Since 2012, Lucion Media works with light and shadow theatres hosted into vinyl spheres: an installation called moonGARDEN. Since its creation, more than one million people have been amazed by its luminous shadows. From here came the idea to take them outside of the spheres, expose them upon light, ally them to LED lighting and micro-mapping and tell a good story.
The latest creation, Shadow Play premiered at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art on January 25, 2018. For this representation, Lucion Media reproduced the city of Shanghai with its parks, its bridge and its buildings. Nevertheless, this installation is completely customizable. It is also possible to create a glass brand, Harry Potter or a natural park universe. The installation served as a sample of interactive volumetric cinema technology and it was meant to show how it could transform a garden, a lobby, a public space … into a story.
The show lasts 5 minutes and is followed by the interactive 20 minutes scene. The volumetric decor turns into a giant interactive shadow garden where people are using the light of their mobile phones to reactivate a few moments of the movie and to discover the city noises. These two parts allow to reach a wider audience, from the most thoughtful to the most active.
Shadow Play tells the story of an artist living in Shanghai who takes the subway home late at night. Finally arrived, he hurries upstairs, changes clothes, grabs a pair of scissors and starts cutting up paper frantically. What is he doing? He is shaping tiny paper characters. Once complete, he places them onto the set and their shadow comes alive. They run, they heckle, they climb onto buildings, they take over a city—a fantastic forbidden playground.
A knock on the door interrupts their euphoria. They freeze. The owner is screaming from the other side of the door. He is here to collect the artist’s rent. The moment he is gone, joyful bliss seizes them again. They grab the artist’s paint pots and pour them all over the city.