2022

Two stills from the River succession films on screens: a green pond fringed with reeds and willows, and an aerial view of a river winding through forest.

River succession series

How a river remakes the land around it

A 3D film in six chapters about cyclic river succession in Kopački Rit, from a new meander to a flooded forest. Made for the museum at Tikveš.

Kopački Rit lies where the Drava meets the Danube, and its rivers never stay put. They bend, cut new channels and leave their old beds behind. What happens to those old beds, river succession, takes decades and is hard to picture from a diagram.

For the Presentation and Education Centre Tikveš, we made a 3D film that shows the whole cycle in about eight and a half minutes, in six chapters. It plays on a large screen in the museum, with subtitles in Croatian and English.

The cycle, chapter by chapter

  1. A new pond. The river meanders and changes course. In its old bed the flow slows down, and the water becomes clearer and warmer.
  2. Life moves in. Phytoplankton and water plants multiply. A pond that's still connected to the river gets fresh water even when levels are low.
  3. Organic matter. Plants and animals die and sink, and as they decompose they feed new growth.
Still from the film: reeds and water plants close up, at the water level of a pond.
  1. Sediment. River water slows down in the pond and drops what it carries. The bottom rises, and the pond grows shallower and warmer.
  2. Meadow. The pond dries out more and more often and turns into a wet meadow that floods whenever the river is high.
  3. Forest. Shrubs and trees take over, and the meadow becomes a flooded forest. By then the river has carved a new bed and a new pond, and the cycle starts again.
Still from the film: a wet meadow of tall grass in front of willows and dark forest.

How we made it

Every scene is a 3D landscape: terrain, water, vegetation and animals, modeled and animated in Cinema 4D and rendered in Unreal Engine. That lets the camera glide over the forest canopy in one shot and drop below the pond's surface, down to the plankton, in the next.

Still from the film: a green pond framed by overhanging leaves. Still from the film: a channel lined with reeds and willows, with fish in the clear water. Still from the film: a drying pond bed lit by a shaft of sunlight between trees. Still from the film: young trees of a flooded forest rising from tall grass under a cloudy sky.
Built with
  • Cinema 4D
  • Unreal Engine
Animation3D