JEFF WAYNE’S THE WAR OF THE WORLDS:THE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
THE MAKING OF VIDEO SERIES
Dotdotdot are a London-based immersive theatre production company, founded and led by serial entrepreneur and marketing boss Andrew McGuinness. Following on from the success of 2018’s Somnai, a feature-length audience-participation immersive experience based on sleep, dreams and nightmares (for which Flashbang did the videography documenting the show’s content), dotdotdot partnered with legendary composer Jeff Wayne to bring his 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds to a new generation through a two-hour immersive show, combining live actors interacting with participants, augmented reality, virtual reality, simulation, pyrotechnics and projection, all set to the soundtrack of the iconic album.
Flashbang were originally hired for videography, to create a ‘making of’ video series documenting the six months of planning, creating, building and rehearsing leading up to the show’s opening in May 2019, but it soon grew into much more than the videography project we were originally brought in for.
Here are the episodes we released monthly.
We take a closer look at how the CGI creates a sense of peril with director and writer Jack Pirie, and Jeff Wayne discusses composing the music for Forever Autumn and Thunder Child while people are experiencing a physical boat ride in VR across the Thames, and setting the music to immersive reality.
A look behind the scenes through green-screen sets, volumetric capture and the hair and makeup department, as lead cast members Tom Brittney and Anna-Marie Wayne discuss their characters and how they integrate them with the VR technology.
CTO Carl Guyenette discusses the intricate technologies used to create the immersive effects seen in the Immersive Experience.
We were able to film the unique volumetric capture technique, which comprises 300 cameras within a cylindrical green screen studio to create virtual avatars of the actors inside.
Composer Jeff Wayne and dotdotdot CEO Andrew McGuinness discuss the upcoming production and dotdotdot’s previous show, 2018’s Somnai.
For this we began our interviews…
Ahead of the production commencing, we were asked to pull together a teaser episode to announce the plan for the new Immersive Experience opening in London.
