Max Hattler just completed two short films with students at The Animation Workshop, an animation school in Viborg, Denmark. The two pieces, 1923 and 1925, will also be featured in a one-person show at Lumen Eclipse starting April 1st. We caught up with Max to find out more about the origins and the process of making these two enigmatic pieces.
Imagine stepping into an elevator and looking through a viewport that reveals your ascension to heaven or—if you’re on your way to the street—your descent to hell (appropriately enough).
This interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is precisely the experience video artist Marco Brambilla (director of Demolition Man) and Toronto-based studio Crush were striving for in Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City.
The entire mural uses over 400 video sources, including samples from several films—something Brambilla is well-known for in his work. This particular project came with some special technical challenges, though. Crush explains:
We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn’t fly.
We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.
Read on for a Q&A with Marco Brambillla and detailed notes from Crush’s Sean Cochrane about the technical challenges behind this project.
For commercial work, Marco Brambilla is represented in the US by The Ebeling Group.
“The Divine Comedy,” written by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century, is an allegorical vision of the christian afterlife, depicting a journey through the three realms of the dead. This is a big story.
So, as modern, classy people, we remake it into a video game.
With Psyop at the helm, EA’s “Dante’s Inferno” game trailer captured the imagination of the 13 year old boy inside of me (note to audience: I am not a boy). Knowing that fact says something about the impression this trailer has on someone that loves the original story, but hates video games.
“Inferno” is distinguishably different from most game trailers. Psyop’s spin takes us to an organic place that the 3D game trailer genre has seldom gone before. It’s got the elements of being a cheese-ball 3D showpiece: a glow-y woman, a beefed up man in armor grunting.
But “Inferno” could care less about being a glossy 3D trailer, and more about rendering Hell with all its might—slovenly liquefied flames, orifice-shaped monstrosities tearing through the blurry mess of a rotting flesh landscape. It’s poetic and sick. We’re in hell, and I love it.
Read our interview with the creators at Psyop behind “Dante’s Inferno” game trailer.
UPDATE: Psyop has graciously shared their storyboards and some concept development imagery with us.
Posted on Motionographer
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A. during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
