This approach was initially designed to look like a history textbook brought to life. Timelines, infographics, paintings and photographs all brought together through camera movement, parallax, and subtle animation techniques. The production company and History Channel both liked the treatment but felt the need to inject more texture and age. We developed techniques and scripting to create volumetric distressing, dynamically placing appropriately sized textures in front of the camera regardless the pathing.

Each era of the presidents required different techniques. The farther back in history we went, the fewer assets we could pull from to tell those scenes individual stories. For those we would sometimes split apart and animate camera moves through paintings linking images together dynamically. In the more recent scenes we would have multiple photographs and sometimes even footage to work with.

Infographics were created using a combination of 2D and 3D techniques to illustrate our interpretation of the data. Each scene was analyzed and grouped together for production based on similarities in workflows to optimize efficiencies and calendar.