Red Elephant Story // ARRR

Inspiration

Maria Prymachenko one of the most Ukrainian folk art painter, who worked in the naïve art style. Picasso once said after visiting a Prymachenko exhibition in Paris, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.”

With this non-commercial project we would like to tell the truth to the world about events that should never have happened. One of the museums, which kept the paintings of the world-famous artist, was destroyed in the first days of the invasion of Ukraine.

What it does

We created a specific state machine to switch between project stages.
In our project we used mixed tracking — ground tracking + world tracking.
Project divided into two parts - elephant's slideshow projection and 3d tour via burned museum.
Our lens used remote assets.

How we built it

We are happy that in 3 weeks our small team was able to come up with an idea, collect eyewitness materials for the video, make 3d models and animations, restore photos for the room and recreate the museum's artefacts in 3d. Specially for this project we've drawn unique trident symbol "tryzub" which fits to stylistic of Maria Prymachenko's paintings.

Challenges we ran into

A small information about the museum has been saved, and the photos literally had to be collected from the parts. We have applied a three-stage enhancements of photo materials with neural networks, which we then used in our 3d-model of the destroyed museum room.

Interesting point, that our first project's iteration was rejected because a Russian bombing airplanes were shown in elephant's video. In fact, previous version was more dramatic and touchable. So we totally rebuilt the video to slideshow to be published.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are honored to support our country in different ways.

We collected different activities of Ukrainian artists around cultural heritage of Maria Prymachenko.

Our starting point was the authentic project with the handmade rugs which was initiated by Ukrainian volunteers. That is why our 3d elephant jumps out of the carpet at the start. link

In slideshow you can see photos of art and street objects, etc.

A song of singer Maryna Krut' "Lullaby" from the selection Eurovision contest 2023 link used at the the video

What we learned

Work with prefabs. Work in conditions of war and power outages (as one of our team member is in Ukraine now.). Projects optimization. Use multistage neural networks for input recovery. Data packaging and interaction of the visual component with the content and experience of augmented reality.

What's next for Red Elephant Story // ARRR

We would love to have more interactions and projects with the Snapchat teams. We are open to all communications for creating extremely qualified AR projects.