Giuliana the Whale

We worked at the intersection of research and image. In collaboration with the University of Sannio and Sapienza University of Rome, we acquired scientific and technical materials—papers, surveys, stratigraphic data, field photographs, datasets—and integrated them into a rigorous editorial and visual process. Together with the research teams, we conducted a preliminary study, defined the informational perimeter, and subsequently developed the writing, visualisation of content, and a frame-by-frame validation process.

The result is a short film that clearly reconstructs the habitat of the whale “Giuliana”. The film was presented at the National Conference of the Italian Geological Society and accompanied by a co-authored scientific publication. Not an aesthetic exercise, but a transfer of knowledge: the data remains intact, while the narrative makes it comprehensible and memorable for the scientific community, the media, and the wider public.

The video narrates the geological history of the Matera area from the Cretaceous period (80–85 million years ago) to the present day, seeking to answer the question: “How did a whale end up in Matera?”
Giuliana, the name given to the specimen, is a Blue Whale from the Early Pleistocene (a geological period spanning from 2.58 million to approximately 800 thousand years ago) and, with an estimated length of 26 metres, represents one of the largest fossil whale remains ever discovered worldwide.