Eusapia
A downloadable project
The Art Direction Project, was a collaboration between the Master and Bachelor students at KADK.The goal was for all students to try working as in a team with a formal structure on a 3D project. The students were tasked with setting up and managing a workflow and production pipeline within their team, and students were asked to volunteer for preferred development roles before the project started. Two separate project were created by five teams consisting of both bachelor and master students, both of which were based on the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, where students had to select a description of one of the cities to base their 3D project on.The projects were created in Unity, and the usage of online assets were permitted.
Eusapia, from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
No city is more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and flee care. And to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities. And, of these activities, it is their carefree moments that take first place: most of the corpses are seated around laden tables, or placed in dancing positions, or made to play little trumpets. But all the trades and professions of the living Eusapia are also at work below ground, or at least those that the living performed with more contentment than irritation: the clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his shop, places his parchment ear against an out-of-tune grandfather's clock; a barber, with dry brush, lathers the cheekbones of an actor learning his role, studying the script with hollow sockets; a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer.
To be sure, many of the living want a fate after death different from their lot in life: the necropolis is crowded with big-game hunters, mezzo-sopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, courtesans, generals - more than the living city ever contained.
The job of accompanying the dead down below and arranging them in the desired place is assigned to a confraternity of hooded brothers. No one else has access to the Eusapia of the dead and everything known about it has been learned from them.
They say that the same confraternity exists among the dead and that it never fails to lend a hand; the hooded brothers, after death, will perform the same job in the other Eusapia; rumour has it that some of them are already dead but continue going up and down. In any case, this confraternity's authority in the Eusapia of the living is vast.
They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims.
From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
Project 2 - Week 3 & 4
Group 5 members
Christoffer Stahlschmidt - Art Director
Linnea Ronnerberg - 3d Artist and Concept Artist
Johan Christiansen - Lead Artist and 3d Artist
Bertram Jensen - Tech Artist
Casper Øbro - 3d Artist
Rune Forchammer - Concept Artist