Sounding the last post…

Blimey, this has been something of a roller coaster!

Many apologies for the hiatus since our last blog.

So – since our last entry we have made some giant leaps as well as some tentative tiptoes forward.
Lets start with the leaps:

The Name
After much deliberation, The Observatory is now The Unicorn. Clean, memorable and intriguing.

Design
Back in September we spent and intensive period of work with Peter Arnold who came on board as our designer and Gemma Riggs our video designer. Over the course of a couple of weeks at the Lyric we developed some key elements of the piece. Gemma has come up with a fantastic technique for creating the shadows of Unicorns. Having chased a number of horses round fields she has painstakingly cut their shadows out, they look great – cast against a wall whilst trying to hide the edges of the projection you get a real sense that the beast has passed by. Peter, meanwhile, has been working with us to create the final illusion. We built a sort of magic trick / set / machine in which we actually made an image of Melanie (the unicorn was unavailable) walk towards the audience and disappear in a puff of smoke and then had the audience walk down a corridor where she had appeared. It wasn’t perfect but with some slight of hand and misdirection our trial audience were convinced. However – it was just the skeleton of the illusion. We only created the framework for it, the next stage is to work on the design skin of the idea.

The Tech
We have a final design for the NuRaves system. To cut a long story short, in its final incarnation we will have the adult carry a laptop in a bag. The laptop will be attached to UHF radio transmitter and a video transmitter. Each of the kids will have a set of radio receiving headphones. Around the route there will be video receivers and projectors. The system will be triggered in two ways – via sniffing out wifi locators associated with the projectors and the start of chapters in the audio sequence, and by a key connected to an RFID that the adult will carry.

And the tiptoes:

The Narrative
One of the first pieces of advice we had from Theatre Sandbox was to be careful not to let the piece develop faster than the technology so that we didn’t put ourselves in a position whereby the narrative exposed floors in the tech. We want this experience to be as seamless as possible and for the kids to feel that all of this is really happening in their world so it’s vital that the tech works smoothly. As a result we have been slowly edging forward with the narrative of the piece responding to our tech developments. It now feels like we need to spend some time concentrating on writing now that the tech parameters are clearer.

The Tech
Although we have a design that works, the execution of it has proved trickier than we anticipated. Dan Williams has made a working model for us but inevitably there is quite a lot of software tinkering for us to do together to make the platform stable.

What next
Our plan now is to concentrate spending some time writing now before entering a final tech period of R&D. Once Dan has worked his magic on the NuRaves system the only untested part of the equation will be the video projection.

And finally…
Having been sceptical about blogging as a tool for development I am a complete convert. It has been extremely useful to record our discoveries and developments over the last few months as well as opening up more conversations for us. So – I’m not sure whether this blog will remain open after the Theatre Sandbox project draws to a close but we will certainly carry on writing about the process… watch this (or possibly a different) space.