This scenography, mixing cinema and theatre, was born out of passion for storytelling, paper art and shadow theatres.

The idea

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. 

Shadow Play

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.  

It 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.  

A dual organization

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. 

The story 

At night, an artist living in Shanghai takes the subway back home. 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.

Project: Shadow Play

Duration: 5 minutes + 20 minutes

Site: Shanghai, January 2018

Production: Lucion Media in collaboration (visual content and narration) with Audio Z (sound design, music and interactive sounds) 

Dimensions: 5460x1080pixels for the screen and 1280x800pixels in the sphere. 

Projectors: 4

Lumière: 4×514 adressable LED

Sound: 1 sound system, from 4.1 to 10.1 

MDF cut outs: 67

About Lucion

Lucion has been active in the field of multimedia production for 18 years. The company develops narrative environments with the help of visual artists, urban designers, interactive developers, space designers, screenwriters and musicians.

Their aim is to combine leading-edge technologies with traditional craftsmanship to create theatrical experiences with a strong human dimension.

In 2017, Lucion contributed to the illumination for Montreal’s Jacques-Cartier Bridge. It also produced “Three Seconds of Light”, a cinematic sound and light extravaganza using 26 4K projectors onto Place des Héros in Arras, France. In 2016 Lucion designed the stage and all visual content for Dream Theatre’s “The Astonishing”, an animated rock opera world tour.

Since its creation in 2000 Lucion has played a role in producing more than 400 cultural, museum and corporate events. 

moonGARDEN as a reference:

https://vimeo.com/185235840