POLAND: Museum creates digital 3D film reconstruction of Warsaw in ruins in early 1945

Record ID: 722206

  • Title: POLAND: Museum creates digital 3D film reconstruction of Warsaw in ruins in early 1945
  • Date: 31st July 2010
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (Polish) 'CITY OF RUINS' PROJECT MANAGER MICHAL GRYN, SAYING: "The more elements in a scene, the more buildings, rubble, the more time is needed for the computer to process it. Here we have 7500 frames, one frame takes two hours to render. We had over a hundred of the most advanced computers rendering this film for two months."
  • Embargoed: 15th August 2010 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Poland
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: History
  • Reuters ID: LVADT7I93XJMWRZSXN7B4BJ413P8
  • Story Text: A unique 3D film will be shown to visitors of Poland's Warsaw Uprising museum to make them feel like they are flying over the ruins of the city after it was nearly levelled by German Nazi troops following a failed uprising in 1944.
    The film was made using historical images and records to create a very detailed model of the city as it was after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944. As the camera approaches the city, details of destroyed bridges and entire districts reduced to rubble emerge.
    This is meant to simulate the flight of an allied B-25 bomber, the same type that flew sorties with supplies for the fighting city during the Uprising.
    Jan Oldakowski, the director of the museum, explained that the film targets audience from abroad who often cannot imagine the extent to which Warsaw was damaged.
    "The film 'City of Ruins' was made because we couldn't use words and black and white photographs to describe what Warsaw looked like at the beginning of 1945. When we met guests from abroad, we felt that they don't understand. That they consider scenes from 'The Pianist' when the pianist Szpilman walks through destroyed Warsaw as a beautiful artistic metaphor, not reality," he said on Friday (July 30).
    Starting Sunday (August 1), the film will be shown to the public. The Uprising Museum documents the uprising and is a major draw for tourists and students from across the country, with around 500,000 visitors last year.
    Michal Gryn, from the Platige Image studio that made the film, said the film exceeds anything done in 3D animation so far.
    "This is a world-scale project because even the biggest Hollywood studios haven't done anything like this, haven't created a virtual city and filmed it in one shot. There have been dozens, probably hundreds of war movies with shots of a destroyed city, but those last at most a few dozen seconds," he said.
    Gryn first filmed modern day Warsaw from a helicopter and later filled the picture with detail from some 2,000 historic pictures, films and paintings from the museum archives. In this way he completed a picture of Warsaw, building by building, street by street.
    "The more elements in a scene, the more buildings, rubble, the more time is needed for the computer to process it. Here we have 7500 frames, one frame takes two hours to render. We had over a hundred of the most advanced computers rendering this film for two months," Gryn explained.
    The film has no voice over and only short on-screen texts at the beginning and end. One of them says that before the war, some 1,3 million people lived in Warsaw, at the beginning of the Uprising there were some 900,000, and just 1,000 amid the ruins in 1945.
    Warsaw was rebuilt after World War II by the new communist authorities, who in some places built monumental structures of Social Realism and apartment blocks where baroque and gothic structures of pre-War Warsaw once stood.
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