#1251: From Book to Play to AR Installation, “Colored” Explores the Forgotten Segregation History of Claudette Colvin

Colored is a HoloLens 2-based, augmented reality immersive story installation for 3-10 people that talks about the forgotten history of Claudette Colvin. "This experience plunges the audience into the Deep South during segregation. In the course of that journey, we meet the young Claudette Colvin, 15 years old who, on March 2, 1955, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Nine months later, Rosa Parks repeated this act of defiance and became the icon that history remembers to this day."

Writer Tania de Montaigne discovered Colvin's story, and wrote a book named "Noire: La vie méconnue de Claudette Colvin - collection "Nos héroïnes" (The Unknown Life of Claudette Colvin: "Our Heroines" Collection). Then Stéphane Foenkinos discovered the story and adapted into a play, and then Pierre-Alain Giraud joined with Foenkinos to co-direct and co-produce an immersive AR story adaptation with them.

This is one of the more compelling AR stories that I've seen so far since they're using a series of benches in a stark black space that is transformed by AR point-cloud overlays to change contexts into a bus, into a church, and then into a courtroom. They used Volumetric capture studio in Taiwan to asynchronously capture each of the performances, and then added spatial sound, additional archival film footage, added theatrical lighting effects, and wind machines to add additional haptic feedback. Overall, it was really compelling use of mixed reality to go on a spatial journey with two other people at the Tribeca screening (up to 10 people could see it at a time at it's initial showing at World Premiere of "Noire" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from April 21 to May 29.

I had a chance to speak with de Montaigne, Foenkinos, and Alain-Giraud at Tribeca Immersive to talk about the translations from book to play to AR installation, their experiential design process, and interdisciplinary fusion of storytelling techniques to tell this forgotten history of Claudette Colvin.

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Music: Fatality