Hans Christian Andersen
Experiential Installation // Director - Noah Harris
We built a series of experiential films for the new Hans Christian Andersen museum built in Odense, Denmark, just steps from the site of the authors childhood home. The large scale museum is filled with artwork and interpretations of his dark fairy tales from artists across the world. Together with director Noah Harris, I led a team of 20 VFX & 3D artists as we built films for 10 of the museums key exhibits.
The films were experimental, exciting and all very dark, alternative takes on some of Hans Christian Andersen’s most famous fairy tales. Across 5 studio days we shot a range of live action plates and puppetry, along with stop motion characters and then composited these into 3d scenes, combining LIDAR scanning of Hans Christian’s childhood home and surrounding streets and the 3d animation of some of the tales creatures and characters.
It was a dream brief and here is just a small selection of stills and content from the production of the films.
Pre-production
Our initial phase of concept design, modelling and LIDAR scanning allowed us to explore new techniques and approaches to mixing live action and 3d media together to make unexpected visuals. We sculpted 3d creatures and character in zBrush before taking them over to Maya for rigging and animation, everything then rendered in Arnold renderer. For environment builds they were a mixture of modelling based on archive reference photography and then LIDAR scans from environments and interiors in and around Hans Christians childhood home.
The Films
The films themselves were designed specifically for the projection architecture of the museum with some films being projected on to voile films for a 3d Peppers Ghost effect, or onto shattered mirror glass or 10m walls of perspex rods. Each story came with its own challenges of how to present the fairytale in the most impactful way.
The Installation
Projected within a impressive museum space, designed by Kengo Kuma Associates, our films were built to be immersive, experiential art pieces, existing on floating shards of glass above your head, mirror glazed ice palaces or projected in full 360 around you inside of a giant toy box.
Credits
Client - Hans Christian Andersen Museum
Agency - Event Communications
Director - Noah Harris
VFX Lead - David Horsburgh
Production Company - Agile Films
Post Producer - Rebecca Little
Concept Designer - Sveta Kudakova
3d Modelling - Julien Romeo, Oguz Birgoren, Eric Schnell
3d Animator - Alexandre Belbari
3d Rigging - Glon Gwenhael
3d Designer - Chris Dunleavy, Sebastian Zaniewski, Kevin Marian, Chris Angelkov, Jonathan Watkins
3d FX - Alican Gorgec
Composite - Simone Ghilardotti, Andy Hague, Rob Ward, Artur Katrancioglu, Emre Samioglu, Gok Gursoy, Dean Adjeikum, Chris Dunleavy, Sebastian Zaniewski, Kevin Marian