National Gallery - Hendrick Avercamp

It was a pleasure to return to the Protico shop for another season of content at the National Gallery London. This time the focus was on Hendrick Avercamp, the Dutch painter during the golden age of painting in the Netherlands. His works give a vivid depiction of sport and leisure in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century. Many of Avercamp's paintings feature people ice skating on frozen lakes capturing entertaining moments of leisure. Avercamp's work enjoyed great popularity and he sold his drawings, many of which were tinted with water-color, as finished pictures to be pasted into the albums of collectors.

Our brief was to bring life to these paintings through subtle digital animation whilst respecting the orginal content. We did this by animating elements of the painting. We decided to animate a blackbird, Ice skaters and the snow falling. The blackbird is animated flying through the scene and landing on the trees in the background. This was a 3D asset that we then applied a painting effect to blend it into the original works through compositing. The ice skaters were carefully extracted from the original works and overlaid in layers in front of the paiting. An animation rig was then applied to these characters and used to drive the subtle swaying movement. We also added a gentle wind effect to the clothes of these characters to give it an extra sense of realism. Finally we added a slow snowfall layer to the seasonal content.