The Observatory First Blog

Good afternoon all, and welcome to Ed and Melanie’s first blog. For me this really is the first time I’ve ever blogged anything – a ground breaking moment. So here goes…

We have just finished the first practical investigations of this stage of R&D at the Lyric. Its been great to get our teeth into The Observatory and as anticipated we have discovered more questions than we have found answers.

We’ve spent time investigating the narrative of the piece, questioning what sort of technology we need to realize it and most excitingly we’ve spent some time with two groups of young children exploring the affect that binaural sound recording has on them and taking them out on an exploratory adventure around Kings Mall and King St in Hammersmith.

Working with children
So – starting with the children’s workshops… It was amazing to see their reactions to the audio work we played them. Their eyes absolutely lit up. They looked around to see where the sound came from and made comments like “its like watching a 3d film”. So – that’s a relief. They find the sound world we want to create absorbing and immersive.

We then took each of the groups out to three areas of the shopping centre next to the Lyric and asked them to find three things: somewhere they could hide something, somewhere they felt safe and somewhere they thought could be a gateway into another world. This had mixed results – some of them came up with extremely imaginative responses and some were quite prosaic. However – it really helped us to see the world through their eyes – to see what interested them and what they all gravitated to. It revealed a number of recurring themes. Lots of them wanted to crack codes, lots of them were attracted to photobooths, lots of them found interesting nooks and crannies to hide / reveal things. Also – unexpectedly – one of the children’s parents worked in the shopping centre and took one group out into the back service area which has a great deal of potential.

Tomorrow we will be meeting the manager of the shopping centre.

Other creative collaborators
We started to look at what other creative input we’re going to need to make The Observatory and discussed physical and video design. At this point we’re not going to be working with a designer – We think that we should bring them onboard after this period of R&D but we do need to start working with video quite quickly. We began a conversation with Gemma Riggs, a fantastic film artist about creating the visual elements of the piece and we’ll be meeting up on Friday to talk through the project in more detail. Specifically how she can make us a unicorn…

The story (so far…)
Crucially, we’ve started to interegate the narrative of the piece – the kids we worked with were properly drawn in by the sound world but – to make it satisfying this needs to be about story – not just emotion or effect.

This is still very much the bones of the narrative but here goes…

There is another world parallel to our own. It is identical to ours in every way except one… the inhabitants of the other world have lost the power of their imaginations.

After a terrible storm a unicorn together with a few unlucky children, for now lets call them Rod, Jane and Freddy, were thrust into our world.

Unicorns are the providers of all imagination and with its absence, the people of the other world have become dull, lifeless and mechanical.

The unicorn is trapped in our world and is very frightened. As we all know, Unicorns are solitary creatures and live in the deep forest of the imagination. Our busy crowded world is anathema for the poor beast and it is desperate to return home.

The only way the other world can be made whole again is for the Unicorn to be returned and their imaginations restored.

The only people in our world who can see the Unicorn are young children and those with vivid enough imaginations. Not having as great a power as the unicorn, Rod Jane and Freddy can only be heard. They lead our real world children on their adventure, aiding them in the quest to lure the Unicorn back to The Observatory where they have developed a portal to return them all home.

The real and invisible children journey together in pursuit of the unicorn through the shopping centre and main shopping street and return to our meteorological event chamber (the observatory), where they must use the information gleaned from their quest to lure the Unicorn to them and conjure a storm that will send the Unicorn back to its own world.

Rod Jane and Freddy are propelled back into the other world with theUunicorn in a flurry of hooves and cries and wind. After they’ve gone, all is calm.

Our technical aims
Now that we’ve got a clearer idea of story – we also have a clearer idea of the technical elements we need to help us tell it.

So – here’s our revised shopping list!

We want to be able to trigger visual effects from the proximity of an audience member to a place

We want to create a Pepper’s ghost effect of a unicorn in either a corridor or a shop

We want to create a shadow projection of a unicorn as if we have just missed seeing it in daylight.

We want to create sound in a space which gets louder and evolves the closer you get to it and vice versa (on headphones). For example could we create a storm where the outside ring is light rain, then the rain gets heavier – we then encounter wind, then thunder, then the centre of it is there is calm.

We want to create a multi chapter audio track which skips to the right place triggered by the audience proximity to a specific place.

We want to find out what can we achieve with moving holograms.

Calling all experts…

That’s all for now, hope everyone is progressing well.

Cheers
Ed & Melanie