To mark the opening of Hans Christian Andersen’s House, a new museum in the Danish city of Odense, we were tasked with creating a series of animated installations to celebrate the life and work of the author through a dark, experimental re-imagining of his most famous fairy tales.
The ambition was to create an ‘Andersenian Universe’, blurring reality with fantasy to conjure up a striking experience for museum goers.
Alongside director Noah Harris, we led a team of 20 VFX and 3D artists to create short films for 10 key museum exhibits, shooting a range of live action plates and puppetry – along with stop motion characters – subsequently compositing them into 3D scenes.
Our concept design and modelling allowed us to explore new ways of mixing live action and 3D media, resulting in truly unexpected visuals with an almost ‘hand made’ look and feel.
Inside H.C Andersen’s fantastical universe
We sculpted 3D creatures and characters in zBrush, before rigging and animating in Maya, and rendering everything in Arnold. Our environment builds were a mix of modelling based on archive photography and LIDAR scans from in and around the author’s home. The films themselves were designed specifically for the projection architecture of the museum – our challenge being to present each unique fairy tale in the most impactful way which meant some being projected onto voile films for a 3D Peppers Ghost effect. Others appear across shattered mirror glass or 10m walls of perspex rods.
Projected within the impressive museum space, designed by Kengo Kuma Associates, our films became truly immersive, experiential art pieces.
