Parish Church Architectural Models

Client: Christianity and Culture
Dates: Ongoing - due 2010

Overview
Heritage Technology has developed a close working relationship with the Christianity and Culture project at the University of York. The project was founded in 1999 to address the problems posed by a general lack of knowledge regarding Christian thought and practice on the understanding of western art, literature and architecture. Many people who have grown up without this knowledge, or have come from different faith communities, can struggle to engage with this broad-ranging culture. Christianity and Culture uses digital media to provide introductory guides to common Christian subjects - the current topic being the English parish church.

Approach
'The Story of the Church in England' is an interactive digital resource due to be released in 2010 on CD/DVD-ROM. It looks at religious, political, social and architectural aspects of the church in England, from its late/post-Roman beginnings, through Anglo-Saxon and Medieval developments, the Reformation and finally the modern-day.

An important element linking all of these periods is architecture. Heritage Technology was commissioned to create a series of 3D animations to illustrate the architectural development of a typical church. Both the exterior, presenting major structural developments, and interior, depicting changes in furnishing and decoration, were addressed.

The exterior animations, created as a set of linking movies that address different stylistic periods, are to be presented via an interface on the CD-ROM - allowing users to play them individually or back-to-back. Additional information, in the form of supporting text and images, will help users understand the changes shown and place them in context alongside real-world examples.

The interior models will be similarly presented, either via a panoramic or still-frame interface. Clickable hotspots will provide contextual information on specific features, while short animations will dynamically visualise the changes encountered between different stylistic periods.

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