The Douro region : two thousand years of history

Filmmaker and scenarist Eric Le Collen was commissioned to direct a series of ten short movies for the upcoming multimedia center Espaço Porto Cruz in Porto. For one of them, he bumped into the challenge of animating a story out of still images, which were the only kind of media available. For that matter we proposed the idea of entering the photographs, paintings or etchings, by transforming them into 3D scenes.

After a few tries using the various video or 3D softwares at our disposal, we came to the point that we needed our own tool to do the job.

We imagined and developed an application that allowed us to split and arrange the pictures in the 3D space, then to control a virtual camera in a smooth travel inside the image.

We ended up with a 4'32'' movie exploring about 15 images, with texts and voice-over in 4 languages (Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish). In addition to being an instructive movie, the result gives the fascinating ability to watch historical paintings and still photographs come back to life.