How to Order a Projection Mapping Show — Client’s Guide

How to Order a Projection Mapping Show — The Client’s Guide

The article is written by a human. Mistakes have been edited by AI. Written from our own procurement experience. Resource links checked July 2026.

The most common enquiry we get is three lines long, has a €3,000 budget, and attaches a reference video of a show whose content alone cost around €90,000. Nobody is being unreasonable. The client simply has no way of knowing, because this industry publishes almost nothing about how the process works.
This is the missing document: how to find a contractor, what to put in the enquiry, and which commercial terms decide whether the project goes well or becomes a dispute.

Who this article is for: event agencies, municipalities, brand and venue managers commissioning a projection mapping show for the first or second time. Also useful for studios who want to send clients something instead of explaining it again.

What it solves: you have a building, a date and a budget, and no framework for turning that into a signed contract with a supplier you can trust.

What you get by the end: a vetting checklist, a brief template that gets you comparable quotes, the contract terms that actually matter, and a realistic timeline working backwards from show night.

Hello dear clients and colleagues. I am new media artist Alexander Kuiava. LIME ART GROUP has been quoting, producing and occasionally declining projection mapping projects since 2012. Everything below comes from that side of the table, including the parts that are awkward for us.

How to find and vet a contractor

Where to actually look in 2026

Word of mouth still produces the best matches, and in most European markets an event agency already knows someone. When it does not, these are the places worth searching, and all of them were live when we checked in July 2026:

• VJBooking — a directory of over 820 professional VJs, projection mappers and visual artists, searchable and built specifically for this purpose. The most direct route if you want an individual artist rather than a production company.
• Vimeo groups — the Le Collagiste and Mapping Projections groups remain useful for finding work by style rather than by company name.
• Video Mapping Facebook group — over 20,000 members across the wider community. Posting a brief there gets responses within hours, and you will hear from studios that do not rank on Google.
• Video Mapping Blog — a long-running aggregator of documented facade and installation work, useful for browsing by project rather than by supplier.
• Google, YouTube and Vimeo search — obvious, and still effective if you search for the type of surface rather than the word “mapping”. “Cathedral projection” and “warehouse facade projection” return better results than “video mapping company”.

Do not restrict yourself geographically by reflex. Content production is location-independent. A studio in another country can animate your facade perfectly well, and a local rental company can supply the projectors and crew. Splitting the job that way is normal and frequently cheaper than either extreme.

Five checks that remove most of the risk

One: is it a registered legal entity? You need a company you can sign a contract with, invoice properly and hold responsible. There are many capable freelancers working without registration, and if the show fails you have no recourse and no insurance. This was in the 2017 version of this article and it has not become less true.

This is not a judgement about freelancers — plenty of excellent artists work through an agency or a production company precisely to solve this. Ask who the contracting party is. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.

Two: is there a showreel, and does it match your job? A showreel tells you the studio’s dominant style in ninety seconds — motion graphics, 3D animation, VFX, abstract, narrative. It also tells you the studio’s maturity. What it does not tell you is whether they have done your kind of surface. A studio with a superb reel of stage and LED work may never have mapped a heritage facade with real depth.

Ask for two or three projects on a surface comparable to yours, and ask specifically whether their team produced the content, the technical delivery, or both.

Three: who does the technical side? Content production and technical supply are usually different companies. That is fine and normal. What is not fine is discovering it three weeks before the show.

Ask directly: do you own projectors and media servers, or do you subcontract? Who is the single point of responsibility if a projector fails on the night? A studio that subcontracts openly and names its partner is a better bet than one that is vague about it.

Four: how fast do they respond, and with what? A serious company sends a usable proposal within two to three working days — a price, an approach, and enough sketch material to approve or reject the direction. Longer than that means either genuine overload, which is fine but implies a premium, or that they have forwarded your brief to somebody else and are waiting. Large international projects are the exception: nobody moves ten 30,000-lumen projectors across a border without logistics and carnet paperwork.

