A Blender mix: storytelling, 3D, 2D, procedural modeling, simulations and drones for an educational short video

The opening title of "Il piccolo Masaccio e le Terre Nuove"

A drop of drone shootings, a pound of 3D and procedural modelling, a shot of watercolours, an ounce of crowd, cloth and particle simulations and a sprinkle of photomodelling. Mix well in Blender and deliver to the Museum of San Giovanni Valdarno a fresh educational video for telling visitors about the birth of the town in the late Middle Ages.

Commissioned by the Museum of the New Towns, “Il piccolo Masaccio e le Terre Nuove” is a short animated Computer Graphics educational movie, developed with manifold techniques and mainly aimed to the younger audience of the museum. For enhancing the possible identification, the main character is a kid of the early 1400’s, a young version of the painter Masaccio, one of the illustrious citizens of the town of San Giovanni. The Vicar, city ruler of the time, explains to the young Masaccio, and to the audience, about the city, its birth and creation on the ground of the rational rules underlying its design. The video presents a series of very different solutions, such as:

live shots, taken also by drone;

2D drawings executed with a digital tablet;

drawings sketched with traditional techniques, such as India ink and watercolours;

Computer Graphics, with traditional and procedural modelling, photogrammetry, also for textures;

crowd, cloth and particle simulations;

a digital library for the vegetation of the time;

digital videos taken from Google Earth.

All of this complexity is displayed in order to fascinate a museum audience of adults and children, transfer knowledge, stimulate the interest towards other sections of the museum while keeping a high level of scientific accuracy. An effort able to produce, also, a wealth of reusable 3D assets for a future crossmedia exploitation.

The video will be delivered to the museum in September 2018.

Technical information:

Blender 2.78 - 2.79

Rendered with Cycles render engine

PhotoScan Agisoft

CityEngine ESRI

CrowdMaster

ngPlant

Papagayo NG

Krita

the GIMP

Adobe creative suite

Blender Render Farm on 2.79

8 scenes for a total of 72 shots

60k h/core of rendering and counting!

Production crew

VALENTINA ZUCCHI - Museo delle Terre Nuove: Producer, scientific committee
ANTONELLA GUIDAZZOLI - Executive producer, project supervisor
GIOVANNI BELLAVIA - production manager, screenplay, direction, animatic, color layout, editing, final editing
DANIELE DE LUCA - Lead 3D artist and computer graphics team leader, animatic, lighting, compositing and VFX, scripting, 3D animation, photomodelling, photographic campaign, crowd simulations, lip sync
MARIA CHIARA LIGUORI - Assistant Director, project supervisor, 2D graphics, watercolours and drawings, photographic campaign, lip sync
GIANPAOLO FRAGALE - character animation
FRANCESCA DELLI PONTI - 3D modelling, procedural modelling, photomodelling
FEDERICA FARRONI - 3D modelling, photomodelling, crowd simulations
BEATRICE CHIAVARINI - 3D modelling, scripting
SILVANO IMBODEN - Blender Render Farm, technical pipeline supervisor
FRANCESCO DE RUVO - Storyboard, animatic
REBECCA VANNOZZI - Lip sync
MARCO PECCIARINI - Lip sync
AIR PIXEL - sound effects, live shootings, color correction, final editing
SINCRODUB srls - dubbing
BENEDETTA PILLA, FAUSTO FORTE - scientific committee
Special thanks to: LUCA GOVONI, ALESSANDRO MACCAFERRI, STEFANO PIZZAMIGLIO, ALESSANDRO MACCAFERRI, SIMONA CARACENI, NICHOLAS NOZZI, ROBERTO GORI, SILVIA MONFARDINI, PATRIZIA BENFENATI