Brown Blog Films

There’s a scene in the script for 23 Degrees 5 Minutes that says:

A high angle looking down over College Green in Dublin. It is the turn of the century and the streets are full of men in top hats walking and horse drawn carriages.

Professor Orit (Voiceover)
If God ever spoke to us he would sing in Calculus

The camera moves down and towards the gates of the college.

It’s easy to write this but another thing entirely to get it looking good in 3D. First part of course is the storyboard which looked a little bit like this:

Storyboard image 01 - Trinity College

Trinity College - storyboard image 02

Then we went about getting as much reference material from the period as possible. There were a couple of books which were a great help for this such as Fr. Browne’s Dublin (Incidentally Father Browne was on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, but he was lucky enough to have only sailed from Liverpool and he got off the boat on its stopover at Cork before the ship took off on the final leg of its tragic journey!) and the Evening Herald’s ‘Images of Dublin’. Another great resource was website of the National Archive.

Picture from the National Archives showing Trinity from Dame Street

These give you a lot of great detail such as the types of vehicles on the streets at the time & the clothing worn, etc.
Here’s a look at some of the modelling work done by Derek Horan to bring this scene together.

First of all there are the cente pieces of the set such as the Bank on College Green:

College green bank - rough render 01

College Green Bank rough render 02

And then of course there is Trinity College itself:

Trinity College rough render 01

Trinity College Rough render 02

Trinity College rough render 03

Then we went about modelling some of the traffic such as trams and horse drawn carriages:

Tramcar

Tramcar 02

I think Derek did a particularly nice job on these Trams and paid a lot of attention to detail. Its mad to think that we already had our own ‘LUAS’ like public transport back in the day but unfortunately we didnt have the foresight to hang on to it… doh!

Various Horse drawn carriages

And then of course we had to model the various incidental objects such as lamposts, statues & generic buildings to flesh out the background in order to pull the whole thing together.

Street light

College Green statue

Random street buildings

Richard Keane then took all of these various objects and put them together playing with scale etc until I was happy that they all looked good in relation to each other, and then added in a cool moving camera. You will notice that we are merely sliding objects around in these scene to check for the relative movement. You will also notice that we haven’t added any human characters in there yet. Character design was still being finalised and we still aren’t sure exactly how we will figure out crowd movement. There is no animation on anything yet but it gives you an early idea of how the scene is going to look.

Check it out as a work in progress & I hope you like it: