Waller creek tunnel

(2015)

This project was completed during my time at Chaotic Moon. The Waller Creek Conservancy came to us wanting to produce an art video to promote the work they are doing while re-developing the Waller Creek area of downtown Austin, TX. In order to develop the area they needed to construct a massive underground overflow tunnel to mitigate flooding in the area. As the tunnel was completed and just before they flooded it completely, we pitched them to projection map the interior of the tunnel as the basis of the video they were looking to create. 

We brought six 8k lumen projectors and two generators down into the tunnel to power the projectors and computers. All of the crew and equipment were lowered 76 feet underground into the tunnel via a crane and cage. The tunnel was scheduled to be flooded just 1 week after we started the project. Our team quickly started building visuals that abstractly represented the flow of water, people, and community based on a script that we wrote with the client. 

We mapped the interior of the tunnel with MadMapper and spent roughly 10 hours in the tunnel mapping and shooting the different visuals we created on camera. We had only that today to map and shoot everything we needed. It was an exhilarating project that moved very quick but we were super happy with the results.

Immersive Media Lead: Ryan Padgett

Projection Lead: Jeff Kurihara

2D Animation: Ryan Padgett, Brad Dugdale, Chenglei Wu