Estate 360° (Miami, Florida)
Estate 360° (2018) is an experimental interactive film made in collaboration with students and researchers at University of Miami, Fl. USA. It emerged from a relational site-specific performance developed by Scott Palmer and staged in a heritage site, The Deering Estate on Florida’s East coast in April 2017.
The performance, ESTATE, was made with students and staff from University of Miami’s Department of Theatre Arts working alongside professional writers taking part in the Miami-Dade Playwright Development Programme. It offered audiences a unique, night-time immersive experience in the grounds and buildings of the Deering Estate. Although filmed in daylight, the film captures some of the qualities of the original performance which has been translated into a theatrical experience via the smartphone screen. Estate 360° was filmed, developed and tested during the autumn 2017 by Kim Grinfeder, Stephen Di Benedetto, Scott Palmer and postgraduate researchers in Interactive Media.
This ‘immersive’ experience offers a digital simulacrum of the live performance in which the viewer navigates the environment as witnesses to the characters and their stories. Estate 360° raises key questions and new possibilities for exploring performance documentation; creating relational performance and designing audience experience using 360° film and interactive VR technologies and techniques.
This performance can be downloaded onto a smartphone here: Estate 360°
Although this can be viewed on a smartphone, the performance is designed and best experienced in 360° by placing the smartphone in a VR headset. Select the Google cardboard/dual image headset mode within the app. For best results use headphones.
Chapter pre-print available to download:
Palmer, S. (2018) ‘What Country, Friends, Is This?’ Using Immersive Theatre Practice to Inform the Design of Audience Experience in Estate 360°. In: Rouse, R, Koenitz, H and Haahr, M, (eds.) Interactive Storytelling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 11318. ICIDS 2018: 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, 05-08 Dec 2018, Dublin, Ireland. Springer , pp. 383-391. ISBN 978-3-030-04027-7 http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/138216/