PROJECT PREVIEW
CAVE PAINTINGS
A thousand years of story telling are being brought to life at the Mogao Caves Tourist Center in Dunhuang, China. The creators, Silkroading’s Chen Jianjun and Sky-Skan’s Steve Savage, tell Kathleen Whyman how they’re taking audiences virtually into the caves
A
t a religious and cultural cross- roads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China, lie the Mogao Caves – a system of 492 temples spanning 2km south-
east of the centre of Dunhuang. Showcasing Buddhist art created over a
period of 1,000 years, the paintings tell the stories of merchants, travellers, governors and kings and queens – a historic ‘who’s who’ – while highlighting the breadth of art that was happening a millennium ago. The caves are a famous historic and
cultural destination, and a UNESCO World Heritage site, and receive 6,000 visitors a day in the peak summer time, many of whom have travelled vast distances. But, to protect the wall paintings, visits have to be restricted – the heat and humidity that peo- ple naturally create destroys the delicate artwork – and lighting is by torch only. As a result, the beautiful images are hard to see and are witnessed by relatively few.
However, this is soon to change. Thanks
to the combined efforts of the Dunhuang Academy, award-winning documentary director and CEO of Silkroading Jianjun Chen and Sky-Skan’s president Steve Savage, the paintings are being repro- duced in a life-size fulldome fi lm. Designed to accompany a large scale
theatre pre-show detailing the history of the caves, the experience will launch at the new Mogao Caves Tourist Center in 2012. Currently being built, the new centre will allow visitors to see the historic art in all its glorious detail for the fi rst time.
PRESERVATION The idea for the centre, and the accompa- nying Dunhuang Research Institute, fi rst took shape in 2003 when the Dunhuang Academy requested a meeting to discuss ways of preserving this national treasure of great historic signifi cance. Senior mem- bers of the government of the People’s
Republic of China were invited to attend the meeting, as was Silkroading’s Chen, who sug- gested that the caves would be best preserved digitally and pre- sented in a dome show. “At that time no one in the meet- ing had seen a fulldome show,” Chen recalls. “And I’d never made a dome show! But everyone liked the idea of being able to see the inside of the caves in a digital dome and accepted the idea.” Silkroading was asked to take the fi rst steps towards making a dome show, which was to digitise the inside of a select number of caves.
PREPARATION Chen and his technical team started pho- tographing and laser scanning the caves in 3D, so they could reproduce them with a quality equal to being there. Trying to overlay high resolution photos onto scans
The stunning cave paintings are seen by relatively few, as people’s heat and humidity destroys the artwork
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AM 3 2011 ©cybertrek 2011
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