Vision Fountain’s Creative Director, Richard Jones, gave a lecture and workshop to students attending Immersive Heritage and Folklore Project at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism Media and Culture (JOMEC) last week.
The project is part of the Story Futures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Story-telling.
The workshop talked about the power of story-telling and his views on the importance of embedding, as deeply as possible, with the story you are trying to tell; be that with a community or a building and it’s stored archive.
Research, attention to detail and pounding the streets and hills to gather the audio and visual assets that tell the story is vital. Equally important is communicating with those who know the story; locals, family members, curators, historians and academics.
Richard cited Vision Fountain’s work with the British Motor Museum’s black-box immersive installation “The Car. The Future, Me”, Diffusion Festival’s “CoalFace” as well as “Last Voices of the Rhondda” with Rhondda Heritage Park as examples of embedding with communities to gather audio and visual assets.
The Virtual Reality Project with Rhondda Heritage Park, “Pwll Bach Cwm Rhondda” was used as an example of a fully immersive story telling project. Richard worked through the steps for creating the virtual drift mine; the 3D modelling of the mine, deep-dive research with curators at the Heritage Park, re-creating the museums’s collection as interactive 3D objects and using local coal-miners to recite the short films, thus ensuring local ownership and authenticity of the project. Richard ended with the importance of safe-guarding and user testing with the audience(s), as well as collating the user testing data collected. – ends