A huge feature of immersive experiences is the intense sensory experience and different routes that participants can take through physical spaces – from the complex architecture of shaping narrative and agency to creating worlds with audience experience in mind, making this work is a multifaceted process for creatives and production. In this episode Dr Joanna Bucknall talks with Colin Nightingale and Hannah Price about the rewards and challenges they have experienced when creating immersive worlds and the burgeoning language that makers use to describe creating different types of audience journeys.
Our Guests:
Colin Nightingale is Co-Founder of A Right/Left Project and co-creator of Beyond The Road a sound and visual art installation/walk through album experience which premiered at Saatchi Gallery in 2019 before transferring to Seoul in 2021. Colin is a member of the core creative team at Punchdrunk for over 20 years and is currently Associate Creative Producer. Find Colin on Instagram and Linkedin
Hannah Price is an award winning director and creative director, working across theatre, immersive, VR, digital, and game performance directing. Hannah is the Creative Director of the Gunpowder Plot. Find Hannah on Instagram and Twitter
Hosted by Dr Joanna Bucknall and produced by Natalie Scott for the Immersive Experience Network’s, Knowledge Bank. Funded by Arts Council England.
Podcast Transcript
Joanna Bucknall
Welcome to the Immersive Experience Network’s Making Immersive podcast series, giving you the tools and insights into the making of all things immersive and interactive. I’m your host, Dr Joanna Bucknall. Over the course of this knowledge bank series, I’ll be having conversations with extraordinary creatives, production specialists, and makers, who shape this tantalizing sector and the worlds that draw us into this form. In this third episode of IEN’s Podcast, the discussion is going to focus upon the various structures that are used to marshal the audience’s roots through experiences.
I am joined by Colin Nightingale, who has been the associate creative producer for Punchdrunk and is now co-founder of A Right/Left Project, and Hannah Price who is an award-winning director and creative director. We’re going to be spending the next hour or so doing a deep dive into the nature of the various structures used to build audience experience. We’ll be comparing and contrasting different structural approaches such as linear, multitrack, single journey spaces for audience, and we’re also going to unfold the impacts of various modes on the creative process, the dramaturgy of telling immersive stories for audiences, and of course, the practicalities of using space in different ways to create immersive experiences. We are going to talk about the different languages and terms that makers are using to describe some of these approaches.
After all the different conversations that we’ve been having so far, it’s been really helpful just to get a sense of people’s backgrounds, how you ended up working in immersive interactive performance. Hannah, can I start with you? Just find out, how did you get into this?
Hannah Price
I think like most people, I had a slightly circuitous route. I started mainly in theatre. I trained at RADA and I did all the assistant directing that a lot of people do, West End and associate directing stuff all over the world, which was really amazing. I was very lucky. Then I also used to run a theatre company called Theatre Uncut, which is a very political-focused theatre company, which is also international. Both of those things put me in contact with a lot of new writing. I did a lot of development. Aside from that, I love technology and I really love games. I was doing quite a lot of directing of video games, particularly performance and some narrative work, and got very heavily into the technology behind that. Started to coalesce those two things and somehow managed to get into the immersive route through that. I definitely come from a theatre gaming background.
Joanna Bucknall
I think that’s quite a common route. There’s a lot of theatre training at the heart of things, even if that doesn’t look the case on the surface and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who works in this sector who doesn’t have an interest in either tabletop games, Laps, D&D, or comes from at least a game influence in some way. It’s quite interesting to hear that story very much. It’s the same as a lot of people’s roots really. Colin, how about you?
Colin Nightingale
Mine is definitely pretty random. The best way to describe stuff about my route into this. I gave up art when I was 13 because no one really explained to me it could be anything more than painting and drawing. I was okay at it but it wasn’t going to be something I was going to do with all my time. Headed off in a bit of a direction I ended up at university doing a very vocational management degree. When I was at university, I suddenly realized that I was actually massively into music. This is in the early 90s and I got very interested in DJ culture and the real true roots of DJ culture. It’s all before digital music. It’s like if you wanted to know about music, you had to hunt for it. It was a whole art form and it was a way of life.
I was just very obsessed in that world and that made me really realize how much I was interested in just creative stuff as a whole but I didn’t really come from any formal artistic training. My 20s were a mixture of me doing a lot of DJing and running parties with friends. I was always trying to take spaces and try and transform them into something and they weren’t always recognized venues. Sometimes we were taking over warehouse spaces doing things. I suppose I got into transforming space that way.
I also at the time was doing a job where I worked for an event management company but it specifically wasn’t about anything entertainment based. I used to help charities fundraise. I used to organize crazy things like parachute jumps but also used to do a lot of app sales. I used to have to constantly look at buildings and try and see the potential of a building, what it wasn’t designed for. I think a lot of that got me super curious about space and all of this just led to a point where I was just searching around in my 20s. I was running warehouse parties that I used to make hand-drawn maps that were a little bit wrong because I was playing around with people as they were coming to the party.
I wanted to … I was curious about how you could shift the energy of people. I was doing stuff like that and I was just very curious. One day, I would go to all sorts of unusual places and it used to be somewhere in Peckham, way before Peckham had turned into what it is now. It’s an amazing art space called Area10 that always amazing things happen there. Could go to any strange art festival that was on the fringes and one day through that journey, I went to Deaffest, which was an art festival and that’s how I fell into the world of Punchdrunk. At the beginning, I was falling into that world to try and do stuff with music and then I ended up falling down the rabbit hole of what turned into immersive theatre stuff.
Joanna Bucknall
That’s so interesting as well because, of course, parties in themselves are a liminal space, which is one of the essential ingredients for making this kind of work happen, and also the maps as well is that idea of already thinking about roots and audience and experience, I think, which is really interesting. That’s what we’re thinking about and focusing about in the conversation is this idea of audience journeys and the different structures and the different ways in which audiences might be activated or included. I wanted to ask you, what forms you think there are and what ones that you have used, what ones you would definitely avoid. Hannah, can I start with you?
Hannah Price
Well, it’s so funny when I got sent the questions, and I know this is something that we were maybe going to talk about a bit later but I was a bit like, what do those mean? I think we’re still at a point where all these forms are really, really developing, and people are finding new languages and people are working out how these things might function in different spaces. For me, I’ve done immersive, which is quite I don’t know if you would say it was static originally, which was immersive environments but with a particular focus. Then, obviously, Gunpowder is I think what you are calling Carousel but when we were making it we called Daisy Chain. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know if we made it up.
