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N0va Media · Brooklyn & Bologna
Who We Are.
N0VA
media · bklyn
A documentary from inside the studio
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Beh1nd
the scenes
Ten years of building virtual reality in Brooklyn — the rigs, the green screens, the late nights, the people. [ add your intro copy ]
the reel ↓
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01
Red Hook, Brooklyn
The studio sits inside a Civil-War-era brick warehouse on the Erie Basin. The neighborhood around it has been a harbor, a hazard and a muse for four centuries.
the place ↴
360° · the loft · 4816 Beard Street
“Roode Hoek” — the Red Point
Dutch settlers named it in 1636 for the red clay soil and the hook of land bending into the harbor — one of the first corners of Brooklyn they mapped.
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The Red Hook
Stores
Stores
Beard St · Van Brunt · c. 1870s
The Beard Street Warehouses
In the 1860s, merchant William Beard carved the Erie Basin out of the harbor — an artificial port walled off with landfill and the stone ballast dropped by arriving ships. Along its edge rose a row of heavy brick stores to hold the grain, sugar and cargo moving through one of the busiest waterfronts in America.
Those buildings — the Red Hook Stores on Van Brunt Street — still stand. Their vaulted brick, iron shutters and arched windows are the bones of the studio today: the same stone walls behind every shoot.
Est. 1860s
Erie Basin
Landmark brick
Find us
Van Brunt St · Red Hook
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Inside the studio
ten years, frame by frame
auto-playing · hover or click to hold
More from the floor · hover to enlarge
360° from the roof — the harbor Red Hook wrote about
The Horror at Red Hook
H.P. Lovecraft set his 1925 tale in these very streets during his uneasy Brooklyn years — the brick warehouses and dark waterline standing in for dread. The Beard Street row (right) still faces the same harbor.
Last Exit & the Brooklyn Bridge
Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge both pulled their dockside drama from Red Hook’s longshoremen — the working harbor just past this rooftop.
First contact · a three-frame sequence
The First Time
the first time ↴
The other studio · sotto i portici
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Bologna
A frescoed room on Via Barberia — where N0va's design, motion and 3D work gets made, under four centuries of Bolognese brick and painted ceilings.
benvenuti ↓
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08
Bologna Design Studio
Across the Atlantic, a second room under the porticoes of Bologna — where the design, motion and 3D work takes shape, a few steps from Piazza Maggiore on Via Barberia.
l'altro studio ↴
Find us
Via Barberia 13 · Bologna
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Via Barberia 13
The Italian studio sits inside the old town's ring of porticoes — vaulted ceilings, tall windows and four centuries of brick, a short walk from the two towers and Piazza Maggiore.
Via Barberia 13
Bologna, Italia 40123
Bologna, Italia 40123
Design + motion
Sotto i portici
Emilia-Romagna
La vita in studio · everyday
In the Sala
plants, paint, caffè ↴
Headphones on, watercolours out — drawing the rooftops through the studio window.
360° · Bologna · one moving frame
Bologna in 360°
città e studio ↔
Dopo la pioggia · from the roof
After the rain
Real-time · Unreal Engine
Bologna, in engine
towers & sky ↴
In motion · always on
Bologna, in motion
tutto in movimento ↴
Immersion · after dark
In the headset
un altro mondo ↴
The experience · in VR
What they see
dentro il visore ↴
Mythology · Via Barberia 13
The well beneath the studio
Long before Bologna was Bologna, it was Felsina — an Etruscan city laid out on this same rise of clay some 2,500 years ago, its dead buried beneath carved stones just past the walls. The Romans renamed it Bononia; the porticoes and leaning towers came later. But the water never moved.
Dig anywhere in the old centre and you strike it — brick-lined wells and cisterns sunk through every century of the city at once. The old octagonal pozzo in the cloister, a few doors from the studio, has been drawn from for the better part of two millennia: Etruscan, then Roman, then medieval hands on the same cold rope.
N0va's Italian room sits on top of all of it, on Via Barberia — four floors of frescoed ceiling above the street, two thousand years of the city below. Every frame rendered here is drawn, in its way, from that same well.
2000 anni sotto i piedi ↴