National Museum of Qatar - Nice Shoes Behind the Scenes

Creative studio Nice Shoes, with headquarters in New York, partnered with a diverse array of top global directors to bring wonder and beauty to commissioned film exhibits as part of the highly-anticipated opening of the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ). The museum, which opened on March 28, 2019, is a sprawling architectural wonder, with its galleries and courtyards spreading across over 52,000 square meters.

The Doha Film Institute (DFI) who produced the project for the NMoQ, through their Technical Director Dean Winkler, tapped Nice Shoes as a partner to help visualize the history of the country across 10 galleries with awe-inspiring, floor-to-ceiling immersive films. The films were meticulously crafted to draw in visitors with state-of-the-art technical specs, resulting in 21.54 billion pixels per second image resolution--over 10 times the quality of IMAX screens. These rich visuals are displayed on 114 4K projectors, with 308 speakers to provide immersive soundscapes throughout the 11 galleries. Nice Shoes CTO Robert Keske worked closely with Winkler and the creative team onsite, fine-tuning the technical setup, custom-tailored to the museum’s curved design, supported by 179 bespoke servers provided by London-based Realtime Experience Systems (RES).

Ten art films produced for NMoQ in association with the Doha Film Institute by noted international filmmakers visually represent Qatar’s history. Nice Shoes collaborated with directors and museum curators to map each film to multi-dimensional museum walls and HD displays, ensuring each project retained the consistency, vibrancy and resolution of the original footage. The studio enabled the filmmakers to review the films through the construction of scale models of each gallery, as well as through the configuration and reconfiguration of projectors within a custom post production suite dedicated to the films. This was done in tandem with designing and implementing custom workflows for each film that would ensure the comprehensive edits were cohesive and transferable to the museum installation.