Flight over time

About the project

The brief and the answer

The Cathedral asked us to compare today’s Kant Island with photographs of the old Kneiphof — and to do it from the air. We filmed the island from a drone in autumn so that every pass could be halted at exactly the angle from which an archival photograph had been taken a century earlier: at that moment the colour frame dissolves into an old photograph or postcard, and a few seconds later returns to the present day. Captions name what you are looking at and the year: Kneiphof Island 1942–1944, the Cathedral 1907, the Cathedral and the synagogue 1889–1914, the Holzbrücke with a view of the cathedral and the university 1937–1940, Königsberg University on the island, the view from Lomse Island 1935. The precision of those matches came from what was then a new capability of the DJI Mavic 2 Pro: the route was set by waypoints in space, so the camera repeated the same move take after take and it could be tuned to each archival photograph. Two weeks from the brief to the finished film.

• Aerial filming
• Directing
• Producing
• Editing
• Colour grading
• VFX

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