Image above: National Theatre’s Wonder.land from its Immersive Storytelling Studio
IMRAN: I’d learn a lot by seeing your process. Taz and I were talking last night about how we might take some of that learning into VR and what a great fit it’d be to have you help craft some experiences with us. BTW, I’m pinching a 360º camera soon to have a play around with if you fancy trying anything out!
ALEX: 360 Camera sounds like fun!
IMRAN: Gonna be borrowing a Ricoh Theta 360º cam from the University next week if you fancy a play about with some ideas and experiments?
ZSOLT: Definitely! Have a few things I’d love to try out, to see if they’re possible/useful/weird
And so began a micro-collaboration between Freedom Studios, Mothership and ourselves, Carbon Imagineering, to collide theatre, film and synthetic digital realities.
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Last last year, we developed some concept VR and AR experiences with Tribe Arts, to see if we could use immersive technologies to help Tribe realise their goal of making theatre more “cinematic”. These concepts ranged from enhancing theatregoers’ experience with augmented reality narrative layers, to a series of virtual reality vignettes on the experiences of Indian troops in WW2.
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Though our work with Tribe didn’t move forward, we couldn’t stop imagining the possibilities for what we started to think of as Theatrical Reality.
This summer, I was fortunate enough to strike up a deep nerdcrush with Freedom’s Alex Chisholm and we convinced each other that I should join her company as a technologist-in-residence to explore those possibilities.
Alex invited me to observe rehearsals for her production of Tajinder Singh Hayer’s North Country, a decades-spanning post-apocalypic tale set in a future Bradford recovering from a plague that has wiped out most of humanity.
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Alex cleverly picked a scene towards the end of the play, where the three principle characters are passing judgement over an unseen character, “Railton”, being tried for murder.
We’d been thinking about the possibilities of world-building and how it enables you to take a story and reframe it from any point-of-view. So we shifted the story to put Railton at the centre, to make his point-of-view ourpoint-of-view.
Railton would now be a played by a chair with the camera fixed at eye level. Our three performers, would circle Railton keeping eye-contact with the camera whilst performing their dialogue, providing the audience with the perspective of a key character.
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360º stills of the cast and crew, preparing the “Railton” scene.
We managed to shoot the final three minute scene, representing two pages of dialogue, within a couple of takes. The actors (Natalie Davies, Philip Duguid-McQuillan and Kamal Kaan) adapted their physicality quickly to the presence of the camera, treating it as just another actor.
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Source: Medium