When Atelier Brückner approached us to create an audiovisual installation for an exhibition featuring the world's largest Viking ship, we knew it would be a project of epic proportions. Beautifully illustrated, the two one-minute historical films not only showcase the violence of the Viking military actions, but also show a gentler side to the warriors as they return home to their families after battling to provide for them.
To create the look the artists first created their matte paintings, a Flash artist animated each frame by hand then gave their sequences to designer/animators, who imported the Flash files into Photoshop and added hand-painted textures over the original animation. Those sequences were then rendered, imported and composited using After Effects. By taking aspects of traditional hand-drawn animation and modernizing them with today's technology, we were able to bring a sense of artistry and drama to the narrative film embedded behind the ship.
To survive the treacherous life of a Viking, you had to raid, steal and kill to fend for both your family and your village. As Creative Director/Director on this project the goal was to create two vignettes that illustrated the intense hardships of this Nordic culture. Atelier Brueckner chose to project the videos onto a "liquid screen" displayed before the largest Viking ship ever unearthed, measuring 37 meters in length, which is currently exhibited at the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. Behind this massive artifact displayed two videos, 16 minutes in length, conveying a ghostly video of the severe Nordic lifestyle these men, women and children had to endure hundreds of years ago.