Five: will they tell you no? This is the most useful signal and the least discussed. A supplier who explains that your budget does not match your reference, and proposes a version that does, is worth considerably more than one who agrees to everything. We turn down or outsource projects whose budget cannot produce the result the client is imagining, and we say so in the first reply. It is not good salesmanship and it is the reason our clients come back.

The brief that gets you a real quote

Send all of this in the first email. It costs you twenty minutes and it saves a fortnight of back-and-forth on both sides.

The four that people get wrong

Dates, plural. Give the show date and the dates for equipment delivery, installation and testing. A show on the 14th usually means rigging on the 12th and testing on the 13th, and the venue has to be available. If equipment is crossing a border, add buffer for customs clearance and carnet paperwork — this is a real and regular source of delay, not a theoretical one.

The building, properly. A frontal photograph is the minimum. Dimensions are better. A CAD file or architectural elevation is dramatically better and will speed up your quote by days, because the contractor can build an accurate model and calculate coverage instead of estimating from a phone photo. If the building is municipal or heritage, the drawings usually exist — ask.

Also state the surface material and colour. A white render facade and a dark stone one with the same dimensions need different projector counts and therefore different budgets.

The format, not just the duration. “Ten minutes” is not a brief. A single ten-minute show after which the audience moves on to something else is a completely different production from a four-minute piece looping every twenty minutes for seven consecutive evenings. The second needs weatherproof housing, unattended playback, a service plan and probably a different insurance arrangement.

The budget. We know why clients withhold it. The fear is that the price will expand to fill it.

Here is the honest counter-argument. Projection mapping has no fixed price — the same building can carry a €5,000 show or a €300,000 show, and both are legitimate. Without a number, the contractor guesses, and guesses wrong in one of two directions: too high and you dismiss them, or too low and you get a proposal that cannot deliver what you are imagining. Giving a range costs you nothing and gets you a proposal aimed at the show you can actually have.

If you genuinely cannot disclose it, give a ceiling: “we need to stay under X.” That is enough.

We wrote the full breakdown of what things cost by scale in our guide to projection mapping show pricing — read it before you set the number, so the number is realistic.

What you should get back

An itemised proposal, not a single figure. It should separate:

• Content: run time, custom or licensed, number of revision rounds included
• Projectors: model, brightness, count, number of billable days
• Media server and mapping software
• Crew: how many people, how many days, day rate
• Rigging, power and signal distribution
• Travel, accommodation and freight
• Permits and insurance
• Contingency

If any of those lines is missing, ask. The ones that most often hide later are freight, accommodation, facade usage fees on heritage buildings, and weather contingency.

The commercial terms nobody discusses until it is too late

This section did not exist in the original version of this article, and in hindsight that was the biggest gap. Most projects that go wrong go wrong here, not in the creative work.

Payment structure

The industry norm is a deposit on signature, a milestone payment on content approval, and the balance before or shortly after the show. Something in the region of 30–50% up front is standard for content production, because the studio is paying animators from day one and the entire cost is incurred before you see the result.

Be suspicious of a supplier who asks for nothing up front. It usually means they are not paying anyone until you pay them, which means the schedule is not real.

Agree the payment trigger precisely. “On approval of the content” needs a definition of approval and a deadline for giving it — otherwise a client who goes quiet for two weeks silently moves the delivery date.

The video preview, and what it should cost

Clients frequently want a video preview: a rendered simulation of the show on a 3D model of the building, before committing.

This is reasonable and we recommend it on any substantial project. But understand what you are asking for. Producing a convincing preview requires the 3D model, the animation and the render — which is most of the actual production work. A preview thrown together in an afternoon looks bad, satisfies nobody, and frequently loses the project for a supplier who would have done excellent work.

Our long-standing recommendation, and our own practice: budget roughly 10–12% of the project value for a one-minute preview, and pay it as a separate commission at the point of order. You get a real preview made properly, the studio is not funding speculative work, and if you then proceed the preview material feeds directly into the final show.

