The Elstree Project — Immersive Documentation and Capture of Studios

The KE placement will enable the applicant working alongside studio staff to capture the studio spaces of Elstree Studios and BBC Elstree Centre through immersive 360 photography and LIDAR data. Crucially, it is anticipated that the coproduced research outputs can be used to create Google Streetview-style interactive tours, and immersive museum-style experiences. Through a process of curated existing oral histories from The Elstree Project — embedded with the street view exhibit — the outputs will inform the public of how studios work, the history of these spaces, and will preserve interactive visual records of the site for future knowledge and study. I aim to present two outcomes — a public exhibition of the 360 content as an interactive tour, hosted online, and (in a future phase) build the LiDAR data into a VR exhibit which can be presented in the immersive heritage space planned for Elstree and Borehamwood’s heritage centre, in partnership with UH. Two significant buildings, including historic filming spaces and sound stages, on the BBC site are due to be demolished from August, and so it is a vital activity to record and capture their spaces in this way before they are gone.