About the Film

This interactive theatre documentary film follows TriggerShift, a project bringing together young people from across the North East with programmers, musicians, visual artists and illustrators. Over fifteen months they built a live performance around Microsoft’s Kinect camera, a device built for gaming and repurposed here into a genuine creative tool. What made the project worth filming was less the technology itself than watching a group figure out, largely by trial and error, what that technology could actually be made to do.

Technology Repurposed

Part of what made the project work was how ordinary the technology behind it actually was.

The technology isn’t necessarily that groundbreaking. It’s been around for decades. But what’s so amazing about the Kinect is it’s less than 100 pounds. Whereas before you’d have to be in the military, or you’d have to be a big company to get one, it would cost five, ten grand. Now you can just go buy one, plug it in and use it.

Watching a group realise what a piece of everyday hardware could do in the right hands is exactly the kind of moment an interactive theatre documentary film exists to catch.

Ideas from the Group

The technology mattered, but the project was really driven by the ideas of the young people involved. Workshops circled around big, open questions.

If you could change the world, or your city, what would it be like?

Those conversations turned into monologues, devised scenes and designed visuals and sound, eventually converging into a performance called API – Planet Ideas, staged as a game show where performers pitched ideas for a new world.

We started off talking about our ideas and how each of us wanted to create a show. Some wanted to feature artwork, some a musical piece, and some a drama piece. We voted and decided a dramatized connection with the computer would be a good idea.

Filming Over Three Days

I filmed workshops, rehearsals and interviews over three days using a Panasonic AF101 for interviews and wide shots of the space, a GH2 for flexibility in low light and faster-moving scenes, and an iPhone 4S for spontaneous, discreet behind-the-scenes moments. Editing was completed in Adobe Premiere CS6 and Adobe Prelude, which made a large volume of footage manageable and kept the finished film focused on the process rather than trying to cover everything.

A New Kind of Performance

Using Processing, a beginner-friendly programming language, the group coded interactive visuals and sound triggered by movement the Kinect tracked in real time, letting performers control the show’s environment as they moved. That brought a genuinely different kind of pressure to performing.

Doing a speech and working with the technology is completely different. It needs another way to get your head around. If one thing goes slightly wrong, you have to step back and change it live.

An Installation Too

Alongside the stage show, the group built an interactive installation upstairs at the venue, inviting visitors to design their own perfect world. Answers ranged from space travel for everyone to equality to a world where nobody gets hurt, small, honest glimpses of what people actually want when you ask them plainly.

Why This Film Matters

TriggerShift stayed with me as one of the clearer examples of what an interactive theatre documentary film can capture beyond the performance itself, the curiosity, the trial and error, and the confidence a group builds when they are trusted to run the technical side of a show as much as perform in it. It sits alongside other North East theatre and youth arts projects I have filmed, and remains one of the more unusual and rewarding briefs I have worked on.