The Berlin Wall Has Been Rebuilt

For the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall ART+COM reconstructed parts of the border wall in Berlin and Saxony-Anhalt for the documentary film “Eingemauert, die Innerdeutsche Grenze” (Walled In, the Inner-German Border) using CINEMA 4D.

On behalf of Deutsche Welle a ten-minute tour through a stretch of the border along the Bernauer Street and the Hötensleben retion, as they were before the fall of the wall, was created with the help of CINEMA 4D.

The goal of this film was to demonstrate the chronology and function of these blockades. With the help of historians from the Berlin Wall Memorial Society and the Border Memorial Association Hötensleben detailed recreations of the border blockades – as they were in the 1980s as they divided East and West Germany – were built. Simon Häcker, artist at ART+COM, said, “The Deutsch Welle wanted a completely animated film with no real footage and rendered in HD (720p50). We used CINEMA 4D for all 3D elements. Since those involved in the project had already worked with and had gathered experience with VrayforC4D in the past, it was used for rendering. Since it quickly became apparent that the memory usage for rendering many of the highly complex scenes would require up to 7 GB, ART+COM converted its render farm to Windows XP 64-bit. Some of these complex scenes contained thousands of objects and millions of polygons. The CINEMA 4D MoGraph module soon proved to be invaluable and was used for everything from foliage and plants to the creation of Spanish horsemen. What worked especially well were the Layer Shaders in conjunction with point weighting. Liberal use of XRefs helped us handle complex models when work in real-time only became possible when layers were switched to solo mode.”

“All images were rendered in OpenEXR format, whereby moving and still elements were always rendered separately. After Effects was used for compositing, where the vehicle exhaust gases were also added. The depth channel proved to be somewhat more complex since it had to be rendered with a dark-to-light gradient centered on the camera in order to correctly render the alpha textures of the tree leaves. This channel was however indispensible due to the foggy look that was required.