Joanna Bucknall
Well, the thing is, actually, there are these basic bones, I would say skeletons but everyone is calling them by different terms. I haven’t heard that term, which I think is really interesting, but they’re evolving out of practice. I think that’s why everyone’s finding a way to articulate that in terms of their own approach. This is why I think this conversation is important for sharing as well to start to be like, well, we’re calling these things. Is there a way that we can start to consolidate some of those things as well?
Hannah Price
I think Carousel is better. It actually describes it better.
Joanna Bucknall
I can’t even take credit for that. Les Enfants, that’s how they talk about the work in terms of a Carousel but other people call other things as well. Daisy Chain I think is interesting because that actually signals a kind of loop.
Hannah Price
I don’t know where it came from. We were just still using it to try to explain it because I think that most people, if you speak to somebody who doesn’t work in this get confused about it because there are people in all the spaces all the time.
Joanna Bucknall
All the time. Yes.
Hannah Price
I think Carousel explains that better. I’m going to steal that. Then free roam led where you want an audience to be in a particular space at a particular time but they go themselves. I guess that’s free roam. I was quite interested in myself that I was a bit like, what are these terms? I thought that was a really interesting thing for me to learn.
Joanna Bucknall
I think it’s because they’re coming out of direct practice. Their terms that are being used in a process at the moment rather than terms that audiences would remotely recognize, I think. I think a lot of people do refer to Punchdrunk’s work as Free Roam, potentially, but there’s also lots of other work that might be called Free Roam that doesn’t follow that model either.
Colin Nightingale
Yes. I was very similar to Hannah where I saw these words and I was like, what do these mean? Then I was slowly piecing it together in my head. Definitely, in shorthand that I’ve been around, Free Roam makes total sense, especially for those more shows in the Punchdrunk, that’s the way we talk about it. We also used to talk a lot about it being from the audience’s experience, something being fragmented, like the narrative being fragmented.
Also, with those shows, you’ve got the whole loop structure. There is part of the shows and for those who don’t understand what I’m meaning there is that a lot of those shows are three hours long but there’s three loops of one hour. Things repeat and because the audience are basically receiving information in this fragmented form, it’s a way that actually allows them to maybe piece together some form of narrative because otherwise, it will end up … because it’s really interesting, in the way all the performers and everybody running the show, everything’s linear and it’s all on a timeline, but obviously, that isn’t how someone experiences it. For them, it can feel totally nonlinear in the fact that it’s actually you’re seeing things out of order anyway.
One thing I was thinking about with terms and it’s maybe because I’m quite space-led in the way that I think about things and also with some of the work that I now do, I’m quite interested in one room versus multiple rooms because I’ve obviously had a huge amount of experience on creating these multiple room experiences, which come with certain challenges. I’m quite curious, and Stephen, who I work very closely with now are about how we can craft quite impactful experiences that are essentially going back into a black book studio. I think that’s definitely some terminology. One room versus multiple room or one space versus multiple space.
The Carousel term is actually really interesting. I think I’ve never heard that before. Sometimes when I’ve been involved in linear experiences and there’s going to be multiple groups of audiences on the same track, we quite often talk about it as essentially being on rails because something will come in place because of all the timing and the need for groups not to crash into each other. There’s a sense that the show is on rails and I think it’s more of if I hadn’t really thought about it from the idea of a term that would help explain that there’s people in every space.
Joanna Bucknall
Yes. There’s almost two sets of articulation going on. Like you said, when you’re actually managing and designing and delivering, the experience actually is on rails. That certain things have to happen and do happen in loops at certain times and at certain moments and actually, that’s quite linear in terms of delivering it. Of course, for an audience, it doesn’t unfold in that way at all.
Maybe there are two sets of almost a production technical language that actually describes how you deliver these things and then a different way that we articulate that with audiences. Then there’s also that game approach as well, Hannah, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about how that branching decision tree because that’s very common in game design, that definitely influences certain kinds of immersive.
Hannah Price
I’ve obviously worked on things that are, I guess, what we’re saying is multi-narrative or multi-choice for the audience but I think what you’re saying, Colin, and what I would say as well is that these things might feel like you’ve got a lot of choice and I guess that’s the game that we’re playing with the audience. In order for it to work as a production, everything has to fit are certain times and everything has to be to a certain extent, given parameters in order to make everybody move in the way that they’re supposed to move. I think audience flow in anything I’ve ever worked on is a massive consideration that obviously is totally different from any other art form. It’s very different from theatre. It’s very different from anything else really.
I was doing a thing called the Museum of Shakespeare, which will be launched in a couple of years and that’s got more of a museum thing but you still got to be there going, where are people going to be and how are we going to move them and what are they doing and what are the things that are happening in each of those spaces in terms of lies and sound? When I’ve done something that’s approached that multi-narrative or branching side, it’s got the same consideration.
Joanna Bucknall
There’s multiple factors that influence on the structure because it’s never just that creative or even narratively driven. It’s exactly what you’re saying is that says that pragmatic practical level of we need certain people to be in certain places at certain times and not just audience but performers as well, but also then knowing we need a certain amount of numbers through in order to make this wash its face as well. Then also, we have a time limit too. There’s a lot of things that you don’t get in other forms to have to think about. It’s not just a case of going, yes, I’m going to do Carousel and I’m going to choose this structure. All of these things I think peg into how you design that. Do you think so, Colin?
Colin Nightingale
I think, at times, I’ve been fortunate that I’ve worked on some projects that have come from a really artistic place that haven’t necessarily had the commercial pressures on them that other times are at the heart of a production. If you’re fortunate and you can end up in those very pure places of creating, then really, the conversation is all about what is it you’re trying to create, and therefore, what is the format that makes sense for it? In some of the work that I now make, which is a very sound led, within it, I don’t necessarily have some of the pressures of the considerations of the performers because a lot of these are actually performer-less and it’s all about the sound design. One project Stephen and myself made a few years ago, the root of the idea was about deconstructing music and rebuilding it across multiple spaces.
Instantly, we have to create it, it’s like it needs to have multiple rooms. That was non-negotiable in terms of everything about trying to get that project realized and made. Then it was just about trying to find a venue that could accommodate that shape and then how we carved into it. I suppose there are some things within the way we approach work, it’s like it’s second nature thinking about how the audience is going to flow around it. Also, there was a need here that audiences needed to flow and they needed to be able to return to spaces to understand that they were essentially in a piece of music.
