Behind “Peseta” are freelance director, designer and animator Uli Henrik Streckenbach and Robert Pohle from the studio for animation and interaction schnellebuntebilder – both are graduates of the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.
Streckenbach specialises in visualisations and has already received an animago AWARD twice, each time in the visualisation category: in 2013 for “Let’s Talk About Soil” and in 2012 for “Ending Overfishing”. More from Uli Henrik Streckenbach can be found here.
The next animago AWARD & CONFERENCE will take place on October 15. And 16., 2015.
We spoke with Uli Henrik Streckenbach about his project “Peseta”.
DP: What software was used?
Uli Henrik Streckenbach: Cinema 4D, including the plug-ins Thrausi and Steadybake and CV Art Smart, was used for all 3D work. Compositing and colour corrections were then carried out in After Effects. Illustrator and Photoshop were used primarily for the maps.
DP: How long was the project worked on and how many employees were involved?
Uli Henrik Streckenbach: The project was completed in about three and a half months. Two people were employed full-time; in addition, there was another artist who spent 2 weeks on character modelling and rigging. At the end, we also brought in a sound designer and musician – in one person.
DP: How did the idea and concept come about?
Uli Henrik Streckenbach: “Peseta” was a project for the “Joint Research Centre” (GFS, or “Joint Research Center”, JRC), one of the European Commission’s Directorates-General. What this large-scale research institution does is not elaborate. It is super elaborate! Using complex formulas, they calculate Europe’s geological and meteorological condition up to the year 2100 in order to draw conclusions about the economic consequences of climate change. Supercomputers calculate this for days. Nevertheless, we did not want this process to look like a scene from a science-fiction film, but wanted to make it tangible for the viewer. Our visual answer was: the atlas. Because many factors used in the calculation occur in one form or another in an atlas. Surface characteristics, land use, weather maps, wind and water flows. At the same time, however, viewers were not supposed to be reminded of geography lessons in the 6th grade. We therefore wanted to translate these representations into 3D space and combine them with other elements, such as the small British town where we show the consequences and the development of flooding in Europe. And, of course, a representation of the Earth must not be missing from any of my films.
DP: What design and technical challenges did you have to overcome?
Uli Henrik Streckenbach: If we had to pick out one thing, it would probably be the representation of the maps. At the beginning of the project, we experimented a lot with displacement maps. But we wanted to use a more abstract, more technical representation for the maps, one that differed more from reality. From atlases one knows the representation of elevations through different colours and contour lines. We wanted to take up this method. To do so, corresponding maps first had to be created. The basis was a coloured elevation map of Europe that we “posterised” in Photoshop. In this way, the map, which had previously consisted of many different shades, was divided into – I think there were 13 – shades. We imported this map into Illustrator, traced the individual layers and applied various Pathfinder functions to them. Despite all these great tools, we ultimately still had to put in a lot of manual work – Illustrator is a love-hate relationship. Once we were satisfied with the result, we loaded the Illustrator file into Cinema using the CV Art Smart plug-in. The plug-in offers clear added value over Cinema’s native Illustrator import, but also reached its limits with the many vectors in the map (Ed.’s note: You can find the individual work steps for the map in the image gallery below).
Concept art and final shot
DP: What other special problems were there?
Uli Henrik Streckenbach: The opening scene with the long camera move towards the ice floe was tricky, because we had to combine many shots with Cinema 4D and After Effects here. In general, showing the effects of climate change on a global scale, not exaggerating everything too much, but somehow also depicting it visibly (do not worry, Great Britain will not sink any time soon), was not so easy. The texture on the Earth was animated in After Effects and then placed on the Earth in Cinema as a video texture. The main problem then was the water. The water around the ice floe is different from that on the Earth. When both were rendered together, there were overlaps. In short, the Earth, ice floe and the water around the ice floe had to be rendered separately and then combined in After Effects.
sha
