CHANGING LANDSCAPES - MESA VERDE
Boston Museum of Science USES EXPERIENTIAL ANIMATION TO ILLUSTRATE THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON VARIOUS UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITES
I was given the opportunity to help Hero 4 Hire create a series of animations for Changing Landscapes: An Immersive Journey, a new experiential exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science that takes visitors through four UNESCO World Heritage Sites and shows how they have been affected by climate change. Though the exhibit covers more information, I worked specifically on a pair of experiences focusing on the effects of wild fires on the ecology and archeologically important sites within the park. Bear with the wordier than to be expected page in such a visual medium, because some of this may seem strange out of the context it was meant to be presented in.
Light Projection and Spalling
First up was an animation that would be projected on to an interactive display where visitors would assemble a puzzle that revealed a pictograph on a rock wall. Once assembled, the animation would give the illusion of a wild face scorching the rock, before chunks of the rock fell away through thermal spalling. Getting a projection to give the illusion parts of the image getting brighter some times then darker others was a little tricky, but for the most part the team at H4H had that mostly figured out and I just got to work within their constraints. Its a weird animation to view on its own…but when projected on to the actual rock…I’m told it looked pretty convincing.
BEST LAID PLANS MEET UNPROVEN SOFTWARE…
Originally, I was tasked with taking a still image of a Pinyon pine tree in different states of maturity and using it as a basis for five animations. All of the pieces would feature a foreground bluff with a prominent Pinyon pine, overlooking a valley and a distant mesa. Two of the animations were to show a fire sweeping through the distant mesa and one of those was to be partially extinguished by a fire fighting helicopter.
Probably most challenging was sort of a time lapse of the hero tree growing from a sapling to a mature Pinyon, only to be destroyed by a wildfire, after which the mesa top is overrun by cheat grass. This was originally where the still images of the Pinyon were supposed to come into play but it quickly became apparent that a 3d tree animated growing through maturity was the only real way to go. Mistakes were made…lessons were learned…but in the end a tree was grown.
There were other challenges there, for sure. Mainly our timeline and budget required creating a convincing wild fire and resulting smoke plumes without resorting to complex 3d simulations and volumetrics. We found some great stock elements for the fire and the foreground smoke, then relied on Particular for the large background plumes. Budget and timeline also meant we couldn’t create custom 3d solutions for the animals in the base state, so we had find clever solutions to make stock work there as well.
CREDITS.
Client - Boston Museum of Science
Studio - Hero 4 Hire Creative
Creative Direction - Jane Wu and Steve Young
Producer - Lynn Guarino
Responsibilities:
Edit, MoGraph / 2d Animation, Rendering, Comp