We’d got the recording stems of a piece of music and then we scattered it across multiple rooms, and then they rebuilt. You’ve got the strings in one part of the space and you’ve got the drums in one little room somewhere. You’re only ever in one piece of music but it sounds different depending where you are. The whole point of it was that you moving through it, you’re essentially mixing the sound for yourself in the way that a recording engineer can sit there with all the faders so that you’re doing that physically. That was key to it and it was like it was always going to need 20 odd spaces, otherwise, we weren’t going to be able to create that experience.
I think that fortunately was something that was driven from a very pure place and the two times that project has existed, there’s never been any negotiation around that because it’s like, that’s what we’re making. I have been on the flip side of it where I have been in projects that are needing to hit certain numbers of people and then you really have to think so much about the format and how you’re going to get those numbers through, how you’re even going to process them, and I think sometimes the core creative idea can make all the decisions for you.
I’m trying to think of another example. In the work I’ve done in Punchdrunk, there was a project we did in Aldeburgh. It was a 55-minute linear experience around the streets of Aldeburgh and it was for one person at a time. It was on headphones and that project because it was going to have to have one audience after another, certain things come into play whereby it does have to be on rails. You end up with a load of parameters that you start working in and then a big bit of the creative is how you mask the structure that’s been put on it.
It feels like a very fluid experience. There was a lot of things out of our control because people were literally walking around the streets and we had to think in how the sound design was created even to set a tempo, to set pace for the whole thing, but very early on in that process, it was like, this is linear. Every single person is going to get the same narrative and they move in a particular way, which is obviously so different from what some people will associate with Punchdrunk in terms of the big mass shows where it’s scattered everywhere and everyone’s experience is totally unique. This was very different. It was the same but the random element was that we were working in a real town. It was about theatricalizing a town and how anyone that you walked past could have potentially been part of the experience.
Joanna Bucknall
You never know. That changes from moment to moment as well. Even though that linear process, everyone’s effectively doing the same thing because it’s reframing the everyday. With you, every day is different every day. You have that. Again, I think a lot of what we do and I was going to ask you about this is, it’s hard often to remove the mechanic from the shape or the structure of a journey because I think those things facilitate each other. Often, what we’re doing is hiding that and I wanted to ask you both about the relationship between mechanics and structures and the difference in those, and how we hide them from the audience. The way that we are thinking and functioning and moving audiences through is very different then to how that’s actually encountered.
Colin Nightingale
I think I have a particular mindset on this. I don’t think you can make a truly successful piece of experiential work if there isn’t a really joined-up conversation between the practical and creative. I don’t know how you separate the two things. Over the years, I’ve felt like a huge part of what I bring into a process when I’m working on something is I have this ability to think very practical, and quite liked the challenge of understanding all the parameters of the health and safety staff. Just learn all that because then we need to fold that in to try and make something meaningful. I don’t want all of that to be layered on afterward and I love sitting in the middle of it all trying to help everybody craft something meaningful for an audience.
Hannah Price
I don’t really think they can be separate. You have to work so closely with ops, for example, to know what you’re doing with the people in the space and you have to work so closely with the rest of your team and your makers and all the practical side of it that it becomes second nature and you can’t really … I personally feel like I’m also super practical and spend a lot of time making sure I understand all those processes. I think quite a lot of the time when I’ve done stuff, I’ve been given quite a lot of parameters, even down to, we want three pieces of VR or whatever it is, or we want to use this type of technology because our company believes in that.
I think in that sense, it’s quite often about making sure you’re not letting those technical considerations get in the way of the storytelling, and then selecting the right things to make the story better and better and make sure the audience is getting what you think they need. Years ago, I was working on something, a theatre director I was working with called Josie Rock, she said, “You need to tell your actors what they’re in.” I think that’s a little bit like what we’re seeing from a maker’s perspective.
Once you’ve decided what you’re making and then you get everybody to work to the same thing, then those considerations of like, oh, we absolutely need to get the audience out of the room by nine minutes, 40 seconds, like become part of the conversation you’re having with the writers and everyone. We’re going to have a sound effect at 9:26 that’s going to alert this actor and if it runs over, we’ve got this much space, and then you do these six things, and they become part of the internalized storytelling. Otherwise, you do get in a mess. Where I know I’ve personally not achieved those things, you can really feel it. Everyone can feel it because the whole environmental feeling and the emotion you’re trying to create just collapses into a mess.
Joanna Bucknall
Is it difficult? Obviously, you’ve got integrated technology and moving between that life moment and the technological moments and also the hybridization of both of those, does that pose additional challenges in terms of the audience’s journey?
Hannah Price
Yes, it really does. Gunpowder is a really good example. It’s 1605. Why on earth am I putting on a headset? I hope that you don’t feel too jolted by it. We make some sense in the story of putting on a mask and stuff but I think it’s also about setting up at the beginning what expectations are so it’s very clear when you’re buying a ticket what people are coming in and the company layout reality very open and that’s what they do. I think, again, earlier, you were talking about what audience are expecting. I think if their expectation is I’m going to put on a headset at some point, you buy yourself a lot of leeway.
At one point, we were going to try and make all the VR headsets look a bit 1605 by putting stuff on them and it was just really, it just wasn’t great. I think it worked much better once we gave a bit of storytelling for something to be on your face, yes, but actually set the expectation earlier that you were going to have to make that cycle to cross yourself.
Colin Nightingale
I think there’s something with Gunpowder Plot. I don’t think it really hides the … It’s not trying to be totally authentic of that time period. I think it’s some clever bits that led to the tongue-in-cheekiness of it slightly. I think those things are really important. I went along to that and I really enjoyed it as an experience. There is no point in it. No one’s really trying to tell you that you’ve gone back in time in that way but you’ve got this really nice way that everything unfolds. I think like you’re saying is the expectation, it’s like, you know at the beginning that headset is going to get involved in some way. I don’t talk about it so much.
In the old days, in some of the work that I did, there was always a constant conversation around the management of expectation. Some of that was coming, in a lot of the early Punchdrunk stuff, the work was so unprecedented, and people didn’t really know what they were coming to and part of that was the game that was being played with the audiences. We were really trying to bring people down almost to the point where we’d want to think that this is a little bit of rubbish or being confused as to whether they were even in the right venue, or all of these things.
There was this rug pool when they finally find themselves in the world that’s been created and you were able to do that 15, 20 years ago because there wasn’t a lot of work out there and people didn’t even know how to describe it. Now, there is expectation and therefore, I think you do need to start laying it out to people in advance. I think it’s really smart in something like Gunpowder plot. People know that there’s going to be technology in it. Therefore, it’s not as jarring when the technology comes, whereas it would be if you’d said at the beginning, it’s like, we’re sending you back into an authentic recreation of London, 400 years ago. Then you’d be like, “Well, why am I now in a headset? This doesn’t make any sense.”
