Museum Experience

Rosa Parks Museum

Wide Awake Films recently collaborated with Eisterhold Associates Inc. to update the Rosa Parks Museum’s Bus Scene exhibit film, situated at Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

The museum stands as an active memorial to the life of civil rights icon Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, fostering scholarly dialogue, civic engagement, and positive social change. Our mission was to revitalize the museum's immersive projection installation documenting Rosa Parks' incident, housed within a reproduction 1950s bus at the site of her historic arrest.

Our team touched many elements of the project from start to finish. We created a 3D previsualization of the bus and its space, which allowed us to work out and fix technical and visual kinks in the existing installation. We then produced and filmed all the new content for the project, dressing and directing more than 20 actors in historical wardrobe. Our shoot featured six principal speaking roles, wired with hidden lavalier mics, plus an off-camera live narrator. We filmed a panoramic spread of the action with four 6K high-resolution RED cameras, expertly aligned to ensure precise and seamless angles. Our team advised on audio and visual hardware selection and was present onsite during installation to ensure the finished film was properly mapped to the 12 synchronized monitors placed inside the physical bus windows.

The bus windows were fitted with 12 separate video monitors to display a seamless 9 minute scene of how the events unfolded. Each monitor had to be synced to one another to achieve the effect of seeing one long, seamless video interaction.

The actors were shot on a large greenscreen theater stage setup with four 6K RED cameras used to create a very wide format 20K image. This would extend to fill the full length of the bus while maintaining excellent video sharpness so that the performance would feel very lifelike, as if it were playing out right in front of the viewer.

Realtime compositing was used to visualize and check that the camera setup was working correctly on-site .

Historically accurate wardrobe and styling was an essential part of this project. Every little detail was considered and curated by some of the best in the business.