Every Room Is A Canvas: How Alford Media Changes The Environment

What IS IT?

What Is Projection Mapping, and Why Does the Space Matter?

Projection mapping turns a physical surface, a building, a stage, or even an entire room, into a moving, immersive canvas. The technology gets the attention, but the harder skill is reading the space itself. An outdoor facade and an indoor ballroom don't behave the same way. Lighting changes. Distance changes. The surface itself changes. And so does how an audience actually experiences the room from their seats.

Shawn Lunsford has led Alford Media through both worlds, outdoor architectural mapping and full indoor room takeovers, giving clients the confidence that their vision holds up no matter where it lives.

"The biggest difference outdoors is lighting. Even the most powerful projector in the world can't compete with the sun, so focusing, alignment, testing, and programming often have to happen at night. You also have to plan around weather, especially rain and wind, all of which can affect the equipment, the structures, and the schedule. Indoors, those concerns largely disappear because the environment can be controlled. Beyond that, the core logistics stay the same: understanding the throw distance, the power and signal needs, and precisely aligning the image to the surface."

PROJECT ONE

University of Utah, Outdoor Architectural Projection Mapping

The University of Utah had one goal: turn a building into a moment guests would still be talking about long after the night ended. That meant transforming a massive facade, 214 feet wide and 45 feet tall, into one seamless, glowing canvas, with no visible seams and no room for error.

Before any equipment arrived, Shawn traveled to Salt Lake City for an in-person site survey. He walked the space, measured the building, and mapped exactly how the light needed to travel to bring the university's vision to life.

That groundwork shaped every decision that followed: which projectors, which lenses, and exactly where to stage them for full coverage. A backup projector stood ready the entire night, because at this scale, there's no such thing as a second chance.

On the night of the show, the building came alive edge to edge. No seams. No gaps. Just the vision the university had asked for, fully realized.
"The moment the first projector hit the building, I knew we weren't ready for show yet! But it gave me exactly the light reflection I was hoping for, and I knew right then that it was going to look bright and beautiful once the alignment and blends were finished. I had also been involved in the content planning ahead of time, so I knew the visuals were going to line up beautifully with the features of the building."

Project two

Dollar General, Indoor Full Room Takeover at Music City Center

For Dollar General, the ask was different: don't transform a building, transform an entire room. The Karl F. Dean Ballroom at Music City Center needed to feel immersive the moment attendees walked through the door, no blank walls, no flat moments.

The team built out the ballroom with eight Barco laser projectors, split evenly across the room, all driven from a single media server so every wall moved together as one experience. On the main wall, three of those projectors blended into a single, unbroken canvas more than 90 feet wide, engineered so precisely that guests never saw where one projector's image ended and the next began.

Indoor rooms carry challenges an outdoor building doesn't. Ambient light, sight-lines that shift depending on where someone's seated, walls that were never designed to be a screen. Rather than guess how the ballroom's dark wood walls would handle the light, Shawn's team made a dedicated trip to Nashville ahead of time to test it, so nothing about show night was left to chance.