Symphony is a project fully supported by “La Caixa” Foundation”. As a Foundation, we focus on diverse areas and culture and education is one of them. We were thinking about how to use new technologies to spread one of the most important European cultural heritages, classical music, among all audiences. It became clear that VR was the best option because it would allow us to make visitors experience classical music as never before- travelling inside instruments or taking the position of a musician in an orchestra.
Once the technology had been chosen, we started working on storytelling. We came up with the idea that Symphony had to be a VR experience and an immersive audio-visual experience. The symphony begins with a 2D film projected onto a panoramic screen with a surround-sound system. In this wordless film, sound and music lead the story and submerge the audience into the discourse as a perfect prelude to the VR film.
We had to overcome some technological and artistic challenges because some of our visual ideas had never been done before with VR technology. For example, we wanted to film the VR live-action scenes in lower light and get very close to the musicians. To archive that, we used a prototype of the Meta One camera, nearly entirely 3D printed at the time.
Symphony’s unique value is in making the heritage of classical music available to everyone through a highly enjoyable experience using state-of-the-art technology.