Joanna Bucknall
I think it is difficult with expectations. I remember the first time I went to a Punchdrunk show and I had no idea but now I think there are very heavy expectations associated with all the different tropes that come with that form and with that structure. Do you think it’s evolved in terms of the weight of those expectations in the form and the audience experience because audience behaviour has massively evolved to respond to the structure? What’s been the feelings behind the scene about though because the audience behaviour is so particular. There’s almost like a community now that behave in very particular ways to that form. I really wanted to get your thoughts on that.
Colin Nightingale
I think if people answered that question honestly, they’re around making the work. Unless you’re taking the work to a totally new territory that hasn’t experienced it, then there’s no point trying to think, yes, we’re playing. Some of those techniques we used to use in the past, they’re going to have the same impact. Also, there is now, as you’re pointing out, there is an audience that understands the rules of engagement and now they want to go so deep with it.
I think if there’s anything that’s gone on with the form is to make sure that there are so many layers in this thing, but it’s still impossible to get all the way through it and because there’s such a restless creativity within a lot of the team that work on shows like that, the sets are never static, it’s like the design team, which is always layering stuff in, if you’ve got a long-running show and you do have lots of repeat audience, whether it’s all intentionally done, things are shifting and changing and someone’s maybe thinking, “Oh. I never spotted that before,” but they don’t necessarily know whether they just missed it last time they went or whether there was actually a new thing that’s actually layered into the world.
Hannah Price
We found Gunpowder gets quite a lot of tourists as well and walk-ups. Sometimes people come in who know 100% what happens in immersive and then some people come in who don’t really know anything. Also, I think escape rooms and other scare attractions, there are some stuff similarities I would say in terms of environment. You go in and first room’s a dungeon. People have a set of behaviours that they think happen within those. When we were first making, it was a bit of a steep learning curve for me because we tell the audience stuff. Sometimes we would get people behaving in ways that were slightly….
Joanna Bucknall
Surprising?
Hannah Price
Yes. Like climbing things and stuff like that. We realized in that particular instance, it was one tiny line that we’d said can you get out or something very flippantly at one point, and it led people literally climbing stuff trying to get out. I know that sounds really obvious but it wasn’t obvious at first.
Joanna Bucknall
No. Of course, no.
Hannah Price
It was really funny to go like, oh, wasn’t funny, it was worrying because obviously, you have a duty of care. Once we figured out why that was happening, we were really specific for it not to happen. That was a bit of a thing for me to just remember that immersive is incredibly audience-focused obviously and you have to be open to audience response and audience testing, and it is movable. I’ve been lucky enough that every time I’ve made something like this, the company I’m working for has been very open to rejigging things from audience input and you have to be even plotting in points when you’re open that you go, “Okay, we’re going to change this up and change this up every three months check-ins.”
The other thing is, we had preempted that we were going to get some … because of where it is and because it’s attraction-ey, that we were going to get some people who maybe weren’t sure of how to behave. The first scene, we’ve structured it within the storytelling. I think sometimes, when you’re doing the storytelling, we know what we want to say in the story, we’ve got normal, everything you want to get across in the story, how many times you need to say people’s names but then we very quickly wanted to make sure people understood what they were coming … what was going to be their expectations of them.
In the first scene, we’ve got three what we call the step-down, in immersive, we had three, we did it, for everyone not watching me doing stuff with my hands, it was like a step-looking thing. I’m trying to draw a good diagram. We had the top level, which was like you come in, somebody speaks directly to you, okay, or I get it. That’s a bit weird. That’s one type of immersion. Then the second one is that there was more people entered the scenes. You were going to see scenes between bundles of people.
Then we had a bit, we purposely leave them alone just for a small period of time because that does happen on and off through it and hopefully, it gives you the idea that you could have to make decisions and be on your own. You’ve got a bit of agency. Then we have the last one when someone runs at you and goes, go that way. We try to pull them in through the first scene to understanding how we were going to be asking them to behave. Sort of works I think. Then later, we have the whole thing where people are climbing the set. We changed that up when we realized it. It was planned in.
Colin Nightingale
I think this is a really interesting point I was going to make in the onboarding and the offboarding and within something and I think as much as it’s about which format are you using, it’s also about how you set that format up for people. It’s really making me laugh with you. You’re just saying one word led to a particular behaviour. I was just doing a piece of R&D on a new project a couple of weeks ago and we ended up with a couple of school groups just coming through as some test audience and it was quite hurriedly put together. We hadn’t really gone through a really clear briefing of the key things to say and the person that was just warming these young people up before they went in and just getting them relaxed just made just a throw-away comment of, “Oh, when you get in there, you can do whatever you want.” That really wasn’t the right term and obviously, when you say that to a group of 16-year-olds.
What was actually interesting, it was actually their teacher was the one who took the mantle on that. He was like, “Well, I’ve said, we can do what we want in here.” It was suddenly touching everything and we’re creating a deeply meditative space where yes, it’s more, and I had to very quickly afterwards like, next time, you’re free to move around. It’s different. You’re not free to do what you want. It’s those little bits of dialogue can really impact how people then start behaving, but then you have to remember that only works if someone’s actually speaking the same language.
I learned the hard way when we did the Borough, that piece that was an audio piece in Aldeburgh I was telling you were just that we never really thought about the idea that someone might turn up to do that who really didn’t have a good grasp on English. A poor Japanese man. We did lose him in Aldeburgh for about half an hour but we did eventually get him back on track, because that whole piece was you’re getting a series of instructions that were embedded deeply into a narrative. They weren’t even heavily signposted. I’ve never had the opportunity to remount that project, but I know there’s even that in terms of how an audience started.
It was like, we’d have to have made it super clear again in the setup and the expectations of like, unfortunately, if you don’t really have a full grasp of English, you need to flag that to us because we could have solved it by just making sure someone was more chaperoning, whereas the way we were managing this across the town, we had people handing off. We had stewards/stage managers/stalkers. I don’t really know. That was spotting people and they were passing off. I remember this guy got, seemingly, the exchange happened but something happened in a split second and then he was gone. Then everyone was racing around Aldeburgh to try to get him back on track.
Joanna Bucknall
It is kind of still the Wild West. Audiences never quite know what to expect and we don’t really have any shared terminology yet to talk about the structures, to talk about these mechanics, but do you think then an integral part of this is having that rules of engagement built into its structure? Whatever that structure might be to Marshal it. From what you’ve both been saying, it seems that that’s very much bespoke.
