The Legend of Lutine

200 years ago, a ship with millions worth of gold disappeared into the depths of the sea. Most of her treasure is still unfound and with every attempt to salvage the gold, only the legend became richer.

The Legend of Lutine is a museum exposition I had the opportunity to direct at Colorbleed. With the amazing help from ‘Museum ‘t Behouden Huys Terschelling’, ‘Mr. Beam’, and of course the Colorbleed team, we created an experience to be fully immersed in. On this page, I’ll show some of process related work we did to create the experience. Because I directed the project, not all work is made myself. To give a complete impression of the project I also included work that other artists have made. For the full credits, please check the link at the bottom of this page.

Immersive Experience

We built an immersive experience to tell the story of how La Lutine mysteriously sank near the Dutch island and why her treasure is still left (almost) untouched until this day.

At ‘Museum ‘t Behouden Huys Terschelling’ the audience can dive into this mystery and experience the legend of Lutine for themselves.

Concept Set

To tell the story as immersive as possible, we designed a ‘replica’ of the interior of La Lutine. A 200-year-old decayed version. The shipwreck’s replica has a damaged hull giving the audience a peak inside the animated world we created.

Set Design

With immersive spatial audio and light effects creeping through the cracks of the wood we suggest something ominous might be lurking in the depths. Everything is connected to the story, so we really involve the audience in the full experience.

Immersive Design

For the immersive design, it was important to know how it would feel to actually experience it as an audience. Looking at the animation on a 2D screen really does not compare. To imitate that feeling of immersion we created the set design in VR and could make directional choices based on how the audience would actually experience it.

Character Art

For the face behind this catastrophe, we designed a young woman with a darker side to her. Radiating an ambiance no seaman could resist. By emphasizing her seducing beauty and mysterious atmospheric feel she lives up to the legend.

Art style and mood

Our pillars were very much based on capturing the mystery behind the legend with the use of strong moods. Creating a larger-than-life experience to depict what happened that evening, in an intimate way. An audience might feel like they were actually there when it happened.

We chose a highly stylized art style with tons of atmosphere that was still grounded in reality but gave us enough freedom to capture what we needed for the experience.

An intimate cabin, melancholic sea depths and a lustrous gold room turning in a captain’s nightmare. Breath in the mysterious haze that surrounds this legend.

Look Development

When making the painterly shaders of the environment, we first tried to get close to the mood we wanted by completely lighting and shading the scene. Then we would render an isolated light- and shadow version of the scene to be made painterly in Photoshop and paint over it to push the renders where we wanted them. After that process, we could build a shader that uses the light and dark renders as a projected base for the final lighting. This time with characters in the scene, and all the lighting and shadows reacting to the painterly base.