Explainer video style · Renaissance oil

Renaissance painting style explainer videos

Sfumato, true perspective and blue distant hills. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Renaissance oil style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

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What it looks like, and when to use it.

Soft edges with no outlines, a dark room lit by one window, a checkerboard floor in true perspective and blue hills fading into the distance, all under the warm varnish and fine cracks of an old panel. The Renaissance oil look is drawn in code and gives science, invention and big ideas a patient, thoughtful feel.

Best for

Inventions and the history of science
Art history and culture
Thoughtful, big-idea topics

Try a brief like

“How Leonardo imagined a flying machine”
“How perspective drawing was invented”
“Why the Renaissance began in Florence”

The art direction the director follows.

Every style is a full art direction, not a filter: its own palette, type, motion and music. This is the brief the director works from for Renaissance oil.

Look: High Renaissance oil painting drawn in code, in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503): dark umber interiors lit by one window; soft sfumato edges with no outlines; form built by gradients; true linear perspective (checkerboard floors, receding architecture); blue-hazed aerial-perspective landscapes through arched windows (layered mountains, a winding silver river, cypresses); velvet and linen; a light shaft with floating dust; the surface of an old painting with canvas weave, faint brushwork, craquelure and a warm yellow glaze.
Motion: Calm and contemplative: the light shaft brightens and dims as clouds pass, dust drifts in the beam, birds and machines glide across the distant view, figures make small gestures and breathe, and the camera eases slowly along the perspective, if it moves at all.
Music: Renaissance chamber music: lute, viol consort, recorder, harpsichord, unhurried and elegant.
Type: Classical roman capitals (Cinzel or Cormorant Garamond) in warm cream or gold, small and centred, like an inscription on a stone ledge or a paper cartellino.