Museum Exhibit Project – When Your Final Display is the Room Itself

Lessons Learned from an Interactive Museum Installation

Have you ever wondered what happens when the projector is your final output device? When there’s no reference monitor to trust, no client display to match, and the audience experience depends entirely on what hits the walls, what happens? Welcome to the world of museum exhibits, where traditional color grading workflows meet real-world constraints that force you to throw out the rulebook and grade to what people actually see.

Color grading a museum installation

I recently joined a multi-room interactive installation at the American Village Trust in Alabama, serving as cam-op/DIT during production before transitioning into post as animator, colorist, and general problem-solver. We recreated pivotal moments from American history using RED DSMC2 cameras paired with Remus Blazar anamorphics, and then projection-mapped the content across multiple surfaces in a historically accurate setting.

What started as a straightforward post-production gig evolved into something far more challenging: calibrating five Epson projectors blended across multiple walls in the Assembly Hall, and then grading content in the room itself because the projectors simply couldn’t reproduce Rec. 709 accurately. Media Merge handled the initial calibration using Calman and a Klein K10-A colorimeter, but we made iterative in-room adjustments to ensure perceptual consistency from the visitor’s perspective.

“When displays are fixed and cannot be changed, you grade to the room. The projector becomes your final output [device]. Traditional grading workflows that rely on calibrated displays and delivery by spec can only get you so far. Once content enters a public space, its success depends on how it feels to the audience, not whether it matches a waveform or [a] vector scope.”

Billy Causey, Colorist (and now, 3D animator)

Key Takeaways

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