“The Thrill of Motorsports” at The Petersen Automotive Museum Los Angeles, CA
When the Petersen Automotive Museum came to us at MindOverEye to create three large scale experiential video installations for their newly renovated Museum Row location in Los Angeles, I could not have been more stoked. The great subject matter and technical challenge of this project were a perfect fit.
My task was to lead the edit, finish and delivery of “The Thrill of Motorsports” exhibit. This video would play on a loop providing the background for an exhibit of classic racing cars, projecting roughly sixty feet long and seven feet high. Since the museum was still under construction all we had was an architects diagram of the a 180 degree “U” shaped galery and the deliverables of 22,000 x 1200 pixels divided across multiple projectors.
Art director Ergin Kuke’s concept “The Day in a Race” begins with sunrise over the empty race track, people arrive, get ready, the start, race action, the finish, victory, and the sun sets. Only it is not just one race. It is many races, Indy, Stock Car, Rally, Drag, Moto GP, even drag boats. Also included are moments of races from across the history of motor sports. To create an immersive experience, we would shoot with a full raster 180 degree camera.
The latter created one of the biggest challenges for this job. While fairly low resolution 360 degree cameras are not hard to find, no one had a rig that could shoot 180 degrees at close to 20,000 pixels wide. One of our DP/directors Gabe Sanchez solved this, building an eight camera rig, using re-lensed GoPros in a semi circular array. The resulting footage was synced and stitched together in post, creating clips roughly 20,000 x 1080. Shooting this camera had many challenges. The software used to stitch the image together caused moving objects in the foreground to split and tare. The software was also unable to handle footage shot with the camera in motion. So our 180 degree shots had to be from a static camera, at least fifteen feet from the subject. While novel, our 180 degree shots were not as thrilling as we had envisioned. We had to rely on editorial mixing in 6k Red shots with up-resed archival shots along with creative sound design to bring this exhibit to life. The next task was to to cut this all together.
I decided that a scaled HD offline in Premier Pro would be the only way to handle creative editorial in this unusual image size. Once the edit locked, the plan was to finish and deliver from After Effects. I created a scaled mask to use as an overlay while editing in Premier. The effect was startling. 22,000x1200 pixels scaled down to a 1920x1080 frame felt like you were looking at the world through a slit in a barrel. It was very hard to imagine it projected seven feet high and Sixty feet wide.
We divided the work between three editors and an assistant. Each editor had a segment: beginning, middle and end. Senior editor Nick Sanders took the beginning section and did the final sound design and mix. Freelancer Daniel Clark made a huge contribution taking on the middle section and choosing the music tracks that pulled the piece together. I got the end segment and the job of putting it all together. Once we got the edit in front of the client they where excited and the basic structure of the timeline remained the same. From then on it was a matter of refining the shots and pleasing all invested parties.
With the picture locked, we set out to up-res the edit from a 1920x1080 frame with a little slit for the image to the full raster 22,000x1200. After cleaning up the timeline and creating reference movies, I used an XML to translate the sequence from Premier Pro to After Effects. This worked well getting the content ninety percent of the way there; only requiring repositioning and some rescaling. After effect is a great platform for finishing this type of large non-standard size video. In this case the ability to handle all of the archival footage from many sources was key. Much of it was being scaled far beyond it’s original telecine size, and required some treatment to get it looking good. I colored and added any final looks right in the AE sequence. We then built an export template to divide the output across multiple projectors.
Because of the museum’s construction schedule, the first time we saw any of our footage projected was the first time we even saw the gallery. Right away we knew it was going to work. The little slice of video we had been monitoring in HD, came to life, surrounding the room, revealing the thrill of motor sports. Unlike broadcast and web compression, projection tends to make stuff look better rather than worse.
The opening night was my first chance to see the final renders and sound mix together at scale. It was well received, people pulled out their phones trying to capture it, panning around the 180 degree action. So much of what we create is used once, or for a few months, then forgotten. The Petersen plans on running the exhibit for a number of years. Contributing to a museum’s story telling has made this one project I am truly proud to have worked on.