Two local creative talents, Emma Osman and Adam Dixon, have been recruited to work on StoryTrails, a unique immersive storytelling experience coming to Lincoln as part of UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a ground-breaking UK-wide celebration of creativity in 2022.
StoryTrails allows local people to experience their town in a completely new way through the magic of augmented and virtual reality. People will be able to use this new technology to travel back in time, experiencing untold local histories from Lincoln. These stories will be brought to life in the places where they happened, reanimating public spaces and creating a free, entertaining and playful family-friendly experience. StoryTrails will visit just 15 locations across the UK, including Lincoln on 30-31 July. Led by the National Centre for Immersive Storytelling: StoryFutures Academy, the StoryTrails project has recruited the best and brightest creative talent from the local area to showcase the stories of this community as part of the UK’s largest ever immersive storytelling project.
Emma Osman, who moved to Lincolnshire at the age of 7 and studied Performing Arts at Lincoln College, will be making an interactive immersive map of the city. She has workshopped Hibo Wardere’s memoir Cut, focusing around the theme of being a refugee in the UK. Emma believes Lincoln is already bursting with history, saying “The thing I love most about Lincoln is its architecture.” She went on to explain that “I’m excited to be working on the StoryTrails project because Lincoln has a rich history and present that I think could be fascinating to uncover.”
Joining Emma will be Adam Dixon, who has worked in the community sector in Lincoln and has been recruited to make an augmented reality story trail around the city. Adam has created the game News Flash, aimed at teaching children about the dangers of misinformation, and presents a podcast, These Flimsy Rituals, with his friends. He is proud of Lincoln’s “mix of old and new, the way that the city is layered on-top of itself,” is excited about “the opportunity to tell stories in a new and different way.”
Emma and Adam are part of a team of 50 emerging creative media practitioners who will participate in the StoryTrails project, telling the stories of 15 communities through state-of-the-art immersive technologies in new and surprising ways. These include 17 practitioners creating augmented reality (AR) story trails across city centres and 15 building immersive installations which will map the emotional geography of a location. In addition, nine creatives will develop the virtual reality (VR) experiences and nine will take on a professional placement in one of the StoryTrails partner organisations.
The practitioners will be working with unprecedented access to archive material from the BFI, national and regional film archives across the UK as well as the BBC, with the goal of reimagining the UK’s screen heritage for the future. Full training in immersive technologies, such as augmented reality and 3Dscanning, has been provided. They will be supported throughout their journey by experienced producers.
On 30-31 July audiences will be guided through an immersive tour of Lincoln as they explore stories across virtual and augmented reality and via a series of installations created by Emma and Adam.
Outside Lincoln’s Library on Free School Lane, participants will enter the virtual story portal to begin the StoryTrails experience, guided by a free mobile AR app and local performers. Using stunning AR experiences that remix the BFI and BBC archive, local people will experience history where it actually happened, revitalising the streets upon which they stand with new voices and untold stories of the past. Inside the library, participants will be immersed in a virtual map of their town that will be made up of 3D models and audio stories captured on location. They will also have the opportunity to explore further stories via bespoke virtual reality experiences.
Professor James Bennett, Director of StoryFutures and StoryTrails, said: “StoryTrails is a massively ambitious project as we travel across the UK to discover unknown, surprising and intriguing stories from local communities. We’re excited to work with local creative talent like Emma and Adam to uncover and bring these hidden histories to life, creating a new sense of belonging and immersing audiences in an amazing new way to see themselves, their communities, their towns and country.”
StoryTrails is led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling. The centre is at the forefront of training and up-skilling creative media professionals in the use of the next generation of storytelling tools. It is run by Royal Holloway, University of London and the National Film and Television School (NFTS). StoryFutures Academy wants to ensure that the UK’s creative industries are not only the best trained in the use of these game-changing technologies but that the future workforce properly represents the full diversity of UK talent.
StoryTrails is one of 10 major creative projects commissioned as part of UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, which is taking place across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in 2022. The UK’s most ambitious showcase of creative collaboration includes free large-scale events, installations and globally accessible digital experiences, and an extensive learning programme, which aims to reach millions of schoolchildren.
UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK is funded and supported by the four governments of the UK and is commissioned and delivered in partnership with Belfast City Council, Creative Wales and EventScotland.
TV presenter and historian Professor David Olusoga, Executive Producer for StoryTrails, said: “I am thrilled to be working with StoryFutures to help bring about change in the diversity of our creative industries. By enabling 50 diverse creative voices to create compelling stories that combine past, present and future through the magic of immersive technologies, we’ll be mapping a new path for creativity in this country. StoryTrails will set the public’s imagination alight with experiences that use the poetry of history to inspire a new vision of our future.”
For further details visit story-trails.com and via Facebook and Instagram @StoryTrailsProject and Twitter @StoryFuturesA and @StoryFutures
