The following is a guest post by the Library of Congress 2023 Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren. As part of his residency, Warren will publish a toolkit to empower communities to create relational reconstructions of destroyed neighborhoods of color using 3D modeling methods and historic photographs. In the following post, Warren discusses creating atmospheric techniques in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist and designer Alicia Renee Ball.
When I first began virtually reconstructing Providence Chinatown from 1914, at the start of Seeing Lost Enclaves, I quickly understood that the evenly lit renderings of these historical scenes would not be enough to really give us the feeling of being there. The level of detail of the facades was pretty good, but the flat, fluorescent-like illumination just didn’t bring me back to the feeling of a place. My own strongest memories are… richer, more colorful, and honestly, less precise; memory blurs, it distorts, it’s of too-hot days and dimly lit streets. I was going to have to get away from a more architectural style and learn how to do lighting and atmospheric effects. To become a cinematographer–and to build some 3D rendering skills.