Direction by Smiling Wolf.
Motion Design by P+P
Production, Design & Brand Smiling Wolf.
Archive Photography Manchester Central
A century and a half, one very long screen
Archive photographs of Manchester Central, restored, recoloured and brought to life with
projection mapping, built for LED screens up to 33 times wider than they are tall.
The photo’s where projection mapped then rebuilt each as a 3D scene so the camera could move through. Most work was restoration: removing damage, reconstructing missing areas, and recolouring black-and-white photos so all eras read as one continuous story. The hardest part was format: photos framed for a normal shape don’t work on a narrow screen, so each scene had to be rebuilt for a slim strip.
To demonstrate the potential use of the screens to MCR clients, we vuilt bespoke animated loops utilising the screen dimensions with a touch of anamporphic 3D display.
What we did.
Motion Design & CG build/Historical Photo reconstruction
Behind the Scenes
Project mapping was split between Cinema 4D and Nuke. All animations were created in Cinema 4D using a variety of simulations. Photos were re‑coloured using Affinity. Due to the nature of the final output, some photographs had to be widened, with additional parts of the scene hand‑painted in.
