A whale and a tempest
Sarah Ellis is Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In this case study on enabling innovation and enterprise Sarah talks about the process and value of working with tech companies, and the principles they apply for successful innovation across disciplines.
This case study was sourced by Culture24 as a resource for our conference, The art of leadership.
Greg Doran, the RSC’s Artistic Director, wanted to stage a contemporary production of The Tempest, inspired by the elaborate masques of the 1600s. They had always included the ‘cutting edge’ technology of the day, and Greg’s aim was to see if today’s digital resources could be used to enhance the masque that appears in The Tempest.
I had seen Intel’s extraordinary digital whale in a three-minute corporate video, so we approached Intel and The Imaginarium Studios to work with us, using Intel’s technology and The Imaginarium’s creative expertise to explore what might be possible.
Our challenge was to match the spontaneity of theatre with a real-time fluid digital environment to complement the narrative and give audiences a brilliant live experience.
A theatre first
For the first time ever, we created an animated character live on the RSC stage, using innovative Intel technology and performance capture from the Imaginarium studios. This was a theatre first for us and took more than two years in the making, from first research & development (R&D) to on-stage performance, in close partnership with our collaborators.
For the last 20 years, all graphics ‘rendering’ for digital environments has happened off line and in advance, so it was great to explore the technology to render cinematic environments in real time.
In practice, this meant Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel, appearing onstage wearing a sensor-equipped suit and performing Ariel’s movements. Data was rendered into the computer-generated character in real-time by Intel processors and fed through to video servers for projection, so Simon Russell Beale (playing Prospero) could talk directly to the Ariel avatar as well as to Mark. For the audience, it meant surprising and breathtaking effects on stage, creating a truly magical environment for the world of the play.
Lessons learnt
Our partnership showed us the vast potential for creative collaboration between tech companies and theatre. The research and development we have carried out together has taught us new skills and new ways of working.
It’s given us the foundations on which to build future digital experimentation in our own work and, hopefully, some useful lessons we are already sharing with the sector through showcases and events.
In particular, we identified three basic principles which we think need to be applied within cultural organisations for successful innovation across disciplines.
- Put people first – recognise and celebrate expertise, and support people to build their own skills and connect with others across teams and organisations
- Shift your culture – be OK with risk, flatten hierarchies, provide time and space to play, and make sure you measure the innovation you achieve as well as any financial return
- Develop transformational leaders – identify the evangelists and provide the mandate for those people so they can build enthusiasm across the partnership and unlock isolated expertise
Challenges
The biggest challenges were project and relationship management, rather than the technology itself. We needed to develop our people, processes and assets to address those core project management challenges and maintain the focus on the creative direction within a highly complex collaborative R&D project.
We started with the art and worked outwards from there, which meant we always had a clear picture of where we wanted to get to, even if we sometimes disagreed about the way to get there.
Impact
Not only was the stage production really successful, but we were able to extend our reach into completely unexpected territories and create really valuable foundations for future digital development. We brought a new audience to Shakespeare and were able to showcase the best of British creativity globally.
Over 136,000 people saw The Tempest production in Stratford and London; 27,000 students watched our free schools’ broadcast in their classrooms; and more than 95,000 saw our live cinema broadcast in 17 countries, including China for the first time.
Our social media reach included 6.3 million engagements and 9.8 million video views and we pushed the boundaries of digital technology on stage.
The project also demonstrated the possibilities of creative collaboration between tech companies and theatre. Our research and development has given us the foundations on which to build future digital experimentation and we have worked to share our knowledge across the sector through showcases and events.
We have all sorts of exciting experimentation in train with some key digital tech companies across the world. We’re engaging in R&D across virtual, augmented and mixed reality and always looking for ways to bring the very best live experience to our audiences and amplify that in new ways digitally. We will also continue to share our work and the lessons we’ve learnt with cultural partners all over the country.
Advice for colleagues
It’s about people not technology.
The support we had from Intel was fantastic and enabled us to go places we could not have gone on our own. Our collaboration with Intel and Imaginarium was key to the success of the whole project.
Resources
Designing the Tempest
The art of leadership
