Making of Immense Ryazanov exhibition

From the very beginning we were meant to take on only technical tasks for the exhibition project, commemorating the 90th anniversary of famous Russian film director Eldar Ryazanov. But as we became part of the team we participated more and more in reviewing and rebuilding of the whole concept, graphic solutions and its realization. Finally, due to some tragic circumstances we had to take on the full scope of work — from re-thinking the concept to the realization. When we have started from scratch, the time were pressing: we had around 70 days only until opening and a huge space over 1 200 sq.m in the New Manege exhibition center in the center of Moscow to fill.

Our work started with the optimization of the concept: we reconsidered all of the installations, their content and visitor’s interaction with them. Our creative group also drastically increased the number of installations and objects in order to present more archive documents and materials of interest.

The space of the exhibition, consisting of 3 large rooms, inconveniently located on opposite sides of the entrance, we broke into conventional blocks: life and work of the director, that, in its turn, consisted of his filmography and works for television and poetry. That was our starting point for the works on project development. Our concept was developed in a short time frame and contained technical documentation such as indoor exposition planning, multimedia equipment allocation, installation descriptions and preliminary sketches of exhibits.

At the pre-production stage we created interaction scenarios for all installations, wrote a lot of detailed scenarios for content development and made sketches and storyboards for further content production. Those were agreed upon with the director’s widow, E.V. Abaidullina-Ryazanova, who, along with the Foundation of Eldar Ryazanov assisted and enormously helped us at all stages of the work on the exhibition. After all of this work was approved, we turned to the production. At this stage we made different multimedia and graphic content, exclusive style of the exhibition and indoor navigation. At the same time, we ordered technical and multimedia equipment.

Meanwhile we also looked for objects to fill up setting scenes, which were added to recreate famous interior set-ups from Ryazanov’s movies. Visitors could enter these setting scenes, touch everything there and make selfies in instantly recognizable by every Russian person entourage.

The main hall was filled with exhibits from Ryazanov’s movies and presented him as film director. There were a lot of requisite, recreated setting scenes, hand-written screenplays, real objects from some legendary movies: a huge 2 m in diameter watch from ‘The Carnival Night’ (1956), which we found at Mosfilm warehouse and had to restore, the Volga car once driven by Yuri Detochkin, the main character of the ‘Beware of the Car’ (1966). We also have found lots of original costumes from the film sets, such as iconic pieces of clothes from Russian cult movie ‘The Irony of Fate’ (1976). To show authentic costumes from Ryazanov’s films we put them above the huge lightbox with sketches of the characters who wore these outfits in movies that backlit them for a better appearance.

Beside of it we have placed a chromakey interactive installation with digital entourage being projected on the opposite wall. Stepping inside visitors could see themselves in the Ryazanov’s movies and take a photo along with the legendary actress who played the main role in this musical comedy, Lyudmila Gurchenko. This attraction was one of the most popular selfie spots of the exhibition.

Apart of that, in the middle of the main hall another interactive installation was placed that look like a giant film strip made of light boxes and integrated touch screens. It was visual and informative dominant of the exposition. Each segment of the strip was dedicated to some director’s work from that period, so visitors could seerare still shots and posters, had lots of information to read and some related videos to watch.

We also found some space for tiny cinema: two screensplacedopposite, a sound system and numerous padded stools made this small isolated room for 20 spectators an ideal place for watching all of the Ryazanov’smovies, shown on schedule. Light and sound from the outside were blocked by thick curtains. The medium hall contained artefacts and installations related to other sides of Ryazanov’s creative heritage. One of such installation deployed some old Soviet era telephones that rung times to time. A visitor who, will pick up the phone, could listen to a random Ryazanov’s poem read by the author himself. On the other side of the wall, dividing the space in half, there were 5 old Soviet tube TVs, which we modified so that the audience, switching the channels, could see one of the television programs of popular Soviet TV show ‘Cinema-Panorama’, which Ryazanov was the permanent author and host for many years. It is funny that due to their age, TV sets could not work all day from the opening to the close of the exhibition for a month, and were switching off beyond repair. Taking this into account, we prepared 2 more replacement TVs — nevertheless, by the end of the exhibition, only 4 of 5 were working anyway.

