Private Project

A Place for Everyone: A Virtual Climate Reality

Step into the Museum of the Future where recorded memories from Nottingham, UK, unveil a world shaped by climate change. In 2050, neural implants have captured every moment of peoples’ lives, chronicling a new dark age. We follow the poignant journey of UK citizens turned refugees, fleeing inhospitable coasts and facing the harsh realities of displacement and societal breakdown. As the refugees attempt to integrate into a new community, they encounter power struggles, their desperate attempts at survival land themselves at the mercy of their host community.
"A Place for Everyone" pushes the boundaries of traditional VR filmmaking. Through the measurement of viewers' brain activity, the visual and audio elements dynamically adapt, crafting a personalised trajectory of fear. Additionally, actors' performances are volumetrically captured, imbuing the experience with haunting, fragmentary, and intimate qualities.
"A Place for Everyone" is an adaptive exploration of a possible future. Here, themes of climate, survival, and morality intertwine, leaving viewers with a haunting reflection on the fragility of our shared existence.

We have planned for two of our team to take this adaptive VR experience to festivals this summer. The experience runs off a laptop and vr headset that we provide. All we would need from you is a space in which to run the work, small table, chair and a power socket.

  • Richard Ramchurn
    Director
    The Disadvantages of Time Travel, The MOMENT, Before We Disappear
  • Mat Johns
    Director
    A Father's Day, Inertia
  • Mat Johns
    Writer
  • Richard Ramchurn
    Writer
  • Rachel Ramchurn
    Producer
    The Disadvantages of Time Travel, The MOMENT, Before We Disappear
  • Jennifer Milford
    Key Cast
    Before We Dissapear
  • Lisa Ambalavanar
    Key Cast
    Titans
  • Ali Gadema
    Key Cast
    The Seige, Mogul Mowgli, The MOMENT
  • Sumit Sakar
    Digital Artist
  • Gary Naylor
    Sound Design
  • Callum Berger
    Lead Developer
  • Project Type:
    Virtual Reality
  • Minimum Runtime:
    27 minutes
  • Maximum Runtime:
    31 minutes
  • Average Runtime:
    29 minutes
  • Variable Runtime Details:
    While scenes are a set length, the audience member is able to choose which scene comes next. In this "Hub" state there is some audio content which, if they listen to it all, accounts for the maximum runtime.
  • Completion Date:
    March 1, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    60,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Richard Ramchurn, Mat Johns

Richard Ramchurn is an innovative director and creative technologist renowned for pushing the boundaries of interactive storytelling. As the founder and driving force behind AlbinoMosquito Productions Ltd., Richard has carved out a unique niche at the intersection of art, technology, and narrative. With a background in visual arts and human-computer interaction, he brings a multidisciplinary approach to his work, seamlessly blending academic rigor with artistic vision.
Richard's directorial portfolio includes groundbreaking projects such as "The MOMENT," "Before We Disappear," and "The Disadvantages of Time Travel," each pushing the limits of immersive and adaptive storytelling. His expertise lies in crafting interactive cinematic experiences that blur the lines between audience and narrative, inviting participants to become active participants in the storytelling process. His work has garnered international acclaim and continues to inspire audiences and fellow creatives alike.

Mat is a freelance filmmaker based in the northwest. As a writer/director, his BFI-funded shorts films ‘A Father’s Day’ and ‘Inertia’ have been selected by over 200 film festivals globally, including many OSCAR and BAFTA qualifying festivals. ‘Inertia’ was longlisted for the 2022 Academy Awards for Best Short, and ‘A Father’s Day’ has received over 3.5 million views on YouTube. As a freelancer, Mat also works as a DoP and editor.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The inception of "A Place for Everyone" stemmed from one simple question: Can a horror experience catalyze agency for climate change? Our aim was to immerse audiences in the visceral realities of climate-induced displacement, envisioning the harrowing consequences when swathes of our country become uninhabitable. Crucially, we sought to challenge the pervasive "othering" of refugees by portraying them as British.
Our creative journey began with grassroots conversations in Nottingham's libraries, where producer Rachel and Richard Ramchurn engaged the public with generative AI images of climate futures. These dialogues, alongside insights gleaned from discussions with climate scientists at The University of Nottingham, laid the groundwork for our narrative.
For the narrative, we wanted to build a post-climate catastrophe city which we could experience from multiple perspectives: the domestic refugees, the workforces, and the management - this inevitably shows characters at their most desperate, vulnerable, or ruthless. We wrote and created 6 short VR experiences that were focused but connected.

We shot the film in volumetric video, between 3 and 6 cameras, which allowed us to work with real actors, and place them in virtual environments. There being no rulebook as to how to film with VolCap we adapted techniques from traditional filmmaking and shot on a soundstage at the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio in the old Carlton Studios in Nottingham.

Working with volumetric capture was freeing as we could imagine whatever setting we wished, but we had to be aware of staging for our actors and how audiences will experience their part of the story. We pre-designed how the environment would look and be lit, allowing us to pre-light the studio space ahead of the volumetric performance footage being placed in the 3D virtual environments.