"Dead Ideaville"

This death is so fresh the next of kin haven't been informed yet. I recently had the pleasure of working with a London based collective of creatives and strategists on a project for the Royal Opera House. 

The brief was to connect with the 18-24 set, not exactly Opera goers, via a viral film. Add to the mix some notable barriers, like the pricey tickets and the perception that the Royal Opera House is the playground of snobs and old farts, and you get a good idea of the challenge.

Royal Opera House - "Interactive Soundtrack” 

One useful insight into this audience is their love and appreciation of music. As a result they are likely to open their ears to different types of music. But they are unfamiliar with the music of opera. They probably don’t realize the many different types of genres there are, e.g. comedy; tragic; romantic; ballad; grand or epic.

So the idea here was to introduce them to opera through the music by letting them play with and experience the power of the music behind the various types of opera genres.

How?
We would create an interactive film with an operatic score. At various stages during the film, the viewer is given the choice to change the genre of the score. The choice of score directly alters the direction of the movie. For instance, let's say a movie starts out as a comedy with a fun, light operatic score. The score then is changed to “tragic” and as a consequence the film gets darker.

In this way the viewer becomes the Director/DJ controlling all the action and sound at the same time. So, not only could we produce an engaging viewing experience, but it also could be a very instructive one as the user learns to discover and appreciate the power of operatic music.

At the end of film we would ask the viewer to visit the ROH website to learn how to experience more of these various Opera genres live.

Ashes to ashes....