Each year thousands of people flock to Sydney Harbor to take in the wonder and amazement of VIVID Sydney – a world renowned lighting, projection, music and ideas festival. One of the biggest draw cards is the spectacular projection mapping installations which transform iconic buildings into 3D animated artworks.

You might think this kind of visual technology is just for major corporate and public events, but the reality is, you can use projection mapping for so much more; from the personal and intimate, to theatre and art. In the past projection mapping was reserved for huge, Disney-sized budgets, but recent advances in projector and media technology mean that you can deliver affordable, high quality, projection that is within the reach of a much more budget conscious venue or event manager.

At Staging Connections, we’ve been perfecting and expanding the uses for projection mapping in our events for years now, and we’d love to share with you some new and different ideas on how you can use it to connect, inspire

and impress your audience!

MAKE IT PERSONAL

You’ve seen big event projection mapping; changing buildings into art, and animating the sails of the Sydney Opera House. That’s the domain of huge, powerful projectors, massive distances, and immense surface areas. But what about at a business lunch; where’s your projection canvas? Well, what about your audience’s place setting? We’ve recently used projection mapping to completely personalize entire tables, projecting names where physical name cards would have once sat. This is great for breaking the ice at networking events!

And there’s so much more you can do with a table – we’ve run custom video animations to introduce courses, tell the diners about the history behind their wine, and delight them with clever animations between service. At your audience’s plate, you have their complete attention, and you can use it to reinforce any message and get any brand first-to-mind

MAKE IT STYLISH

If you can project onto a table you can make it, and any other physical element in the room, look any way you want. Projection mapping can be used to style and theme your event in a much more dynamic and flexible way than using physical decoration or color themes. A white table cloth is a perfect projection screen and can take on video animations, colors, textures, logos, text and anything else you can imagine. The same themes and ideas can carry onto your walls, ceiling, and stage. And the great thing is that it can all change to fit in with the event’s proceedings; one look for the intro, another for the main speech, and another for the networking afterward.

If you can put an image onto an object, you’ve got an infinite canvas for your branding, from your logo, to your lines of copy, to your signature color. Get your logo animated and set to music and you have an impressive start to any show. Take over an entire building and both the interior and exterior can become a massive statement. Your logo can be integrated into any themed projected content, and sit comfortably in the background on walls or screens as your event unfolds.

It’s not just your brand that can benefit from being animated and projected – if your event has sponsors, their logos and colors can be woven into the fabric of all your video content. You can even turn it into a revenue generating item – charge an extra sponsorship fee to have their logo on the big screen, and another to have it appear on your guest’s plate! The main course can be proudly presented by your sponsor, as an animation promoting their business dances in front of your guests’ eyes.

MAKE IT POP

Have you got a spectacular set element or costume in your event? That can also be a perfect canvas for a projection. 3D projection mapping is the art of taking a three-dimensional object and wrapping it in animated video that clings perfectly to its shape, turning that object into a mind-bending visual extravaganza. We’ve mapped onto specially constructed set elements like columns to make them look like skyscrapers, onto huge spheres to make them look like planets, and onto long material trains hung from acrobats’ and aerialists’ costumes that float in mid-air. We’ve even projection mapped a white Steinway Grand Piano! It’s an amazing effect, and can be used for branding, theming, or creating an unforgettable visual.

MAKE IT REAL

One of the most exciting things to do with projection mapping is to get real people to interact with it – maybe we should call it 4D projection mapping? You can break this technique down into two types of application – personal and theatrical. Let’s start with the personal. There’s a 150-year-old lighting trick known in the industry as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’. Without giving away our magician’s secrets, it’s a way of making a projected image look like it’s a physical object on a stage. It used to be done with a scrim (a see-through type of stage curtain), a projector, and a mirror. Now it’s done with more up-to-date tech like video projectors and computers, but the concept is the same. Some people call it a ‘hologram’, but we’re not in Star Trek territory just yet.

So how and why would you use this trick at your event? Imagine your presenter introduces someone who can’t be there. If you can video them addressing your audience and ‘talking’ to your host, we can put them on the stage. You could have customer testimonials from around the world appear in person, or people from across your organization sending their best wishes. This technique isn’t limited to using people as the source material – any image projected this way is going to look like a 3D object appearing in thin air. You can do it with your logo, an award statuette about to be given out, text, or any other image that would blow your audience’s mind.

MAKE IT HUGE                                            

Video and projection technology provides a new canvas for events and if you have a big canvas, you can make adds dynamic movement, it brings a big impact. Just like the building art stage sets alive and can really add to the video of sports stars onto the roofs of stadiums, animated content onto a 30

MAKE IT ART

Meter long and three story tall rock wall, and transformed both the inside and outside of the largest function centers into a three-dimensional celebration of a brand. Ask your Staging Connections event team how you can use projection mapping for your event; from the intimate to the impossible!