The Lamborghini Project – a playground for The Media Merchants

Cristina Blanaru Ads, Creativity

One of the world’s most elite (and expensive) cars recently became a canvas for the creative whims of the techie minds at The Media Merchants, a technology-driven production agency based in Vancouver.

In November, the agency gathered influencers in the city’s creative, technology, design, advertising and automotive sectors for The Lamborghini Project, an exclusive audio-visual event centered around projection mapping onto a Lamborghini Reventon.

At $1.5 million, the Reventon is the luxury automaker’s priciest road car. Only 20 have been produced and sold to the public. Using its raw, understated and angular exterior as inspiration, creative technical director Anthony Diehl and animator Stuart Langfield projection mapped a series of real-time visuals on to the vehicle’s dark grey, semi-matte finish.

Initially, Media Merchants conceived The Lamborghini Project exclusively as a projection mapping experience but once they began the meticulous process of mapping animated images onto the car, they realized they had a one-of-a-kind opportunity to do something more.

One of the surprising and fun elements of the project was getting everything aligned perfectly and then discovering that we had a pretty awesome VJ setup sitting in front of us (…) Although it wasn’t part of the original plan, we couldn’t help ourselves and took the opportunity to run a live VJ set with visuals created in real-time.

Anthony Diehl

Creative technical director

Diehl and Langfield developed the animated visuals using hybrid 3D and 2D techniques developed specifically for the purpose of projection mapping onto 3D objects. Working from the idea of ‘contrast,’ they sought to highlight the Reventon’s dark, moody and clean lines through a combination of predefined op-art imagery and improvised, real-time effects.

The video content was created using MadMapper and Modul8 VJ software run off two Macbook Pro laptops networked together for playback sync and then plugged into three 7000 Lumen Panasonic projectors and one 6000 Lumen Christie Projector.

Project’s credits:

  • Projection Mapping: The Media Merchants
  • Creative Technical Director: Anthony Diehl
  • Animation Director: Stuart Langfield
  • Sound Design: Mitch Lee for Redemption Audio
  • Post Production: JUMP Studios
  • Videography: Perfect Pictures, Van Media
  • Director of Photography: Dan Dumouchel
  • Lamborghini Reventon: SR Auto Groupto