Showing and Telling in Brighton...

Relative Motion took part in Wired Sussex's "VR Show and Tell" event at The Fusebox, Brighton on Thursday. We were there to show and discuss our Shakespeare VR project with the excitingly passionate and diverse community of creative and technical minds in the area.    

Chris Lane introduced our team and the project, giving a very quick overview of our process and discoveries. There's a mini-summary of his presentation below. For the rest of the evening, our headsets were VERY thoroughly used as we shared our work! We met some super-interesting folk and we very much enjoyed all the discussions that ensued.

Our sincere thanks to Jasmin, Chris and Rosalie at The Fusebox for hosting us and this thriving community!
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INTRO

• Relative Motion - theatre company which turned its initiatives towards VR storytelling (recent change of tack)
• The core creative team are theatre makers: Chris, Andy, Chloe, Josh + Filippo
• As theatre makers we are spatial storytellers: we use bodies, spaces and stories to create moving experiences.  Essentially we believe that VR is a space, not a frame, and that, as spatial storytellers, we have a unique way of working in this new, digital performance space.

 
What we’re showing today…

• Shakespeare VR - Three scenes from three notable Shakespearean plays (KL, RJ, AYLI) that were designed/staged for a single audience member using the entirety of the 360 space. 
• In January of 2018 we were awarded funding from ACE Nat Lot Her. Fund to step change our careers into the realm of immersive, digital storytelling, and to look at the fusion of theatre and VR.  We partnered with the noted VR company, Visualise, who acted as our mentors/partners on the project.
• The way we chose to do this was to explore Shakespeare in VR.
• Why Shakespeare? He wrote plays for a round space with the audience in the middle (just like VR) and he knew how to place the audience within the text as conscience (soliloquy), voyeur (standard audience) or character (direct address/implicated in the story). We explored each of these audience perspectives in relation to the Single Audience Member (SAM) in scenes we captured for the development of our MVP.

 
What did we learn/discover?

• SAM - Named the camera based on actor comments about what/who this thing was in the scene with them.  We’ve found this naming to be an essential and easy way to remind actors and creative teams that they are working with a human being who is with us at the heart of the storytelling experience that they’re creating.  It also builds on the idea that successful performance is a two-way connection between actor and audience.
• Proxemics and the heightened intimacy of virtual space means that you can ‘smell the bull shit’ in performance (as one actor noted when sharing the story with himself).  Refining tech for working with actors in VR space 360 & CGI
• Theatre actors were essential so that we could work effectively with long single takes as no editing was done internally to any of the scenes and believable character embodiment and movement through the 360 arena was critical to the success of the storytelling.
• We focused only on single takes and worked with spatially captured audio, transitions tools, and actor/SAM proxemics as our principle storytelling tool kit.
• Also a host of technical and location based things that are essential but not particularly interesting for this setting
• Visual Capture: We captured all work with the GO Pro Fusion and a Google Jump, you’re seeing the GO PRO capture today. Stereoscopic did create technical issues re actor/audience proximity and lighting so it didn’t work as effectively for us as the Fusion. 
• Audio Capture was with a Senheiser Ambeo Mic and an F8 recorder.  Post prod. work in Reaper with FB 360 plug-ins.
• All work was processed in Premiere Pro.

 
What else are we up to?

• Creative XR applicants: pitching to create an MVP for the first full length teen fiction opera designed for VR using the Royal Opera House’s recently commissioned Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon and Gavin Higgins…  once again fusing a 400-year-old art form with 21st century tech.
• Investigating ways to work with Unicorn Theatre, the UK’s leading theatre for young audiences, to create a narrative VR experience based on a piece of their existing work. More info coming soon.
• In the process of securing the rights to a short story by a notable British writer that we will develop into a seven-minute piece that will be submitted to the VR categories at film festivals next year.
• We’re also developing relationships with some heritage organisations to see how we can bring their spaces and collections to life in dynamic ways with VR.
• For our own purposes we’re revisiting Shakespeare to see what more we can learn from the bard in VR…. As my Shakespeare teacher once said, "if you can do Shakespeare well, you can do anything!"... so we’re heeding this advice.
• We are also keen to discuss projects with any and all who think that our skill set might help them, their organisations, or their audiences experience more from VR.

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