Erik SCHMITZ
(Amsterdam City Archives, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Keywords: digital animation, Amsterdam, reconstruction
Abstract:
In 2013 the Amsterdam City Archives featured a traditional historical exhibition on the expension of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age, including the making of the famous canal zone, a Unesco World Heritage site. The old maps, building drawings and manuscripts on display were unique connections to the past, yet hardly intelligible in an multi-dimensional way to a general public. So it was decided to capture the dynamics and the excitement of a booming city in a digital flight animation. Starting from the archival documents and maps we cooperated with a digital engineer experienced in commercials and movie animations, thus staging important buildings as actors in a rapidly changing civic theatre.
The resulting 5.05 minute digital movie created a small sensation, hynothizing unaware visitors into a historical sensation. Uploaded on the cityarchives Youtube channel in March 2014 it has reached a 205.993 views up till now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvsHvfs3G1M). It was later followed by an animation on the ninetheenth century (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5mirkkexSE).
Working with a limited budget in time and money (3 months and 25.000 euro) production concentrated on storytelling rather than reconstructing the city and its surroundings in every possible detail. From a historians point of view this might pose serious objections on reliability, from a producers point of view we often wondered how much historical reality a general public can handle.
Visualizing the past, or rather modelling the past into images, has been common practice in all ages. Starting as a way to communicate power it has been adopted, first by antiquarians and later on by modern science, to communicate knowledge to a broad public. Finding their way into textbooks, these images have been very influentual in shaping an idea of the past of future generations, including archeologists and historians to be. The digital revolution has widely expanded our possibilities to visualize the past, but also poses new challenges.