THE PRINCIPLE

Director: Katheryne Ktee Thomas
Production: Rick Delano
Year: 2013
Number of VFX shots done: 20 (9 minutes of full CG)
VFX Supervisor : Dominique Vidal
VFX Producer : Kristina Prilukova / Robert Schajer


“The Principle” documentary traces the understanding of Earth's location in the Universe during hundreds of years, explaining numerous scientific theories as well as latest discoveries. Our work consisted in illustrating the documentary with animations of scientists and their cosmic visions. With our animations, we tried to explain the past and more recent scientific ideas.

For most of the sequences, we applied the cut-out style to our animations, relying shots by camera movement. For each shot, we defined a graphic style matching with the relevant historical period, enabling us to travel within the Art history. Each style is the result of numerous iconographic researches, based on old photos, paintings, engravings, hieroglyphs, etc.

Despite the disparity of the graphic sources, we tried to keep a visual coherence through similar animation style, inspired by the particular humor of Terry Gilliam's animations in Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The CMB sequence represented for us a big technical challenge, as we needed to create a space-trip from the exterior of the observable Universe (13,8 billions light years) to the proximity of the Moon (one second light years), trying to preserve the scientifically correct distances. Of course, there's no any existing CG software enabling to manage such big distances (1023 km). The solution consisted in creating an exponential camera giving the impression of a constant zoom, which enabled us to cut the trajectory into several pieces and to assemble them to each other.