Collider
Creative Director: Pippa Nissen
The exhibition has a narrative journey from the lecture hall of CERN down into the Large Hadron Collider and the particle detectors that surround it. This journey begins by announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson with a 10 minute video displayed on a 13m wide, 3m high curved screen. We meet various characters who join us on the journey, locations shift along the curve and the characters move along it. Using such a large curved screen envelops the audience in the experience by filling their peripheral vision with images from around CERN.
As you move through the exhibition you meet various real world scientists and engineers who emerge from the walls and talk directly to you about the work they do in CERN. This gives the audience a very direct experience of what life is like first hand in this curious place.
Next you come to one of the highlights of the exhibition, the Particle Collision. This was one of the great challenges for us as video designers: how do you visualise something you can’t actually see and scientists themselves can only see though graphs of electromagnetic activity? Through a long process of visiting cern, talking to scientists and collaboration NRS we arrived at a 3 minute journey, presented on a circular screen, 7m in diameter with 270º of projection that you stand in the centre of. The journey begins in one of the Cathedral sized detector caverns and moves you inside the detector where you join an flow of protons and witness the proton collision, the source of all discovery within the LHC.
You then see the conclusion of the drama that began in the lecture hall in a office, the end wall is video in which our main scientist character is working.
The journey ends in a space for reflection on what you have learned and what may come from the work in the LHC. The video creates a wall for imagination, projecting analogies of the ideas discussed in the space on the end wall, joining lines of print with lines of video and images forming from the lines. There is also a table in the centre of the space with the objects on it blank and brought to life by video. Scientific ideas are explained by animation projected on to the note pads and bits of paper lying on the table.
FRS was brought on to the project by Pippa Nissen of Nissen Richards Studio who was the projects Creative Director. FRS’s team comprised of video designers Finn Ross and Adam Young, Adam being responsible for all the 3D and 2D animation, Carolyn Downing, sound designer and Dan Morell, Project Manager.
Creative Director: Pippa Nissen
3D Design: NRS Studio
Video: Finn Ross and Adam Young
Sound: Carolyn Downing
The video in the the collider exhibition is used to deliver a theatrical storytelling experience for the visitor and to augment the wider exhibition environment.
The exhibition has a narrative journey from the lecture hall of CERN down into the Large Hadron Collider and the particle detectors that surround it. This journey begins by announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson with a 10 minute video displayed on a 13m wide, 3m high curved screen. We meet various characters who join us on the journey, locations shift along the curve and the characters move along it. Using such a large curved screen envelops the audience in the experience by filling their peripheral vision with images from around CERN.
As you move through the exhibition you meet various real world scientists and engineers who emerge from the walls and talk directly to you about the work they do in CERN. This gives the audience a very direct experience of what life is like first hand in this curious place.
Next you come to one of the highlights of the exhibition, the Particle Collision. This was one of the great challenges for us as video designers: how do you visualise something you can’t actually see and scientists themselves can only see though graphs of electromagnetic activity? Through a long process of visiting cern, talking to scientists and collaboration NRS we arrived at a 3 minute journey, presented on a circular screen, 7m in diameter with 270º of projection that you stand in the centre of. The journey begins in one of the Cathedral sized detector caverns and moves you inside the detector where you join an flow of protons and witness the proton collision, the source of all discovery within the LHC.
You then see the conclusion of the drama that began in the lecture hall in a office, the end wall is video in which our main scientist character is working.
The journey ends in a space for reflection on what you have learned and what may come from the work in the LHC. The video creates a wall for imagination, projecting analogies of the ideas discussed in the space on the end wall, joining lines of print with lines of video and images forming from the lines. There is also a table in the centre of the space with the objects on it blank and brought to life by video. Scientific ideas are explained by animation projected on to the note pads and bits of paper lying on the table.
FRS was brought on to the project by Pippa Nissen of Nissen Richards Studio who was the projects Creative Director. FRS’s team comprised of video designers Finn Ross and Adam Young, Adam being responsible for all the 3D and 2D animation, Carolyn Downing, sound designer and Dan Morell, Project Manager.
Press:
"The collision itself, based on real images from the LHC, appears like a magnificent post-modernist painting. Art and science really do collide, with spectacular results." The Indipendent
"a stunning panoramic vision of what protons and neutrons being fired at almost lightspeed round a 27km magnetic doughnut might look like if they were a film designed by Da Vinci and directed by Spielberg" Time Out
"A Smashing show" The Economist