On the left side of the hall is a replica of the facade of the Eldar Cinema Center with a scene in the recess, on which we showed director’s public performance on the screen. On the opposite we have placed largeinteractive kinetic installation that looked like photo film bobbins placed overlight boxes. On films some of his rules of life and quotes about life were printed.

The last exhibition space was dedicated to Ryazanov’s biography. We aimed to make this experience more personal. That’s why the entourage of the director’s flat full of books, watches, paintings, collections and other artefacts was the best choice to immerse visitors into every-day real life of the director.We used a large number of Soviet-style furniture sets, so-called ‘stenka’. Stenkas, familiar to every Soviet person also echoed with the director’s films. For those furniture pieces, along with other replicas of the common objects of the Soviet lifestyle, such as telephones, typewriters, etc., we searched for at flea markets and bought by ads in newspapers. After that, we modeled them in 3D and assembled from them a display case located in the center of the hall, which we painted in neutral white. On the shelves inside the cabinets and around we placed the exhibits. We could not find some rare pieces such as movie cameras and film projectors of the 1950s, but our colleagues from the Open Funds of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum came to the rescue here, providing them to us for the duration of the exhibition, for which we would like to bring special thanks to Natalia Sergievskaya, who responded to our cry for help on Facebook. We also placed objects from the Ryazanov collections on the walls: wall clocks and painted wooden boards. Some of the objects with special value, such as paintings, we projected onto the walls. We also hung Ryazanov’s personal belongings on the dressing hooks at the wall, such as his jacket and a handbag.

The next installation — ‘Typewriter’ combined projection of the screenplay of ‘Beware of the Car’ with the related scenes from the movie. It led visitors deeper into the personal and creative world of EldarRyazanov. In it, we wanted to reflect how the scripts of Ryazanov turned into films: under the sound of keys, a sheet of the script «Beware of the car» crawled out of the typewriter was projected onto the wall, the letters of which turned into a scene from the film.

The so-called ‘Virtual Tour’ was the most impressive multimedia installation of the whole project. By using 14 projectors and ScreenBerry media serverswe have shown a 34-minutes story of EldarRyazanov’s life. The inspiration of this installation we found in his autobiography. We also collected numerous interesting and obscure facts and anecdotes of his life, based on which we wrote a script for the virtual tour that consisted of 11 chapters. Our next step was to ask Ryazanov’s favorite actors and friends to take part. Such movie stars as Oleg Basilashvili, LiyaAkhedzhakova, SvetlanaNemolyaeva, AleksandrShirvindt and, Nikolai Fomenkoagreed to participate in the project.

We have divided these 11 chapters between them and then to filmed them on chromakey within the course of 2 weeks: not an easy fit, keeping in mind their tight professional schedule and age. Some of them we filmed in a rented pavilion, for same we had to set up portable chromakey studios in a hotel room or theater.

The last chapter was conceived as a metaphoric farewell to the director, who, according to our idea, did not just leave the Earth but moved to a small planet (asteroid 4258), that was opened on September 1, 1987 and in fact named after him. He lives on it, like the Little Prince, and watches us from afar. We decided to implement this idea with the help of video mapping technology. To do this, we made a hemisphere resembling the surface of an asteroid, fixed it on the wall and projected content onto it — the texture of the planet and the figure of Ryazanov on it. With the help of 3D graphics, we reproduced the features of the director’s face, worked through his various emotions, recreated his walk and the algorithm of his movements.

To achieve maximum similarity with him was one of the most difficult in the process of content development: a huge number of options and versions were created, until we reached similarity and the widow and friends of Eldar Ryazanov did not approve of this animation. As a result, as a farewell installation, we got a touching mini-film, in which the director walks around his planet, writes, directs and creates new masterpieces on it, and finally waves his hand to the audience saying goodbye to the visitors. In the shortest possible time, we managed to cope with a very difficult task in creative terms and realize what we were striving for: this first large-scale biographical exhibition dedicated to the great director presented all facets of Ryazanov’s enormous talent.