90 years of the Moscow Metro

The Moscow Metro turned 90, and the anniversary was marked with a 3D mapping show on the facade of the Lubyanka station vestibule.

On the building the mosaics of Alexander Deineka and Vladimir Frolov and the sculptures of Matvey Manizer and other artists come to life: the images flow one into another and congratulate viewers on the date.

To make this possible, HALO first digitised the metro's cultural heritage. The mosaics were photographed in high resolution, the sculptures scanned in 3D – and the show's content was built on this basis. This approach means the facade shows not approximate copies but images captured from the real underground works, with their texture and detail.

The studio covered the full set of work: the creative concept, CG content, sound and light, technical implementation. The final running time is 7 minutes of content, structured as a continuous transition from one metro masterpiece to the next.

Digitising the heritage is the most demanding part of the project. The mosaics and sculptures of the Moscow Metro were created as monumental art, and moving them into digital form without loss of quality is harder than drawing abstract animation. Here it is exactly this source material that became the basis of the show.