HIGHRISE One Millionth Tower
One Millionth Tower is the latest chapter in the ongoing NFB documentary series HIGHRISE. It was meant to be a six minute animated short, illustrating how a crumbling housing project in suburban Toronto could be transformed with the input of forward-thinking planners, architects and residents.
But then things got complicated.
Six months of feverish production later, and One Millionth Tower launches at Mozilla Festival in London. Featured by wired.com as the world’s first webGL-based interactive doc, One Millionth Tower blends together such digital tools as video, 3D modelling and textures, animation, sound and particle effects, social media, and weather channels, to create a surprisingly analog world.
One Millionth Tower is a technological first: an interactive documentary built with open-source HTML5 and a Web-based Graphics Library (WebGL). Made for the contemporary browser, it places you in the three-dimensional world of a run-down highrise neighbourhood, where you can interact with the environment and see it re-imagined as a lively, flourishing community.
Helios handled the technical research and development, javascript programming, webGL implementation and art direction.
Go and explore One Millionth Tower
You can learn more about how this project was made here.
“The makers of One Millionth Tower reinvented the documentary format…
…as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.”
Angela Watercutter, wired.com
“Damned Cool”
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“Watch This: Here’s how you make a documentary only using HTML5 and webGL graphics”
Adrian Covert, Gizmodo
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