One caveat that applies to every preview ever made: a monitor is not a building at night. Contrast, ambient light, surface texture, viewing angle and scale all change the result. A preview tells you the concept, the timing and the style. It does not tell you exactly what the audience will see. Anyone who promises otherwise is overselling.

Who owns the content afterwards

Settle this in writing before production starts, because it is the most common late-stage argument.

Three normal arrangements exist, at three different prices:

Licence for the event. The studio keeps ownership; you have the right to use the content for the specified show. Cheapest, and appropriate for most one-off events.

Exclusive licence. You get exclusive use, the studio cannot resell or reuse the content, but the studio retains copyright. Middle price.

Full buyout. You own the work outright. Most expensive, often by a factor of two or more, because the studio loses all residual value.

Separately: agree who may publish the documentation video and with what credit. Studios need the footage for their reel and clients sometimes have brand or confidentiality restrictions. This is trivial to resolve in advance and genuinely unpleasant to resolve afterwards.

Note that licensed stock components — video mapping loops, toolkits, textures, music — are usually royalty-free for commercial performance but are not exclusive to you. If exclusivity matters, say so up front, because it changes what the studio can use and therefore the price.

Weather, cancellation and force majeure

Outdoor projection in Europe between October and March will meet rain. Decide in advance:

At what point is the show cancelled, who decides, and by when. “Show director’s call by 16:00 on the day” is a workable clause.

Who pays if it rains. The content is already produced and the crew already travelled — those costs exist whether or not the show runs. The usual arrangement is that content and mobilisation are paid regardless, with a reduced rate or a rescheduled date for the performance itself.

Whether there is a rain date, and whether the equipment is available on it.

Wind limits. Rigged projectors and truss have wind ratings. Somebody has to own the decision to derig, and it should be named in the contract.

Permits, insurance and who is responsible

Permits. Projecting onto a building requires the owner’s permission, and in many cities a public event or street-use permit as well. Heritage buildings frequently charge a separate facade usage fee. Establish early whether you or the contractor is obtaining these — this is the single most common assumption gap we see, with each side believing the other is handling it.

Public liability insurance. The contractor should have it. Ask for the certificate, not a verbal assurance.

Equipment insurance. Rented projectors are worth tens of thousands of euro and stand outdoors overnight. Establish who insures them and whether overnight security is included or a separate line.

A named responsible person on site. One person, on both sides, with a phone number, who can make decisions on the night. Projects with three people in charge have nobody in charge.

The timeline, working backwards

Availability, not production time, is usually the binding constraint. Projectors and crew in December are booked in September.

Compressed version. With licensed content adapted to the building rather than animated from scratch, and local equipment, the whole thing is achievable in two to three weeks. That is a genuine option and we do it regularly — it changes the creative approach, not the quality of the evening.

What actually causes delay: waiting for building drawings, waiting for permits, and waiting for the client to approve the content. Two of those three are on your side of the table.

Sources

Directories and community resources were checked in July 2026. Everything else in this article is our own procurement and production practice.

Where to find contractors

• VJBooking — directory of over 820 visual artists and projection mappers, vjbooking.com
• Video Mapping Blog — project aggregator, videomapping.blog
• Vimeo groups — Le Collagiste and Mapping Projections
• Video Mapping Facebook group — facebook.com/groups/videomapping

Related reading on this site

• What a projection mapping show costs, by scale
• How to make 3D video mapping projection, full production guide
• Best projectors for video mapping, architectural and interior

The vetting criteria, the brief template, the preview policy and the contract clauses are drawn from our own experience quoting and delivering projects since 2012, including the projects we declined.

Send us the twelve lines

If you have a building, a date and a number, send those three things and we will tell you honestly whether they fit together. If they do not, we will tell you what to change — usually the ambient light, the size of the canvas, or whether the content is custom or licensed — instead of quoting you for a show you cannot afford.

If we are not the right studio for your project, we will say that too, and where relevant point you at someone who is. That has cost us work and gained us more.

And if you would rather produce it yourself, the video mapping loops and toolkits are the components, and our complete production guide is the method.

Write to us with the brief above. Two to three working days for a proposal, as it should be.