Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery came to us with an intriguing project; they were transforming one of their galley spaces into a Virtual Reality experience. Whilst we’re not gaming programmers, our contribution would be a key element to making the experience work, the headsets required mapping points around the room so they could navigate, easy! Well, apart from there could be no repetition of shapes or lines, each section had to be unique. And the room is huge…19 metres x 12 metres with a ceiling height of 4 metres. And lots and lots of nooks, crannies and detail such as plug sockets and radiators to work around.
Now, we could’ve just thrown a random array of shapes onto the walls, but why do that when we can customise the space and link it to a key feature hanging around the balcony space above? The resulting design used the Greek friezes that can be seen in the gallery, these depict battle scenes with both male and female warriors, horses, shields and weapons. And there are four of them, one above each wall that we had to decorate. Each frieze was redrawn by hand meaning that there was never any repetition of shape or pattern, and peach circles were added to give colour and to break the design up. The result is abstract enough to look random, but you can pick out features from the frieze on closer inspection.
Applied to the walls with cut vinyl we were able to apply the graphics around the features of the room and adapt the design where required without breaking up the visual flow. The result is something completely unique to the space and linked to the BMAG collection. The space will be used as a space for visitors to explore the collection in new ways and we’re excited to see how the offer develops in the future.
Tracing the friezes and mocking up the design
Installing the graphics
