Micro Projection Mapping with the FT and Wellcome

The team have been working wih the Financial Times and Wellcome to create a film that raises awareness of the slow-moving pandemic that is Antibiotic Resistance.

The Brief

The film’s director, Juliet Riddel, works at the Financial Times as Head of New Formats and identifies subject matter for her films then choses an artist as a collaborator to help her tell the story. The challenge here was to deliver the scientific message in an emotionally arresting but clear way that varies from existing methods of presentation for themse of this sort. She chose to collaborate with Nina Dunn, whose specialism is visual storytelling through spatial imagery and light.

After consulting a host of scientific experts and working closely with the newspaper’s science editor Clive Cookson, they came up with the concept of the deserted hospital as a setting to symbolise how these spaces – designed to be at the forefornt of fighting infection – could one day become places where even simple operations are too risky without suffiicient help from antibiotics.

Realising the effect

The team used projected images mapped onto objects found within the hospital environment to describe the issues facing world health and the solutions available and to bring home the message that time is running out to curb the trajectory of drug resistance.

The team completed over twenty projection set-ups in three days using surfaces ranging from clocks to pill bottles, ECG monitors to entire rooms. Filming was completed on the first day of the second lockdown and it has been released today to coincide with the start of Antimicrobial Awareness Week.

The Kit

The equipment ranged from low lumen micro units that could fit into tight corners to a larger Epson EB-L1755U 15,000 lumen laser projector eqipped with an ultra short throw periscopic lens for full room coverage. The media server set up had to be light on its feet with a large proportion of the content being shot or animated and mapped in situ so serevral Qlab servers were deployed, which also allowed for multiple set-ups to be created simultaneously ready for filming whilst keeping costs low.