Blackmagic cameras power Texas Revolution projection film

Blackmagic Design said the live-action projection-mapping film Texas Legacy in Lights was shot with its URSA Cine 12K LF and PYXIS 6K cameras. Created for the Gonzales Memorial Museum, the film is projected on the museum's exterior twice a day.

Director John Franklin Rinehart of Austin Film Crew made the project with director of photography Alex Walker as a narrative work designed for the museum's 96-foot by 32-foot façade. Centred on the Texas Revolution of 1835, the production was built to play across multiple parts of the building at once rather than on a single flat screen.

That format shaped how the team planned and shot each scene. Instead of treating the museum wall as one surface, the filmmakers divided its architectural features into separate storytelling spaces, then combined them into a single visual sequence in post-production.

"When we first conceived Texas Legacy in Lights, the world's first live-action projection-mapping film covering the Texas Revolution of 1835, a lot of technical questions and challenges 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," said Rinehart, director of Austin Film Crew.

He said the museum's architectural constraints required a different filming grammar. Images had to fit around windows and other features so scenes looked integrated with the structure rather than stretched across it.

"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 to hold various parts of the story, with the plan to blend the images so 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," Rinehart said.

Complex shoot

The project often used as many as five URSA Cine 12K LF cameras at once, with the PYXIS 6K serving as a secondary camera for shots that needed a smaller, more mobile setup. Rinehart said the large-format sensor and high resolution were important because scenes often had to be captured wide and reframed later for different parts of the building.

"There's something about shooting large format that you just can't replicate: the shallow depth of field, the scope, the cinematic feel. Even though we were doing something very foreign to audiences, since people aren't used to seeing multiple pieces of the story on screen at the same time, we still wanted to keep it cinematic and familiar so the audience could lose themselves in the story. At the end of the day, this wasn't about being a technical marvel. It was about telling an incredible story in a different way," Rinehart said.

He also described the PYXIS 6K as useful for overhead shots and flexible placements during production. "We loved the PYXIS's form factor; it was stripped down and nimble. We could rig it in different locations, do overheads and move it around without requiring a lot of crew," he said.

The structure of the final projection meant the crew could not rely on standard editing methods to hide changes between takes. If several parts of the building showed the same dramatic moment from different framings, every camera had to capture that moment in one continuous performance.

"At times, we would use a tight shot on the right of the building and a wide shot on the left, showing the exact same moment from two different framings simultaneously. In traditional filmmaking, you would usually cut back and forth between those shots. But here, both images were playing at once. The audience on the left side of the museum would have a different experience from those on the right.

"To make that work, we needed to shoot wide because the building's architecture created different image areas, and if you let the image bleed over, it distorted. You have to mask out a window or other architectural elements so the image seems to sit behind the architecture rather than fight against it. To do that, you need enough latitude in the image to punch in and reframe. That's where the URSA Cine really came in handy," Rinehart said.

He added that the team effectively assembled the museum image as a mosaic of separate visual pieces. "We put the whole building together like a mosaic. Different façades yielded different images at different times, so if we wanted the entire image to come from a single scene, we needed five angles shooting simultaneously.

"Since all the shots were shown at the same time on different parts of the building, we couldn't cut back and forth as in traditional filmmaking, so I couldn't hide performances between takes. It had to be a single continuous take that encompassed the entire performance. That meant shooting tights and wides simultaneously, getting two different masters, two different tights and an overall master of both characters in frame, all at the same time," Rinehart said.

Post-production

The production used DaVinci Resolve Studio for editing, colour grading, visual effects and audio, and Rinehart said the project was completed within a 45-day post-production schedule. The workflow had to support extensive compositing and the demands of very high-resolution footage.

"That's when I was like, 'Wow, this is really spectacular,'" Rinehart said. "From a projection-mapping perspective, having that latitude in post was crucial. We shot in Blackmagic RAW, which is second to none in terms of how lightweight it is and how well it works inside Resolve."

He said one sequence involved 42 layers of 12K footage in a single timeline, with fire elements added to depict the town of Gonzales burning across the museum exterior. "At one point, we were compositing the town of Gonzales burning, placing fire elements along the outside of the building and bending them to the architecture itself. We had 42 layers of 12K footage being pushed through the timeline, which is an extraordinary amount for any system to handle. The fact that it could actually play back in real time blew my mind. That's not something you could do with any other codec or software combination unless you were running on a supercomputer or dealing with a ton of proxies," he said.

The museum surface also created unusual grading demands because the sandstone is weathered and uneven in tone. Rinehart said the team carried out live grading on site so each image could be adjusted for the section of the building where it would appear.

"With projection mapping, you don't have a beautiful white screen. We were projecting onto a weathered sandstone museum with aging, color variations and surface inconsistencies. Each image had to be color corrected specifically for the part of the building it would hit.

"We had to go onsite and perform a live grade of each element to ensure it had the correct color for its specific section of the building. Sometimes that required creating gradients because the stone was darker on the bottom and lighter at the top. So we had to create graduated corrections, essentially blending two different color grades within a single image to account for the surface variations.

"This is where DaVinci Resolve's ability to switch between node-based grading and layer-based editing really shone. We could create multiple correction layers with different masks and gradients, adjust them independently and see the results in real time on the actual building. Because we were working with Blackmagic RAW, we had all that color data to push and pull without breaking the image. We could be aggressive with the corrections because we knew it was all there in the RAW data," Rinehart said.

He also cited AI noise reduction tools for low-light scenes and said the production mixed sound in the Fairlight page and handled visual effects in Fusion. "History can feel quite boring to many people, but we had the chance to make it come alive in a way that hadn't been done before. These weren't just historical figures; they were somebody's grandmother, somebody's child. The weight of that responsibility, to tell it right, to honor what they went through, stayed with us through the entire production. And the story gets to live on for the next 15 years, for future generations.

"This film, beyond its technical breakthroughs, wouldn't be anything to talk about if we hadn't been able to tell the story properly and let people know it won't be forgotten. The cameras, the resolution, the workflow - all of that served a larger purpose. We built something permanent for a community that deserves to have its story told on the same scale and with the same ambition usually reserved for major cities, and that's what makes all the technical problem-solving worth it," Rinehart said.