Orval Abbey originated in a beautiful, natural valley which was formed by the retreat of the North Sea millions of years ago. As the legend goes, it was in this stunning surrounding an incident occurred where Italian countess Mathilda of Tuscany accidentally dropped her wedding ring in a natural water source. As a widow she was shocked by this loss and prayed to God for help as suddenly a trout fish appeared bearing her wedding ring. She yelled out that it truly was a “golden valley” (Val d’Or) and promptly decided to create a monastery in this magical location.

The history of Orval Abbey included many fortunate but also a lot of less fortunate eras, as the monastery had been demolished not once but twice and rebuilt both times. The story of Orval Abbey starts with the Cistercian monks building the first location next to the source, and goes all the way through several centuries of natural, economical and spiritual evolution. War, faith and beauty are all combined in this historical videomapping we created from A to Z in and about this beautiful and inspirational monastery.

Team Fisheye kicked things off with an intense and thorough historical research on Orval Abbey, in collaboration with scenography experts SIEN. We listed all important phases in the history of the monastery and started drafting moodboards and storyboards. Our designers went to work on producing a detailed 3D model of the abbey, and created a UVW map for all visuals. We physically 3D printed every building on the site and created a big valley using our 5-axis CNC machine. Once assembled we got started on testing our videomapping setup in our Fisheye studio and created a virtual 3D model to determine the exact position of each projection.

Our content team spent several weeks creating both 2D and 3D graphics, illustrations and audiovisual effects mainly using Gaea, Cinema4D, Adobe After Effects & Illustrator. All transitions and effects were baked as a black and white texture based on the UVW map. Next to that our technicians ensured a crisp videomapping and set up smooth soft- and hardware controls. As a multidisciplinary studio we always enjoy combining creativity with technical craftsmanship and this project proved to be just that. We’re particularly proud to present this rather uncommon combination of 2D & 3D graphics on a 3D scale model.