October 2011 saw the reopening of the Dutch Maritime Museum – Het Scheepvaartsmuseum – following major renovation. Located in central Amsterdam, the museum is housed in a storehouse for the Dutch war fleet dating from 1656 – one of the city’s largest 17th century buildings.

As well as hosting one of the world’s biggest collections of nautical art and artefacts, the museum explores the Netherlands’ connection with the sea. It contains several themed exhibitions, object exhibitions and interactive exhibits that not only celebrate the romance and adventure of seafaring, but also mark the darker aspects of the country’s nautical past, such as colonisation and oppression.

Integrator Rapenburg Plaza has been responsible for the complete media and lighting control and the majority of the audiovisual installations in the museum: in three themed exhibitions, seven object exhibitions and the two interactive exhibits. There is a plethora of touchscreens and consoles, inviting the visitor to choose the areas that they want to find out more about.

Voyage at Sea
For instance, for the Voyage at Sea exhibit, the company carried out the lighting design, the AV and system design and the entire technical execution. Voyage at Sea is a 20-minute show, spread across five rooms, which takes visitors on a journey through 500 years of Dutch maritime history.

This attraction uses a variety of projections – including, in one room, a Pepper’s Ghost illusion – to take visitors out of the building into the harbour, and then on to the sea and even into battle. They even see themselves in a rowing boat on the ocean, having been video-recorded against a blue-screen background in the first room. The third room provides a fully immersive experience, using a Watchout system to control a total of 10 Sanyo projectors in an oval configuration to completely surround the audience. The projection is 15m in circumference and 3.4m high. The story takes the audience on different types of ship, ending up in a sea battle. Multichannel audio (12 Seeburg speakers plus two subs) enhance the experience by carrying the sounds of gunfire and other effects.

“This room was probably the hardest part of the whole installation,” comments Sierk Janszen, partner and technical director at Rapenburg Plaza. “The walls of the building are not straight, and we were restricted in where we could position the projectors. Also, Watchout requires the same number of pixels in all the overlap areas between projectors. We had to work around this by using theatrical foil to physically mask off parts of some images.”