Epiphany Cathedral

Baker Liturgical Art is a second-generation liturgical design, restoration, and renovation firm based in Plantsville, Connecticut, with cathedrals, basilicas, and parish churches across the United States in its portfolio. In September 2022 the firm reached out through our contact form with a request we do not see every week: a high-quality animation for a Catholic cathedral renovation in Venice, Florida.

A project like this answers to a different audience than a condo launch. There is no buyer to close. There is a bishop, a parish, and a congregation of donors, and a renovation of this scale moves forward when all of them can see what they are being asked to support. The still images the firm had were not enough to carry that weight. The design needed to be walked through, lit, and felt.

In a residential rendering, a marble can be beautiful. In a cathedral, it has to be correct. Every element in these images carries liturgical meaning and a real procurement order behind it, and the client, a firm whose trade is exactly these materials, would notice a wrong vein pattern at a glance. The work that had to be exactly right:

• 01The marble reredos and its large-scale mosaic of the Epiphany, with the gold toned down until the figures read clearly from the back pews.
• 02Sanctuary marble matched by name, a Pentelico floor rendered with fewer gray veins than the sample photo showed, and Botticino stair risers so each step reads.
• 03The corpus and the Mary and Joseph statues, built into the model from 3D scans supplied by the client.
• 04The rose window and stained glass, their reds corrected until they read as red rather than pink.
• 05A 75-foot bell tower checked against the drawings, and entry doors matched to a specific mahogany tone.

The schedule allowed no slack either. The commission was signed in late September against a mid-October target, several weeks shorter than our usual timeline for a 90-second film plus renderings, and we staffed weekend shifts to hold it. Then, days into production, Hurricane Ian put the cathedral's own city in its direct path. The project office in Venice closed, the client's timeline moved, and the extra weeks went into refinement instead of rush.

The design was still being adjusted while we rendered it, so the process leaned on conversation. Camera angles were chosen from white-model views, materials were confirmed against a mood board before rendering began, and each round of feedback ran through a shared review platform and a video call, with the studio and the Baker team drawing over the images together. Parapets were lowered, the ceiling changed to a wood grille system, and the design kept moving without the renderings falling behind it.

The film was built the same way. An animatic locked the camera moves and pacing first, aimed at something calmer and more spiritual than a sales flythrough: lifestyle footage of a priest opens the film, the exterior sequence settles on the memorial garden, the interior lingers on the altar, the rose window, and the baptismal font, and the closing frames blend real footage of a butterfly into rendered butterflies flying into the church.

In mid-2023 the renovation plan moved the memorial garden to a new position against the cathedral wall, and Baker came back to have the visuals brought up to date. We re-edited the film, refilming the garden sequence in its new location, updated the three renderings that showed it, and reworked two more garden views as a courtesy because the changes deserved better than a patch.

One revision in that round says more about this kind of work than any technical detail. The garden lawn had been rendered with bushes, flowers, and a walkway, and the client asked for all of it to be replaced with plain grass. Parishioners scatter the ashes of their loved ones there, and the ground had to be shown as what it is. Getting a cathedral right is not only a matter of marble.