A reality you can believe in
Current, Rising – the hyper-reality opera I produced at the Royal Opera House – had a very clear musical challenge baked into its brief. What exactly defines an opera? And can new technologies, such as virtual reality and 3D sound design enable us to design a new kind of opera – one still characterised by its epic nature at the heart of it, but expanded towards new musical horizons while experienced in a very intimate way?
There was a lot to play with on this front.
But when it came to designing the operatic world in virtual reality, we uncovered quite a few visual challenges when working with our VR studio partner Figment Productions. Why?
The libretto was written like a poem or a mediation – and as the main storytelling vehicle, the design world had to respond to the music and were it was taking the audience. It was much more akin to creating an immersive theatre show rather than:
a) a stage show or
b) a game in virtual reality (in which a soundtrack comes second).
What was going to be the best way of telling the story – through the music and the visual landscape, to create a truly ‘hyper-real’ experience?
The key was to truly immerse the audience in the world we were creating – and to truly encourage the brain to feel that it existed in another reality. Only then could we begin to craft the full story with music and design.
Below are five tools, tricks and tips that helped us achieve that immersion.
1. Abstract anything ‘human-like’
Do we introduce other characters in the experience and if so – what do they look like? We uncovered quite quickly that making humans look like humans is very hard in virtual reality. Why? Our uncompromising brains immediately look for reasons why they’re not real.
These were exactly the kind of thoughts and feelings we didn’t want our audience to have. Our goal was to immerse them in a state of make-believe – therefore, we decided to not have any other characters in the show, except for the audience members.
We portrayed them as avatars, that had a deliberately dreamlike, particle-like form quality to them – so as to not try and re-create reality, but rather, to suggest it.
Moral of the story? In virtual reality, seeing less humans makes the actual experience more human.
2. Make each audience member the story’s protagonist
As the story of Current, Rising was inspired by Ariel, the liberated spirit at the end of the Tempest, we struggled with how to portray her for a while. We considered volume and motion capture, we explored human-like forms in virtual reality and were not completely happy with them.
Once we decided not to include any human-like forms in the experience, the answer was simple – it was the voice, in the words of the libretto, sung beautifully by our soprano Anna Dennis that would become Ariel, in our audience’s ears.
This freed us from the need of having to portray Ariel visually and put us on an exciting path of how to communicate the key message to our audience – what it means to be free and that freedom comes with collective responsibility towards our community.
This message became particularly and accidentally poignant during lockdown – and the story was born, with each audience member at the heart of it, to experience Ariel as their inner voice, viscerally and intimately.
3. Defy the rules of physics and human logic – by design
The beauty of virtual reality is that limitations and dimensions of the real world disappear. Tricking the brain into experiencing seemingly new rules of physics was another great way to immerse our audiences.
For example, in an Escher-esque inspired ‘waiting room’, we wanted to communicate a feeling of being trapped in a space seemingly full of possibilities to escape. To achieve this, audiences stepped into a vast room full of staircases leading into impossible heights and depths, except, most of them didn’t make sense. We designed them as gravity-defying steps with no start or end in sight.
The environment pulled them into the world precisely because they tried to make sense of it and they couldn’t.
The same applied to the ‘Sea change’ scene. In the VR world, audiences stepped out onto the sea, seemingly floating above it until a cityscape appeared underneath the water surface and then reflected back onto the sky above them – which had a city growing out of it, towards the sea. At this point the sky and the sea were closing down onto themselves. This moment was further propelled by the music growing in tempo and intensity.
As an audience member in it – the feeling is that of a genuine threat, a fear of being crushed.
It was the rule defying, common-sense overriding design that was equally so real and visceral, that encouraged audiences to further immerse into the world.
3. Use the body’s natural response to height and depth
There are many real feelings and emotions that come up in virtual reality – simply because the brain is used to perceiving certain experiences in certain circumstances only.
For example, experiencing vertigo in real life requires you to stand somewhere very tall and look down. In virtual reality, this is simply a matter of designing an environment involving height and depth from your vantage point of view, but it doesn’t make the vertigo any less terrifying (if you have a fear of heights). Vertigo in virtual reality is real vertigo.
It’s finding visceral responses like this in the design of visual landscapes in virtual reality that we found particularly potent. They are by nature imbued with emotion, which we could then shape and change by changing the environment.
5. Experiment with perspective, distance and forms
Playing with a sense of perspective was another powerful storytelling tool. In virtual reality, you can shrink or enlarge your main protagonist simply by shrinking or enlarging the world around them – yet another impossible feat to achieve on stage.
An audience member in Current, Rising experienced the world explode and collapse, but not as you’d picture it in real life – what appeared as 3D concrete blocks at first became a graphic style ‘see-through’ world.
Distance was also an interesting tool to play with – and an important one to play with when it came to the avatars (other audience members). Even though in the real space, audiences were never more than 2m apart from each other, in virtual reality we separated them to what appeared miles across the sea. Sometimes they disappeared from each other, and other times they moved in closer.
These were important moments in a story about connection and community building – we were particularly pleased when one audience member felt ‘very alone when lost at sea’ and then felt very moved when re-connecting with other audience members later in another scene.
How audiences feel towards each other in an experience where they play the main protagonist is key and cannot be underestimated.
Have a key message – and why now?
Because there are so many rule-defying journeys to take audiences on in virtual reality, the danger in designing in VR is too many possibilities – and creating ‘just’ a fun experience.
Always have a clear mission and reasoning about why you are telling this story, in this moment, through this technology. We used virtual reality deliberately to explore how the ‘epic scale’ of traditional operas could be re-imagined with the possibilities of VR.
The story of Current, Rising was non-linear and told through a combination of libretto, the visual world, music and binaural sound. We designed it in such a way that we knew exactly what emotional response to land at every given point and why, so as to prepare audience members to receive the message at the end.
In the words of our librettist Melanie Wilson, we wanted audiences to “think of freedom as a process within our control, rather than a state we exist in. Current, Rising aims to kindle an intimate and epic moment of connection, to the tenets of our selves and our contemporary cultures, and ask how we might harness personal responsibility to join with others to re-think them.”
As a producer, it was very important to me that we still treated Current, Rising like an opera we needed to deliver to our audiences – albeit a newly composed, designed and packaged one, but an opera nevertheless – with a message and emotional impact to land.
Have you seen Current, Rising? Let me know what you thought in the comments.
If you want to learn more about what it was like to produce an opera in hyper-reality, listen to this Digital Works podcast episode, in which I chat to Ash Mann.
Sketches by Jo Scotcher, photo by Figment Productions.