Two local creative talents, Marcus Smith and Lucy Fulford, have been recruited to work on StoryTrails, a unique immersive storytelling experience coming to Bristol, 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 Bristol. 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 Bristol on 20-21 August. 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.
Marcus Smith, who is of Caribbean heritage was born and bred in Bristol, will be making an interactive immersive map of the city he grew up in. Marcus recently released his directorial debut, and has produced and presented content for BBC Radio 4 and The British Library. Marcus hopes to use StoryTrails to highlight “the independent and do-it-yourself mindset,” of Bristol and its inhabitants. He’s also excited about the opportunity “To learn and create with a talented and experience team of creatives.”
Joining Marcus is Lucy Fulford, who has been recruited to make an augmented reality story trail around Bristol. Since moving to the city for her undergraduate degree in 2008, Lucy has written and produced films for Save the Children and Comic Relief, and is currently exploring the experiences of Ugandan Asians who fled to the UK 50 years ago. She says “I moved to Bristol in 2008 for university, living there for my undergraduate degree and then a number of years after – like many people, I didn’t want to leave the city!” She feels that this is a unique programme, explaining “Storytrails combines my interests in social history, untold stories and immersive media in a way I haven’t seen a project do before. The chance to reimagine archives and diversify history in a city close to my heart is very special.”
Marcus and Lucy 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 20-21 August audiences will be guided through an immersive tour of Bristol as they explore stories across virtual and augmented reality and via a series of installations created by Marcus and Lucy.
Outside Bristol Central Library, 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 Marcus and Lucy 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.”
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
