Blackmagic Design recently announced that the new live action projection mapping film “Texas Legacy in Lights” was captured with Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF and Blackmagic PYXIS 6K digital film cameras. 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 DP 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,” explained Rinehart.
The project’s main challenge was how to properly shoot for the architecture of the Gonzales Memorial Museum, which is 96 feet by 32 feet, approximately one and a half times the size of an IMAX screen.
Rinehart detailed: “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.”