Colin Nightingale
I think I echo a point that you were making in that you actually need to build in enough testing time with something because I don’t know whether you can always second guess the right way to do it but I think it needs to be. I really liked what you’re talking about, which is, I suppose in a little bit the way that people are onboarded within a computer game is that normally, you set up little challenges within. I’m actually not really a gamer. You’re showing people the way to learn how to do this.
Joanna Bucknall
Like a team made in a mansion. Before you enter the full game, you learn how to do all the moves and how the world works. Different companies do that in different ways as well because sometimes it’s appropriate to fully embed that in mould. Other times not and there’s certain stuff that has to be made really explicit right from the off. I’ve even been to things that have been quite challenging in terms of health and safety and risk involved and you were still inducted in-world rather than, it was a while ago now though. I suspect the landscape has probably changed a little bit and that might not be okay to do that to audiences now. Are there lots of things that come to bear on that induction and the rules of engagement and setting those things up? Is it just narrative-driven or is it those other things like health and safety risk as well?
Hannah Price
We’ve got an actual briefing room with a briefing video that has a particular set of things that say really specific stuff. I think the phrase we settled on was, interact, don’t interrupt, which is helpful because there’s a lot of information that comes at you because it’s 1605. I don’t think that would work for all things.
Joanna Bucknall
In terms of developing a structure in terms of developing an audience journey, do you both think you have a signature style or a signature ethos, or a kind of obsession that drives the way you design audience journey or audience experience?
Colin Nightingale
If I’m involved in a piece of work, whether it’s something that I’m actively leading the creation on or whether … because I jump between being an artist but also, I really love collaboration, I really love helping ideas come into fruition, sometimes I’m much more on as the older is quite a lot of the time in a very hands-on production management but I suppose, over recent years, a lot more as a creative producer. I think for me, if I’m working with another artist that’s essentially leading everything, a big question I’m always asking is, ultimately, what do we want the audience to leave this experience feeling or what is it they’re supposed to have learned, or what is it they’re supposed to take away?
If there was a signature, that’s literally the starting point I always have when I’m trying to ask people. I was very fortunate in the relationship that I had in the beginning of getting involved in Punchdrunk was that I actually walked through the door into one of the very first free-roaming masked experiences. I came out the other end and I knew instantly because it made sense with what I was playing around with in disorientating audiences but I was doing it out on the street trying to get people lost on the way to a party, but I wandered into what Felix was playing around with at that time, which was quite crude. It was a space that was just divided up by fabric as opposed to actual physical walls, but it was the sense of disorientation and the sense of you having to find your own way with it.
It meant when I went through that and then started to get involved in it, I never really had to have that conversation with Felix because it was like, I got what he was trying to do and the reason why we started working together was because he understood that I got it but also, I was excited about where it could go. If I start working with someone else, and I was on a call this week at the beginning of a process of trying to tease out an experience that someone wants to make, and as always, I’m just always like, what do we want? What does someone need to feel like? To me, it’s about trying. That can sometimes start to create some parameters, which then you then start to work within those parameters.
I think, as I said, a lot of the processes I’m in, I feel are quite artist-led but I think the same thing is true in a commercial setting. Quite often, the producers will be like, we’ve got this building, we’ve secured this building, we’ve got this content, we need to get X number of people through this. That starts to set the parameters and then that’s where you then start making the decisions as to, is this going to just be one large group of audience that are all going to go in around the same time and have been for a three hour period, which is obviously something more like the Punchdrunk format, or are you going to end up in a Carousel experience because it’s actually throughput and it’s like family audiences and you’re going to want it open for an extended period of time during the day? Then that starts setting the parameters that you then start building an experience in.
Joanna Bucknall
Context I think makes a big difference as well, because certainly, for Punchdrunk, it’s marketed as a theatre. As immersive theatre. Like you were saying, you have audiences who come who aren’t necessarily theatregoers who aren’t even necessarily and know anything about immersive. I’m assuming as well, some audiences who’ve never even worn a headset.
Hannah Price
Definitely. Yes.
Joanna Bucknall
That’s a slightly different context to manage in terms of audience induction.
Hannah Price
I think I would say my drive is wanting to make stuff as similar to yours very much about what is it I want someone to feel. What are we hoping to give as an experience to those people? Because I run Theatre Uncut, which I founded and then run, which was super political, it started as a protest group, I think I always in the back of my head have that way of thinking of, what are we trying to explore here? What are we trying to uncover? What are we trying to look at?
I know that sounds maybe a bit strange for something as, I guess, commercial as Gunpowder but I’m really proud of how when we were working on that, and other things I’ve done, I’ve done other immersive stuff but that one keeps coming up, we really tried to delve into the historical, political, socio mark that’s in that and I think that when I’m trying to find a number of a story is what I feel really excited by this game. Well, what were those people then feeling? What’s this political undertone? Then what are we trying to say with that? Why do we think that’s important and what are we trying to do with it? That definitely comes from spending years with loads of writers trying to dramaturgically help them create very political pieces of work.
I think that’s still in a lot of the stuff that I find interesting. I think it’s always exactly what you were saying, what does an audience want? If you’re going into Gunpowder Plot, what do you want? You want to be about to blow up Parliament. What are the big hits and moments that people really want to be involved with when you’re saying you can go into that world? I think that’s a lot of how all of us start. It’s like trying to go, what is your audience like? What do they think? When they leave, are they going to be like, “Oh, that was amazing. I got to be with Guy Fawkes.” Well, that’s a really good starting point. How do we extrapolate of that?
Joanna Bucknall
It feels like you’re advocating for almost your … because the audience is absent in the process. Until testing happens, which is one of the real troubling and challenging things but actually, it feels like what you’re both saying in some ways is that you stand in for the audience and then build out from there.
Colin Nightingale
I think, yes, for a successful experience, if someone’s not advocating for the audience within the process, then I’m not really sure what’s ultimately going to get made and I think sometimes I do go to, because I check out a lot of things because I’m just curious and I can always learn something, doesn’t matter what the pace is, I’ll always learn something, and sometimes you go and you can really feel where maybe the production has won the conversation quite a lot and a lot of choices have been made based on some very practical thinking.
