Synopsis: A look at the writers, musicians, animators, designers and computer programmers that form British collective the Sancho Plan.
While "feast for the senses" might be a rather cliched way of describing what the British collective the Sancho Plan does, there's nothing cliched about what the forward-thinking, interactive entertainment group is doing.
An award-winning collaboration between writers, musicians, animators, designers and computer programmers, the Sancho Plan’s performances feature animation, music, gaming, technology and performance; various series the group describes as “live, interactive and immersive musical adventures.”
Giant screens surround the live band onstage. And the on-stage players orchestrate sounds that simultaneously control the on-screen animated characters.
From the group’s website: “Spacequatica is a 12-minute piece created especially for the Future of Sound tour organised by the music legend and pioneer Martyn Ware. As we perform both the music and characters live using our drumpads, the sounds of the various characters move around the audience in 3D space through the Illustrious Company's unique 16-speaker immersive audio system."
"Visually and sonically, the performance takes us on a journey down through a musical ocean – from the surface, where schools of small exotic creatures are performed like phasing xylophones, through the deeper waters populated by dangerous robotic sharks, and on to the pitch black depths, where all we see and hear are rare self-illuminating species occasionally blinking out of the darkness.”
The group has also produced a new animated short film called The Black Page, a story “about a lost wanderer who stumbles into a surreal desert landscape, and learns that the door home can only be opened by an unusual guardian.”
The film is the Sancho Plan’s first true interactive short film, a venture the group calls its “most ambitious project to date.”
In The Black Page, the live band onstage will control the cast of onscreen animated musical characters in real-time.
“These are exciting times for both the music and film industries,” says Ed Cookson, director of the Sancho Plan. “[Our] live performance is an entertainment experience built to combine the narrative power of cinema with the energy of seeing a great live band."
The collective also produce immersive installations where the public can interact with its work. Recently commissioned to produce a new animated/musical experience for the world’s largest permanent stereoscopic theatre at the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, Austria, the group designed an installation called Jungle Imperator, featuring Ultra-HD resolution imagery on the wall and floor, surround-sound audio and cutting-edge stereoscopic 3D.
The project combines the music of Tosca (Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber) with “rich surrealist imagery inspired by Max Ernst.”
The Black Page premieres in Newcastle, England at the Tyneside Cinema on September 24, 2009, but will be touring in 2010.
Visit www.TheSanchoPlan.com for more info.
