture, and if you let the image bleed over, it ends up distorting. You have to mask out a window or other architectural elements, so the image almost seems to sit behind the architecture rather than fighting against it. To do that, you need a lot of latitude in your image to punch in and reframe. That’s where the URSA Cine really came in handy,” said Rinehart.
The scale of the project often required five URSA Cine 12K LFs shooting simultaneously, all capturing one take. “We put our whole building together like a mosaic. Different façades yielded different images at various times, so if we wanted the entire image to come from a single scene, we needed five angles shooting simultaneously,” said Rinehart.
“Since all the shots were shown at the same time on different parts of the building, we couldn’t cut back and forth like traditional filmmaking, so I couldn’t hide performances between different takes. It had to be a single continuous take that encompassed the entire performance. That meant shooting with coverage for tights and wides simultaneously, getting two different masters, two different tights and an overall master of both characters in the frame—all at the same time.”
The cameras continued to prove themselves in post. Rinehart shot in Blackmagic RAW, which he called “second to none” when it came to being lightweight and working well inside DaVinci Resolve Studio.
The team used Resolve Studio across editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post production, with Rinehart noting its all-in-one toolset as crucial to achieving the tight 45 day turnaround for post.
“At one point, we were compositing the town of Gonzales burning, placing fire elements along the outside of the building and bending those to the architecture itself. We had 42 layers of 12K footage being pushed through the timeline, which is an extraordinary amount for any system to handle. The fact that it could actually play back in real time blew my mind. That’s not something you could do with any other codec or software combination unless you were running on a supercomputer or dealing with a ton of proxies,” said Rinehart.
“For the actual projection mapping work, we relied heavily on the crop and feathering features in Resolve,” he said. “We could quickly blend images without having to grab a mask tool and manually work on them. Just being able to line up horizons quickly, that’s absolutely fantastic.”
“We mixed and mastered everything inside of the Fairlight page, including all the sound effects, dialog, music--the whole mix. I was really thrilled with how it performed. Even when I was pulling in a lot of VST3 plugins, it didn’t bog down the system,” he said. “We used the Fusion page as our primary VFX tool for particle effects and compositing. The node based workflow inside Fusion is really hard to beat.”
Since the film was projected on the side of the building, grading had specific challenge. “With projection mapping, you don’t have a beautiful white screen. We were projecting onto a weathered sandstone museum with aging, color variations and surface inconsistencies. Each image had to be color corrected specifically for the part of the building it would hit,” said Rinehart.
“We had to go onsite and perform a live grade of each element to ensure it had the correct color for its specific section of the building. Sometimes that required creating gradients because the stone was darker on the bottom and lighter at the top. So, we had to create graduated corrections, essentially blending two different color grades within a single image to account for the surface variations.
“This is where DaVinci Resolve’s ability to switch between node based grading and layer based editing really shone. We could create multiple correction layers with different masks and gradients, adjust them independently, and see the results in real time on the actual building.”
More information is available on the company’s website.
