On April 15, 2014 the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (CMHoF) revealed to the public it's 210,000-square-foot expansion. This included several new exhibits, including the Dinah and Fred Gretsch Family/ACM Gallery where we were able to put our expertise in vinyl wraps to good use!

We recently had the opportunity to work with 1220 Exhibits (1220) to create pieces in the newest wing of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Part of that including wrapping a giant wooden structure 1220 created to be a replica of Taylor Swift's tour bus. The "bus" is actually an interactive display where guests can experience recording their own hit songs and create album art. If you haven't been in The Museum yet, you still may have seen the side of the bus through the giant windows on the side of The Museum on 4th Ave S. 

Image of the bus before the exhibit opened to the public

1220 was hired by the CMHoF to help create the exhibit. They found and consulted with us because they had a vision of creating a life-sized—and life-like—tour bus for the exhibit. They wanted to work with people who have actually wrapped buses and other vehicles to help them create an exhibit that looked as close to an actual bus as possible. 

After meeting with the people at 1220 Exhibits, we hired photographer Ian Cresswell to take extremely high-resolution photos of Taylor Swift's actual tour bus from every angle. One of our graphic designers, Rich Novia, used these photo files to lay out and scale the design for the exhibit. After many design hours of manipulating the images to get rid of sun-glare, properly scale and combine the images, and meld the photos together in a way that looked realistic, we were able to send the measurements over to 1220. Rich said the most challenging part was making the images look cohesively 3-dimensional after being printed on a 2-dimensional surface. The corners were particularly tricky! Part of this process included removing the lights from all of the images of the bus and replacing them with registration marks, or "bomb sites", because 1220 wanted to put in actual working bus lights on the exhibit. 

View of the bus from behind. In addition to the giant bus, the exhibit features a giant guitar that is also a slide and a giant interactive record player.

1220 took the measurements of our design files and created the body of the exhibit. Every measurement had to be very exact on both of our parts to perfectly match the wooden bus with our printed graphics. 

Part of the interactive digital displays inside of the tour bus.

After the body of the bus was built, they sent us vectorized CAD files which we layed the Photoshop manipulated photos of the tour bus over. These files were printed on matte 3M IJ35C vinyl, given time to cure, and then taken up to Nashville for installation! The body of the bus is covered in large digitally printed panels that had to be perfectly lined up across the board. This was challenging for our guys when they were wrapping the bus on the side by the windows. There was only about 24 inches of space between the bus and the windows for them to move around and wrap the bus in! 

This is all the space they had to work in, including their ladders and equipment! What do you think of the working lights 1220 added? Pretty neat, huh?

Although the images of the bus's structure were cohesively wrapped in large panels to look as seamless as possible, the images of Taylor Swift and her logo graphics were put on as an overlay. So, in a sense, the wooden bus's wrap got a wrap! Doing this allowed us to make the images crisper and made the whole thing look more realistic. The photos of Taylor Swift and her signature graphics were provided by her management group. 

Although the bus is pretty large (I mean, it is the size of an actual bus), it only took about two and a half days to wrap. The project itself, however, with proofing, coming up with the concept, going to meetings up in Nashville with 1220 and the CMHoF representatives, art time, printing, testing, and installation took about four months. Much longer than one of our usual projects but it was also on a much larger scale!

The nearly finished exhibit space.

We were also able to print out some more graphics for 1220 and the CMHoF including a wall mural commemorating George Jones, a wall mural of Faith Hill and Tim McGraw at the 2001 CMA Awards, graphics for the "Welcome" Wall and catering area, and graphics for the entrance of the "Sing Me Back Home" exhibit about the roots of country music. 

It was a blast working on this project! If you're in the Nashville area be sure to head on over to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and check it out!

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