The client. The Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, opening a permanent hall for the cog — a 14th-century Hanseatic cargo ship divers pulled out of the Elbe in 1962. The timbers have sat in a glass case for sixty years. Beautifully preserved, completely still.
The challenge. Make a twelve-metre wall do what the glass case can't: put the ship back in the water, load the cargo, sail it out of the harbour. In a museum, for visitors aged six to ninety, running all day every day on a loop that must never visibly end.
The approach. We worked from the museum's archaeological scans and two very patient historians who corrected our rope knots more than once — correctly, we now grudgingly admit; there are three ways to tie a shroud to a rail and we had chosen the one that only appears on Viking longships in bad paintings. The water simulation alone burned a month of render time. The final loop runs 5 minutes 18 seconds and syncs to a light score recorded on period instruments, played by musicians who asked us to render the strings "less shiny". Hearing a class of fourth-graders go completely silent at minute two remains our favourite review, ever.
- Runtime
- 5:18, seamless loop
- Deliverables
- 3×4K projection loop, sound design, sync hardware setup
- Status
- Still running — permanent hall, since Sept 2025