Then the sweet spot is these ones where you go to where you just get lost in the experience and you don’t see any of the mechanics and you just walk away with being like, yes, that format felt right for that piece of work. I definitely was going to fight for the audience as someone standing in and someone fighting that cause. If you’re trying to create a show that’s about encouraging the audience to free roam about space and discover stuff, you don’t want to end up with lots of locked doors around because it can become hugely frustrating. If you may be in a building where that’s a reality and that’s what you’ve got to work with, then maybe then that needs to then fold into the narrative that’s being delivered to them that there’s actually a reason why there’s lots of locked doors around.
Sometimes you can go deeper within the construction of the show. I remember example of transferring Sleep No More to Shanghai. Just the building we inherited, we ended up with, the building had stairwells but at the point we were trying to settle on a design for the building, none of the production team was confident that we were going to be able to get the light levels in the stairwells that we really wanted. In a very Chinese way and because the building wasn’t … I always describe it as a building, it was an empty shell that we originally got, it was never a building, it had never been finished. The best way to understand that building was that anything that needs a nut or screw and I mean anything, didn’t exist in the building before the show was installed in that space.
What the team in China did was remarkable and in the time they did it, I still don’t understand how it happened but we had this whole thing about the stairwells and the solution because there was lots of construction work and it needs to be done was basically we put in new stairwells so that the existing stairwells could remain as back of house just fire exits that we didn’t need to get into a conversation with the fire officers about changing light levels in them and the stairwells the audiences used to actually traverse the space were actually purpose-built.
There was just a sense that because you always have to remember as well with this type of work, especially when you go into new territories, quite often, you’re always pushing the authorities and the licensing people and everybody that makes the decisions on the stuff in a place where they’re not comfortable and they don’t really know because there isn’t a set of rules to follow. I think we’re in a fortunate place in the UK now with the growth of this type of work, you’ve got local authorities who have given you the license that it’s not this strange thing anymore. They understand it.
Out there, it was an unknown. No one really knew where to look to for the advice. We ended up with these extra stairwells and my very roundabout story I’m trying to tell you is that because we had these doors, which had to be very visible because there are fire exits, the first test audience that we put in, and unfortunately, some of these doors were totally, they were adjacent to where we were throwing people out of elevators when they were first going in, the first thing they’re seeing is a door and it had a handle on it. Then the quick fix is within like, does it need to have a handle or can it actually just have just to push-play and their own special magnetic locks and stuff?
Just the simple act of removing the handle totally changes how that audience started exploring that space. This is all the bit where I go back into that I don’t really understand how in experienced design you can ever separate the practical and the creative, like the two things. It’s got to be a constant conversation that’s going on, and then especially the point you chuck the audience in, you need to be prepared, especially on these larger scale shows that are being set up to run for a long time, it’s like you need to tackle some of these things really quickly.
Otherwise, you’re just going to keep coming back with the same frustrations from audiences that it’s maybe not doing what you wanted it to do. Obviously, it’d be totally different if that was a true promenade piece and we were leading audience around the building but that shows setup from the intro that happens at the beginning of it. One of the lines of text that is used is fortune favors the bold and it is basically to go explore. You need to deliver on that.
Joanna Bucknall
I think you’re right and testing is so important as well. People don’t always respond in ways you think they might. Like you said, people trying to escape from one … and it can be as simple as a word or a phrase that you might throw away. Also, you can build that in exactly what you’re talking about. Building it into the space because space says a lot and space is often a character and the way in which an audience can encounter the space will also … when I went to Sleep No More in New York, what struck me as very different to any ones that I’d done here was the way we were ushered with light, which isn’t something I’d encountered here. The way that light disappeared and areas became dark was used as a way to move audiences into spaces, which I hadn’t encountered in that free-roam space until that point.
I was really acutely aware of it because I wasn’t used to that as a technique but it spoke volumes because the area is suddenly really dark. Of course, you can stay but it’s not particularly safe to do that because you can’t really see and so you move to the light. How much do you think human psychology and an understanding of behaviors is helpful in designing journey, or do you think you’ve just literally learned that as you’ve gone along?
Colin Nightingale
I would say within those shows, especially with something like Sleep No More New York, people always have to remember, there was about 10 years’ worth of iteration and learning that the company was doing. I personally must have stood in the dark stewarding shows, early shows. Probably done it for best part of a year or something of my life. I know I personally learned a huge amount about the psychology of people and how they move. I think there is quite a lot within that core group of people that have been around the creation of those shows and some of us have worked together on and off for 20 years. It’s like there’s a lot of shared understanding and we didn’t even need to talk about it. We know that if you do certain things, then you will be able to subtly influence the journey. It’s interesting that you felt that was the first time you’d really felt the light.
Joanna Bucknall
I felt and noticed it.
Colin Nightingale
I think maybe on that show, it was one of the first times maybe the resource was around and the time and maybe just everyone focused enough to be able to start crafting the light in that way to have to do it and some of this is quite theatrical in the way that it happens. It’s like it’s quiet … As you’re saying it, I’m in certain rooms. Currently in the speakeasy, after someone’s been murdered. Then just suddenly, and it’s weird. There’s a lot going on there because you’ve also obviously got in those shows, you’ve got the movement of the performers, which is causing some people to move and disperse quickly. There’s so much going on in the sound design as well.
Joanna Bucknall
I was only there for two days. I was terribly jet-lagged. It was a lot. Maybe my senses were very, very heightened to notice those things more but I noticed them in a way that I hadn’t noticed them before.
Colin Nightingale
You make an interesting point there about the headspace you were in when you experienced that show because I think that’s also something creators need to have in the back of their mind is that not everybody, either you need to do something to create a levelling. In a lot of the work I’ve been around, as much as they’re onboarding, quite often, there’s a conversation around decompression and it’s what you need to do beforehand to get an audience into the headspace to then engage with what you want. That could be, as I said at the beginning of this, a lot of work I’m currently making and I’m really interested in is actually about one room. Some of it is like what do you need to do to just get people comfortable and a little bit of the thing we’re playing around with maybe feel a bit uncomfortable about actually having to be in one space but there’s still a need, if you think you’re just going to open the door and just throw them straight in now, it’s the difference.
I think some of it comes from my DJ sensibility of the way that when I used to DJ, you’re always thinking about how you are crafting the whole evening of how somebody here experiences things. I always find it interesting if you go to a gig and someone hasn’t thought about the music that’s playing before a band plays and how that can impact things. Either it can be used, sometimes it can be if the band that’s playing is high impact anyway, that can sometimes be a nice juxtaposition with the uncuratedness of something and then this thing hits but some acts need support. They need the environment to be right for them to then have a comfortable performance space and safe place to play in. It’s like all of those things you need to be thinking about and making choices as to what you’re trying to do.
