Overview

In the fall of 2024, we were approached by Oxigen agency at Emitter to collaborate on an immersive event at MINA (Museum of Immersive New Art) in Bucharest.
Strabag was celebrating 30 years of presence on the Romanian market, making the event significant for everyone involved.
As part of the project, Emitter was tasked with providing the audio-visual content for the two immersive rooms at MINA. Specifically, we were to create five full CGI videos that would highlight Strabag's commitment to building responsibly for future generations.

My role

For this project, my tasks were to imagine, build, animate, and deliver six 2:30-minute videos, each representing one of the six projections of the new media hall at MINA.

About Future Building Site

For this video the goal was to craft an immersive 2.5 minutes, 360° experience, that would capture the interior of a construction site in the heart of a city, while also hinting at future technologies such as 3D printers, drones, and robots.

Technical Details

The prjection space is 36.60m x 11.16m x 5.58m

Front/Back resolution : 1634px X 816px
Left/Right resolution : 5360px X 816px
Top/Bottom resolution : 4396px X 1342px

The Script

Following discussions with the team at Oxigen and their guidlines we concluded that the experience would unfold from the perspective of a person standing in a elevator platform the size of MINA's immersive room. This platform would ascend alongside a building under construction, animated in a BIM5D-like fashion, gradually reaching a higher level where futuristic technologies would come into view. The journey would then continue upwards, culminating with a view of solar panels against the backdrop of the city below.

Production
Steps

Animatic

This phase involved creating a video composed of stock photo collages to get a rough sense of the animation’s timing and flow.
The video speed was set to 5x to condense the timeline:

Environment Layout & Animation Draft

In this stage, I leverage my architectural background to design the cityscape and construction site. I used a low-poly asset pack from the Epic Games Marketplace to lay out the construction site and the surrounding city.
The animation of the elevator platform was created to simulate the perspective of the viewer and to ensure that obstructed parts of the scene didn’t require excessive detailing.
The 5D BIM-style animation of the building, was done using TyFlow and then exported to Unreal Engine via Alembic files.
This step is an advanced Animatic, speeded up to 5 times:

Environment Detail and Secondary Animation

At this stage, I began detailing the scene with high-poly meshes, textures, materials, and lighting. I also worked on the animations of vehicles, drones, robots, and other futuristic technologies.
To speed up the animation process I decided to do all the rigging and animation directly in Unreal.
The following video is an advanced Animatic, sped up 5 times:

On-site Testing

At this stage, we began testing all the animations at MINA, making adjustments as needed and retesting until the visuals were flawless.
We quickly realized that due to the nature of the 360-degree projection, the reflected light washed out the colors.
As a result, for the subsequent iterations, we experimented with much higher contrast and reduced brightness.
Additionally, the platform had to be opaque to prevent any sensation of movement beneath the viewer, to avoid causing dizziness.

Final Deliveries

The final deliverables consisted of six NotchLC-encoded MOV files corresponding to each projection screen (walls, ceiling, and floor).

Final Thoughts

This project was a challenge due to the tight timeline and the amount of work involved, but it was also a very rewarding experience. It was my first time working on a 360-degree projection, and using Unreal Engine is still relatively new to me (about 3 years of experience).