When Batman meets Superman in comic genre is it called a crossover, we did a crossover with Winy Maas chair in the faculty the Why Factory in short "W?F" and the chair of Ulrich Knaack design of construction which is also running the Facade Research Group.
A semester before the team of the Why Factory under guidance of Ulf Hackauf developed the idea of a transforming city and within this research field, they imagined a material that is adaptive to all of your needs and will respond according to your demands in small, but also big scale.
They developed an inspiring video that showed the performance and possibilities what this material could or should be able to do. It directly reminds the team to the comics of Barbabapa in which a whole family of coloured blob shaped figures is contantly shaping its form to serve each others demand. So the name sticked to the project. Barbapapa material.
Beeing able to create everything on the screen leeds directly to the question, how to realize such a material for real. Known for our expertise to materialize ideas we were asked to join for a workshop with the Why Factory and Prof. Knaack from the chair design of construction.
The task for the Why Factory students was to pick a scene or feature of the initial video and try to materialize this with any material or technology that is currently available and shoot a video similar to the original render version. Its a touch call, but ant the end the students went very innovative and did a lot of experiments and material test to mimicry the different scenes. They also had to grab deeply into the "special effects" toolbox, but see yourself how cool the result is.
We will also report about the making of later, but first enjoy the two clips. First the original, second the one from the workshop.