Again, what are you trying to do to the audience? What psychological game are you may be trying to play? I think in that thing, a show like Sleep No More, because it is an intense experience and you don’t know what’s going on, that’s why you have the bar as a place which people can go back to, to take a break. It’s a very considered thing that was learned over quite a number of shows was that some people aren’t going to walk or want to walk around for three hours. If you actually did make them do that, is this actually going to end up actually in some way negatively impacting the experience? Whereas actually, so much of that is all about choice. Therefore, give people the option to almost drop out of it for a period of time but stay in a supportive thematic world.
Joanna Bucknall
Hannah, how about you? Do you think it is just accumulated understanding of behaviors from working in this field for a while or is it something that you explicitly look at?
Hannah Price
It’s definitely something we explicitly look at. I think audiences are really clever and I think they consume a lot of media. I think there are certain things that are happening in the immersive that are mimicking other media that allow audiences to understand what to do in the first place. For example, we say feature-length, whatever, that gives people the understanding. Basically, they know it’s going to be some three-act structure, possibly a hero’s journey sort of thing because that’s a very well-trodden path of how stories are told and people consume that all the time.
Things like you were speeding up like you said, which we’ve done as well speed up the music. People have spent a lot of time understanding that drums come in and then this thing happens and that goes quicker and that they understand that there’s drama coming in or they need to pay attention or you suddenly drop it out and all those kinds of tropes that exist in mass media in general, but particularly if film and television and theatre, they already know. I think we can rely quite a lot on that mass knowledge, which is very helpful, and then have to layer in the additional stuff that comes with being so close to particularly actors and how we’re expecting them to behave in a different way.
People can be very nervy in headsets, for example, because they got their eyes covered and they feel vulnerable. There’s a certain kind of things you have to put in place to allow people to be safe. I’ve worked a lot with a really, really brilliant girl called Megan Stewart who is very brilliant at getting actors to be very aware of everything around them because you don’t know what someone’s coming in with and you don’t know how frightened they are or whether they’re feeling triggered by something in the space or whatever it is. To enlarge those circles of attention, pay quite a lot of attention while acting to audiences is a really difficult skill to learn. Those actors who can do that well are amazing. I think yes, trust the audience, they know a lot that we can use but also just be aware of the duty of care to both among the actors and make sure that we’re using all those things too for everyone’s benefit. I guess that’s, yes.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s just those little things. The audience already recognising can hang on to and everything. Even if you trouble loads of things and you challenge loads of things, as long as you’ve got a few recognizable tropes or behaviours or something that an audience can be like, I know that, I know what you want me to do here because I know this, that’s enough often to build out of, and then it’s like going right back to the beginning of our conversation, all the languages and all the terms and all the different things, we’re using a super spoke to our own processes that it’s difficult and I think that’s a lot of future work for us to do. I think maybe it’s because the more we share and the more we develop shared ways of talking about these things, I think the better our whole sector will be.
Colin Nightingale
Yes, it would definitely make life easier because also, I think, I obviously come from a period of time when there was only a small number of practitioners doing stuff and now there’s quite a lot and it does get difficult because you don’t know which bits of shorthand people know and then you have to bring them in. I will just say that I think we also need to accept that probably the nature of this type of work is there’s the commercial aspects that does designate certain parameters on it. Some of that does start to get standardized. As soon as you’re trying to do shows that may be 500 upwards, it’s either in a space that’s got a large footprint and it can hold that number of people within one show or you’re going down the Carousel route.
Those things I think are established and I think within those, especially I would imagine within what would be really helpful for a lot of the technicians that work in it because it must be a nightmare coming in and someone’s talking about fine detail that technicians need to know to how to program lighting for a show and everyone’s talking in a totally different set of shorthand. That I think would be brilliant figure standardized but I think we have to remember, there’s probably going to be a lot of restless energy where there’s people actually pushing and creating new things. You’ve got to create a new language.
At the moment, I am lost in this world where what we’re describing that we’re trying to make are basically deep listening experiences. Generally, I think people are understanding that terminology but I have definitely come across a couple of people who are like, “Well, I don’t know what that is.” It is literally like, we just want you to listen quite deeply and we need to create a container for it. Within that, we’re using a lot of emerging technology around spatial audio. It’s like you’re finding your feet with that, you’ve got issues that there’s no standardization. Even in terms of that technology, that’s going to have an impact and until you start to have agnostic tech, then you probably will keep going with people making their own vocabulary.
Hannah Price
Particularly in control systems that can be so tricky when there’s multiples. Just when you’re trying to run something on rails, the technology has to be standardised to a certain extent across the people that are working on it, which I absolutely agree with you can be really tricky and get you in a lot of difficulties you didn’t see coming.
Joanna Bucknall
We have a lot of different disciplines coming to bear on this kind of work. They will use often, and this is what I’m talking about as the same terms but actually, they have quite different meanings or contexts as well from those different disciplines. We’re maybe using even the same words but actually, slightly different things.
Hannah Price
Yes, and expectations and a lot of people coming into immersive, particularly for actors or quite a lot of makers, if they have come from theatre have certain expectations of how things might work or run. That can be quite tricky because quite a lot of immersive, particularly Carousel actually is really hard on actors. I think they have all my respect, the ones that we work with, they’re amazing but it’s physically harder, it’s longer running, it can be way more boring if you’re stuck in one room doing the same loop over and over and over. Also, you are much more exposed to an audience.
I think that’s how we’re speaking to people and how hopefully going forward people are getting training or getting exposure to understanding if they want to go into these types of things and they go for a job, and they know that it is Carousel, and they’re like, that’s not for me, or I love that, then that would be very helpful, and I think would really get the best out of people because I think it can be a bit of a shock for first-time actors coming to some immersive worlds. I suspect it’s the same with the people you work with from dance disciplines.
Joanna Bucknall
I guess dance usually is so separated from their audiences. It’s such a different way of being with our audience.
Colin Nightingale
Yes. I have just unwavering respect for any other performers.
Joanna Bucknall
100%. They are.
Colin Nightingale
Yes. but then it’s an interesting thing because when you chat to some of them, for the ones that love this type of work, it’s a double-edged sword because it’s like I can’t go back to the other type of work because it doesn’t give them the same feedback with the audiences.
Hannah Price
Some of the speed of thought of the actism is if we get a moment where things get held, on a few things I’ve done if something gets held and you’re just waiting because something’s gone wrong and you can’t start and they have to be there and hold the audience in the right idea and the right thought …
Joanna Bucknall
The right moment feeling.
