Part 3 | The final boss
- kolektivizanat
- Jul 20
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 21
The game is rigged, part 3
Everything was going according to plan. Let's not forget that the entire concept, illustration, animation and sound editing had been created by just Jolin and Lea, powered almost entirely by caffeine and their shared delusion.
Then the premiere started getting very, very close.
The installation was scheduled just one day before opening, and having never done anything like this before, panic slowly started kicking in. Would it actually look good? Would the proportions still work once they filled the entire room? Would the ceiling create the impact we had imagined? And would those dreaded columns completely ruin the visuals?
Thankfully, Arlind, being the awesome guy that he is, suggested starting the installation a day earlier. That way, if something didn't work, we'd still have time to make adjustments before the premiere.
Small losses
Even though we had designed the entire installation around the room's architecture, the columns turned out to be trickier than expected.
During our early tests with a regular projector, they barely seemed to interfere with the visuals. But once the full projection mapping was installed, they suddenly became very... present. Especially whenever text crossed over them. Turns out, giant concrete pillars really like being the centre of attention.
Big wins
Luckily, obsessive measuring finally paid off.
From the very beginning we had documented every wall, every beam and every column, building a detailed wireframe of the entire wall that became the foundation for every composition.
So when the columns decided to become our unexpected co-art directors, the solution was surprisingly straightforward. We shifted the typography into the safe zones, updated the compositions, rendered everything again, and the problem was solved.
Another big win throughout the whole project was the people. Every step of the way we somehow ended up surrounded by people who genuinely cared about making this project the best it could be. Europe House, for example, prepared all of the promotional material for the exhibition, from process videos and posters to programmes, with an incredible level of quality. Apart from saving the two of us from having to somehow squeeze even more work into an already impossible schedule, it also brought the exhibition to a much wider audience. Looking back, that's probably one of the biggest reasons the project felt so special. It never felt like we were working alone.
The space as a whole
We wanted the space itself to become part of the installation, while still feeling comfortable enough for people to slow down and spend time with the work.
The cinema seats, although practical, felt too bulky and visually dominant. We wanted the furniture to almost disappear into the room rather than compete with the projections. So we designed and built a series of modular stools, carefully matching the colour of the floor and curtains. Once the projections were on, they almost melted into the space.
The custom modular stools we built for the exhibition. They could be rearranged into different configurations, allowing visitors to use the space however they felt most comfortable.
We also designed a custom bookshelf built specifically around the unusual dimensions of our booklet. It was a tiny detail, but one that made the exhibition feel more cohesive, as if every object belonged to the same world.
Shelf we made specifically for the booklet
And just like that after days of sketching, animating, rendering, exporting, troubleshooting, second-guessing ourselves, we had our premiere.
We know it's impossible to recreate the feeling of standing inside the installation on a laptop or phone screen, but if you're curious, you can still watch the full sequence here.
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