Sydney's Living Museum

Our work on the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney, Australia, was a joy in both design and technical originality. By incorporating advanced motion tracking across the entire museum, we were able to map out individual user locations in each space, and create stunning character animations and interactive living paintings catered to each individual. Special thanks to Crystal Law for her wonderful motion techniques and execution, as well as Jae Il Son for his amazing character animation work.

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Agency: Local Projects

Role: Motion Creative Oversight

Lead Motion and Technical: Crystal Law

Additional Motion: Jae Il Son

Some History

The Hyde Park Barracks was the administrative hub for Britain's transportation system and stood at the heart of a sprawling network of convict sites. Its role as an agent of colonial change and its impact on Aboriginal Australia are still felt today.

Convict's Colony

A projected panorama recreates the Sydney of 1815, where convicts made landfall after their journey. Here, a visitor's location is tracked and activates animated vignettes within the historical image, including depictions of convicts at work or at leisure, Aboriginal presence and trade, and other scenes across town.

Role

This gallery proved particularly difficult, in that we were heavily restricted on what creative liberties we could take with the very old original artwork, but also make it come alive at the same time. To address this, Crystal and I worked with talented designers and illustrators, such as Local Projects's own Anthony Roy and Charlotte van den Bosch to carefully recreate the elements of the painting to pixel-perfect accuracy, and cut out the pieces we needed to bring the characters to life. By bringing on Jae Il Son, an amazingly talented close friend and colleague of mine, we were able to animate hundreds of characters across the huge canvas so each could have its own bespoke and authentic motion. I oversaw the completion over this piece, from start to finish, with Crystal and Charlotte.

Sydney 1848

This panoramic view demonstrates the evolution of the Sydney Hyde Park region over only a few evolutions. By bringing together bespoke illustrations of the transformation of a short period of time, we highlighted the remarkable shift of cultural landscape and architecture in the area.

Role

Working closely with Crystal and Angelica Jang, we determined an effective system of handling extremely large and complex layers of lossless masked Photoshop files to function efficiently within After Effects over a proper render pipeline. I oversaw this process through to the project's installation.

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