History of Belje and Tikveš
Three centuries of an estate, told through old maps
A short animated film about the history of the Belje estate and Tikveš, told through historical maps, made entirely in React for the museum at Tikveš.
A short animated film for the Presentation and Education Centre Tikveš that follows the Belje estate in Baranja through three centuries, told through old maps of the estate.
What it covers
The film starts in 1698, when Emperor Leopold I granted the estate to Prince Eugene of Savoy: thirteen villages and more than 109,000 cadastral acres of fields, meadows, forests and vineyards. It goes on to the manor house Eugene built at Belje in 1707, its gardens, and the estate's later expansion.
Each chapter pairs a short text, set on aged paper, with a historical map. The map moves and zooms to the places the text describes, and areas fill in as the estate grows and changes hands.
It ends with the 1917 merger with the Darda estate, the Treaty of Trianon, and the Tikveš hunting lodge built for Archduke Friedrich at the end of the 19th century, the building the museum now stands in.
Why React
The content wasn't settled when we started, and it kept changing. In a traditional animation pipeline, every change means another round of rendering.
So we built the film as a React app, with our own pipeline to render it to video frame by frame.
Edits took minutes, animations were quick to write by hand and just as quick to rework, and we could render at whatever resolution the screen needed.
- React