Documenting an Installation for Festival Submission

Your installation is a room that people walk into. The jury will experience it as a video file played at 1.5× speed on a laptop, in a batch of two hundred others, possibly without sound.

That is not cynicism, it is the format. Documentation is a separate artwork from the work, with its own craft, and most rejected submissions are rejected on the documentation rather than on the piece.

What you are actually asked for

Open calls converge on roughly the same package. Using the categories from calls like NewImages and EMAF as a guide, expect to supply:

A video — often 2–3 minutes, sometimes a hard cap
3–5 stills, with credits
A concept description — frequently 1,000–1,500 characters, not words
A short biography — 800–1,500 characters
A portfolio or profile link
An artist portrait, with credit
For installations: a technical rider and often a floor plan

The character counts are the first trap. 1,000 characters is about 150 words. You are not writing a statement; you are writing an abstract.

The video is the submission

Open with the work, not a title card

Ten seconds of black with your name on it is ten seconds of a two-minute budget, spent on information already in the form. Start on the work, in its space, with a person in frame.

A reasonable two-minute structure:

Time	Content
0:00–0:15	Wide shot: the work in its room, someone entering
0:15–0:50	Interaction: one person, one complete cycle, uncut
0:50–1:20	Detail: what the output actually looks like close up
1:20–1:45	A second, different interaction — showing variation
1:45–2:00	Wide again, holding, so the jury can look

Show one complete interaction without cutting

This is the single most important shot, and the one most people butcher. A jury needs to know what the work does when somebody uses it — cause, delay, effect. Cutting between three partial interactions hides exactly that, and juries read concealment into it, usually correctly.

One person. One full cycle. No cut. Even if it is twenty seconds and a little slow.

Do not score it over the work’s own sound

If the piece makes sound, that sound is the work. A music bed laid over it tells a jury you are hiding the audio. If the piece is silent, say so in the description rather than filling the silence.

Filming a dark room

Most installations live in the dark, and most documentation of dark installations is unusable. The problems are specific and so are the fixes.

Lock your exposure. Auto-exposure will hunt every time the projection changes brightness, and the resulting pulsing reads as a technical fault in your work. Set it manually and leave it.

Shoot the screen, not the room. Expose for the brightest thing in frame — the projection, the LEDs, the display. Let the room go dark. The jury does not need to see your cable runs.

Match your shutter to the display. Projectors, LED panels and screens flicker at their refresh rate. Pick a shutter speed that is a multiple of it or you will get rolling bands across every frame. If you see banding on playback, change the shutter, not the edit.

Get a tripod. Handheld footage in low light means a slow shutter, which means motion blur on top of noise.

Film a person, lit by the work. A silhouette rimmed by your own projection is both the most legible shot of scale and the most attractive frame you will get.

The stills are not video frames

Export a frame from your video and it will be soft, noisy and oddly cropped. Shoot stills separately, with a longer exposure on a tripod, which is exactly what a dark room allows.

Aim for three that each do a different job:

The establishing shot — the whole work in its space
The human-scale shot — somebody using it, so size is readable
The detail — the output, the surface, the thing that is hard to describe in 1,000 characters

Caption each with title, year, medium, dimensions, venue and photographer credit. Festivals reuse these in programmes and press, and an uncredited image often simply does not get used.

The technical rider decides whether you get installed

A selected work with a vague rider becomes a problem for a production team with forty other problems. Write it as though somebody who has never spoken to you must build it.

State, at minimum:

Footprint and height — floor area, ceiling clearance, and whether it needs to be dark
Power — how many circuits, what draw, what voltage and connector
Projection — throw distance, surface, lumens required, mounting
Audio — channel count, whether it needs isolation or headphones
Network — whether it needs the internet, and whether it will still run if the venue’s Wi-Fi drops
Hardware you supply versus hardware the venue must supply
Install and strike time, and whether you will be present
Failure behaviour — what happens if it crashes, and whether it recovers unattended

That last point is the one experienced festivals look for. A work that restarts itself after a power blip is dramatically cheaper to exhibit than one requiring a daily visit, and saying so is a genuine competitive advantage.

Writing the 1,000 characters

Three sentences, in this order:

What it physically is. “A 270-degree projection across three walls, driven by a single depth camera.”
What happens when someone uses it. The mechanism, plainly.
Why it matters. One sentence, and only one.

Theory first is the most common error. A jury reading 150 words wants to know what the object is before it is told what the object means.

Mistakes that cost selections

Submitting a render. If the work has not been built, say so and enter a development track such as NewImages’ XR Development Market rather than a competition.
No person in any shot. Scale becomes unreadable and interactivity becomes unprovable.
Over-editing. Fast cuts and a music bed read as a showreel, not documentation.
Ignoring the character limits. Over-length fields get truncated mid-sentence by the submission platform, not by a sympathetic human.
Missing credits on images. They quietly go unused.
Writing the rider after selection. It is usually requested at submission, and rushing it produces the install problems you will then live with.

Keep the raw footage

Shoot more than you need, at the highest quality your camera offers, and archive it. You will be asked for different cuts, different aspect ratios and higher-resolution stills for years — by festivals, by press, by grant applications. Reshooting an installation that has been struck is usually impossible.