Behind the Light: The Extraordinary Life of Luca Comerio consists of an applied game (or serious game) developed from an original idea of Cineteca Milano to promote and share with a younger audience its mission, its collections and Museum, with the aim to educate and let the players have fun through a series of challenges, puzzles and mini-games.
This interactive work provides the chance to experience first-hand the adventurous life of Luca Comerio (1878-1940), a famous Italian photographer, filmmaker and director pioneer of documentary cinema and film industry. He documented the First World War as a photojournalist, he experimented with all the most innovative shooting techniques, including Kinemacolor to reproduce colors and he has been a reckless and adventurous witness of History who met the greatest exponents of the early Twentieth Century. Cineteca Milano preserves a collection of its precious films that it has digitally restored, as a fundamental heritage of Italian cinema.
(RE-)DISCOVER CLASSIC CINEMA
Behind the Light: The Extraordinary Life of Luca Comerio is an exploration game narrating the story of Lidia, an undergraduate trainee researching on films restoration. Following her old family house clearance, she finds some of her grandfather’s personal belongings, who actually was the assistant of Comerio. The player will have the chance to get passionate about Lidia’s adventures, learning film restauration techniques through different mini-games, also discovering the historical personality of Luca Comerio.
The narration is developed through 6 chapters, each of them focused on a specific object among the belongings of Lidia’s grandfather and the connection with the life and works of Luca Comerio:
- Milan Great Expo – Expo 1906 in Milan and the Messina earthquake
- The Pioneer of Aviation – The meeting with the engineer Enrico Forlanini
- This is Africa! – Filming of the African colonies
- Silent but colorful – The invention of color in silent cinema
- The White War – At the front in the First World War
- The Dictator’s Gaze – The advent of fascism in Milan
In each chapter the player will face various mini-games (more and more difficult) focused on film restoration, allegorical simplifications of the restoration procedures actually carried out in the Cineteca Milano studios. The first is dedicated to the preparation stage for film restoration with the right calm and precision. The second is focused on the digitalization of films to complete the restoration, bringing the film back to the original one by Comerio.
Once the restoration process is completed, the player will be able to watch the restored footage and will have to find clues that will provide him hints to find the next object. The aim of the game is to find all the objects, reconstructing in this way the life of this great artist.
Narration based on the life of Luca Comerio and the reproduction of his works
Simulation of the tools actually used in the restoration of antique films
Faithful reconstruction of the original environments of Cineteca Milano entirely explorable
Developed with Unreal Engine as game engine
