In the heart of the UK's capital, a mission to Mars is ready for take-off. Territory, the studio that designed the on-screen graphics for Nasa's control centre in The Martian, has turned the set into an art installation, allowing anyone to take charge. "We hope to take people away from the belief that everything's done in CGI later on," says Territory co-founder David Sheldon-Hicks. "We sit somewhere between storyteller, real-life data and science."
Read more: Matt Damon could (almost) travel to Mars in this suit, thanks to Nasa
In The Martian, the film of which was released in 2015, London-based Territory created the graphics for a space control centre of the future, based on predictions from staff at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab. "We had the three big LED screens delivering to the bullpen," says Sheldon-Hicks, 37. "There's a central display that looks like an Excel document. We had to resist having a big, red display flashing, 'Warning, warning,' because that wouldn't really happen."
The set, housed in the Into the Unknown exhibition at the Barbican Centre, is a scaled-down version of the 85 screens used in the film. An audio headset feeds instructions from a fictional director telling the person to interact with the set while the graphics used in the film appear on-screen. "We wanted the audience to experience what the actors experience. It's not just green screen and make-believe. There are graphics, a script to deliver and a director asking things," says Sheldon-Hicks.
For one of its current projects, upcoming film Ready Player One, Territory wants to create the same sensation in VR. "It's about transmitting your consciousness into another digital world," says Sheldon-Hicks of the Steven-Spielberg-directed movie due for release in 2018. "How do you make an audience understand that the VR experience is something new? It's interesting to see how that integrates into storytelling in movies."
Into the Unknown runs from June 3 to September 1
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
