Imperial War Museum London

Second World War Galleries

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT / USER TESTING / MOTION DESIGN / SCRIPTING / VISUAL-FX / 3D MODELLING / EDITING / FILMS / ARCHIVE EDIT & TREATMENT / SOUND DESIGN / SOUNDSCAPES / BESPOKE COMPOSITIONS / STUDIO RECORDING / HYBRID INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMING / GAME DESIGN / ILLUSTRATION / ANIMATION / PROJECTION MAPPING

ALL CREATED IN-HOUSE

CLIENT

Imperial War Museum

DESIGNERS

RAA

HARDWARE

Sysco

AY-PE designed, created and delivered 23 varied AV exhibits across IWM London’s seven Second World War galleries including touchscreen interactives, soundscapes, largescale projected films, LED display ceiling and more.

The Second World War Galleries (which opened October 2021) share stories on a global-scale, exploring the world war from the perspectives and experiences of different nations and backgrounds, helping to combat prejudices in modern society. AY-PE’s AV plays a focal part in delivering these key interpretative messages, within the IWM’s £30m new galleries projects.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 01

Introductory AV

The introductory AV, is a short, looping film succinctly showing the global decline into war through the 1930s. The 3 x 3 metre ‘table’ projection surface comprises 6 ‘shards’ of different shapes and sizes, each themselves angled in different ways, all depicting the colossal ‘shatter’ of the world. AY-PE’s careful design, projection mapping and use of the shards allowed for impactful interplay between single pane and full scale visuals with archive, CGI, motion text and graphics, as well as 2.5D imagery and a bespoke evocative musical score, bringing the fractious situation of the 1930s to life.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 02

LED lightbox ceiling

The ceiling of the third gallery contains 35 ceiling-mounted LED lightboxes where the AV immerses the visitor in a sky-scape of dogfighting planes, Blitz bombing, day and night sequences with an accompanying multi-channel soundscape.

Battle of the Atlantic AV… so artistically done that it could almost be on show at Tate Modern

- The Telegraph

EXPERIENCE TYPE 03

Landscapes of War

AY-PE graded and edited sequences of newly shot footage, designed to be projected across three stretches of gallery wall ranging from 9.5 to 11.5 metres in width. These colossal AVs form the immersive landscape backdrops to the long gallery with correlating soundscapes of ambient desert, Pacific coast and Russian terrain alongside. AY-PEs unique edit of archive, VFX, new footage and sound for the Battle of the Atlantic, caps off the experience.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 04

Interactive Learning

The Enigma interactive takes the visitor through key steps of the iconic code-breaking machine, explaining it’s operation and letting the visitor ‘learn by doing’ simplified activities of the breaker. AY-PE worked closely with IWM, Bletchley Park & GCHQ experts to get the authenticity and level of learning just right.

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EXPERIENCE TYPE 04

Interactive Learning

War Reporter is a physical-digital hybrid interactive where the visitor creates a newspaper front page and learns the nature of messaging and propaganda within that reporting. AY-PEs software works with Unusual Project’s set-works so a visitor builds their choice of digital page at the spin of a ‘headline’ block and a click of a camera button.

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EXPERIENCE TYPE 05

Character Triptych AV

Designed to inform the viewer of the Tehran Agreement and the characters/ personality clashes of Stalin, Churchill & Roosevelt, AY-PE created a film of archive, motion graphics, subtitles and narration which projection maps across a three screen triptych. Interpreting the division and uneasy unity between the three, AYPE played with the slicing effects of the triptych in the VFX design, peeling aways character layers yet sliding them together – uniting to end the war.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 06

Immersive multimedia

Projected 4K onto 3 metre high, 7 metre wide, wraparound walls, an animated film engages visitors in the scale of the British Empire’s global contributions, diversity of people and resources. A bespoke soundscape of subtle musical score, ambient Empire sounds and newly recorded Empire accents and voices immerse the visitor further. They are then invited to explore two Empire interactive databases which AY-PE designed to be accessible, open to learning styles and intuitive to use to access 100s of assets and records.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 07

Linear AV

Two different styles of linear AVs engage the visitor in diverse key events, local stories and individual contributions and sacrifices. Seven looping graded archive and text blended AVs weave through the exhibition, each with its own messaging and soundtrack, and each complementing the other in a holistic look and feel. Three further, larger AVs: ‘Theatres of War’ cover events in the Pacific, Russia and NW Europe. These large-scale AVs are sweeping backdrops showing archive, map design, motion text, sound design, BSL and bespoke animated SFX.

EXPERIENCE TYPE 08

Interactive explorers

War Art is a swipeable, zoomable, manipulable gallery of iconic war art and related artist information from around the globe, where the visitor can investigate the paintings on a 2 x 49″ 4k screens.

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EXPERIENCE TYPE 08

Interactive explorers

Japanese Expansion interactive blends a table-based capacitive touch-foil with an overhead projector. Our software projection transforms the table into a map of the Pacific area, which upon touch, evolves into an animation of events in the area. The visitor then has a swipeable database of events and information to interrogate the growth and counter-attack to the Japanese Expansion.

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