Hannah Price
It’s amazing. It’s really amazing. I would absolutely die of embarrassment and say something ridiculous and they’re absolutely brilliant, so quick.
Colin Nightingale
Then I think what so much of this conversation was trying to get out was the things that you need to decide on whether you’ve got the right resources to do things. I think people, if you’re going to put performers in a situation where they’re doing something really repetitive, you really need the right general management around that group of individuals and you need to make sure people have the ability because if someone might be dealing with something really, really difficult, they might be able to do it very skillfully within it but it doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have necessarily been hugely frustrating. It’s like you got to make sure they’ve got the ability to release that somehow.
Then with dancers, I learned so much through being exposed to essentially working with a contemporary dance company on some level as well as Punchdrunk, ensemble Carousel, and I went from not necessarily really understanding why people were asking for physio to now if I get involved in a project like that, the first thing I’m trying to look at in budgets if someone’s asking me to consult as to whether they’ve got the right budget lines covered, it’s not even just dancers, it’s any of them, I’m like, where’s the physio? I’m like if there’s no physio line and you’re going to be asking people to work multiple days a week moving around space and stuff, think about it.
Therefore, it’s one thing setting up, duration of a run can become a big factor in the support system you need around things. Years ago, I pushed and we made this project happen called Tunnel 228, which was an eight-hour durational collision of art. It was art and performance. It was set up in a way where it was only ever going to be 15 days and it was like, we were able to ask if the performers in that it was manageable, whereas if I’d been trying to set that project up for a year, the size of the cast, we would have needed to have available, which has been so different and maybe we just needed so many more performers because they just couldn’t have kept doing what they were being asked to do.
Hannah Price
I think that’s a super good point. I think we have a very brilliant stage management team. Ruth Perry, who we both know is absolutely amazing. I think advocating quite early on if you are doing something that is Carousel or multitrack where the actors are being asked to move around a lot in the space and do multiple acting tracks and having someone on early who is able to take control of those because one, it completely affects the narrative, if you can’t move your actor from that room back to that room because you don’t have a backstage, for example, Gunpowder doesn’t have fully rounds and because it’s a listed building, we had to just go in for what was there, because of that, you have to have someone who’s there thinking literally about how long it takes to walk from where they might end up back to where they can have a break back to how they get outside to be able to have a proper lunch. That is really key.
You can’t ignore it or underestimate the massive psychological importance of making sure those people get the time and the space they need to be able to get outside and have a proper break. Then also, just add on things like 15 in and 15 out of costumes and all of that. If you can manage all of that, it’s a huge skill set and it’s a massive part of making one of those shows, and the actor track document because we have repeat characters is huge. It’s one of the most beautiful Excel spreadsheets I’ve ever seen in my life but it’s a huge part of how you have to make the show.
I think just making sure those people are in place really early on who can go, this is what the actor needs and this is where they need to go and this is how long it takes is just I think totally, completely, massively important and entirely what we were saying earlier about those practical considerations need to be brought right into the beginning if it’s building-based because otherwise, it’s impossible and you’ll just end up with the end saying, you can’t have that character there because otherwise, they’re not there.
Joanna Bucknall
Literary, they’re not there. I know that you are super busy and I’m so, so grateful for you coming and talking. The very last thing is just a tip or trick of all your experience, which is extraordinary between the two of you, what advice would you give to the people listening?
Colin Nightingale
I’ve got two things.
Joanna Bucknall
That’s fine.
Colin Nightingale
First one, if you don’t feel like you want to get into the conversation about the practical side of it, find someone that you can work with and you trust who you can build that relationship with because otherwise, I think, as a creator, you get really frustrated that your ideas aren’t actually going to happen. That’s the first thing. The second one, I think I said it earlier, is work out what the experience is you’re trying to create for your audience. Within that, if certain things are key to that being possible, learn when to walk away from a project if you’re not going to be able to do it that way, either because there isn’t the money for it or there isn’t the time or you’re just not at the right point in your career yet to be able to create that experience. Ask yourself that and be clear about it. As I said, if it’s not heading in that direction, just know, ultimately, you might be a bit frustrated with what you make.
Hannah Price
I think I said a thing earlier just about knowing what you’re in. That was advice, like I said, given to me a long time ago that’s always been very helpful. It sounds a bit maybe reductive as in, oh, we’re all in a comedy. It’s not quite what I mean. I mean know what you’re making from a practical point of view, yes, but know what the story is and what the aims of it are and what the feeling of it is, and if everybody knows, then it just cuts out a lot of those conversations and is a shorthand between the creatives but also with the actors and with the wider team. I did a full day in 1984 and we knew that we had a few keywords and we all knew them.
Then when I come and speak to the creative team, those parameters were already clear and everybody understood and even the way the actors were moving around the space, there was like shorthand that was just done and that was really key. I guess because I do a lot of start from zero, as in, we want to tell the story how, and it’s normally linear, stories are about change and I know that’s really obvious again, but if you’re looking for something that you want to talk about you want to tell, I used to say this to writers we’re working with a lot, what’s the thing in the way? What’s the change that needs to happen in the story, and what’s the thing that’s stopping it? Then that’s a nice easy way to just get a quick understanding of what the structure of your story is. Then you can move those two things along a timeline and just really get to the meat and the bones of the story really fast but just by understanding those two things.
Colin Nightingale
I think don’t be scared of failure. Do stuff.
Hannah Price
That’s a good one.
Colin Nightingale
Also, so much of this work is an iterative process and you need to do it to learn stuff. If it doesn’t go right, don’t lose heart but make sure you analyze what was wrong about it and try and put that and correct that for the next time you do it.
Hannah Price
I’m going to add one more. Now you’ve done it. I totally agree and I think it’s really worth saying that everybody on one of these timelines because all these productions are so different and, especially if they’re building bases, challenges that you didn’t know about, it’s always worth knowing that all of the teams are all on a new journey all doing stuff they’ve never done. That is great and really throws up loads of amazing opportunities but it also can be quite scary. It’s just to keep that central to the process and going, this is a process of making but it’s also a process of learning. Then hopefully, people like us can share all those things and not make many, many mistakes. The mistakes are good.
Joanna Bucknall
Let’s leave it with the poetics of failure. I think is a great place to finish. Thank you so much for being here. I know you’re both incredibly busy. You’ve given us so much incredible information. Thank you.
Hannah Price
Well, thank you. It’s been brilliant. Thanks so much.
Colin Nightingale
Thanks.
