Barbican - Consciousness
The Barbican is Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue presenting a diverse range of art, music, theatre, dance, film and creative learning events. It is also home to the London Symphony Orchestra
The Brief
The Barbican approached us with a question. How do we tell a story on line? They were producing a one off event, entitled "Consciousness". An interactive performance lecture exploring the history of the brain, narrated by BBC Horizon presenter and Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy, featuring music by James Holden , visuals by One of us, and was to be held in the Barbican concert hall.
The Barbican wanted to know how they could represent such an event online in a way that really captured its essence, whilst displaying the core information and footage in a clear, concise and compelling way.
The Challenge
Although we had access to the script and background visuals, nobody knew exactly what the event would be like until it happened. Our planning had to be structured yet flexible. We were lucky enough to experience the "Consciousness" lecture first hand and came back to the studio bristling with excitement.
In a tight time frame, we were to create a beautiful online story that gave a coherent representation of this unique one off event. It had to be stunning yet functional, as it needed to deliver multiple videos to the user in a light manageable way. As the build was so rich in media we had to be conscious of page load size, and employed various techniques to optimise this.
The Result
Working closely with the Barbican online marketing department we created a beautiful immersive online experience. To keep things simple we chose to create one single page, using the "parallax technique" to create depth, perspective and movement.
The result is what looks to be a complex design but is in fact a very intuitive single page website, giving ease of navigation and allowing the viewer to effortlessly immerse themselves in the story. It's even responsive and degrades to a mobile view in a seamless and coherent way.
We enjoyed working on this project immensely and were honoured to be involved with such a innovative cultural organisation as the Barbican.
This project was awarded a Best in Class Interactive Media Award (IMA) under the Charity/Non-Profit category, along with a Silver W3 Award under the Events category.