HBO’s Lovecraft Country was a genre-defying fantasy-horror that dealt with serious issues in a surreal way. To promote the show, The Mill and HBO dreamed up a COVID-safe series of virtual ‘tours’ through an exquisitely-crafted liminal VR space, populated by site-specific Afro-futurist sculptures by Black artists including David Alabo and Adeyemi Adegbesan, tied together with a narrative voiced by the actors from the show, and capped off by a performance from Janelle Monáe.
The invited guests shared the space in groups of roughly 20, inhabiting gorgeous and surreal bodies of their own choosing, roaming freely through the virtual spaces, and interacting with one another and puzzles embedded in the spaces around them.
For the larger audience at home, the experience was streamed from the first-person vantage of an anonymous participant: a VR cinematographer. The streaming audience had their own layer of interaction available, where onscreen riddles invited viewers to guess answers in the YouTube chat, and the correct answer would invoke a ‘spell’ in the viewer’s name and take over, warping and bending the entire stream for a short time.
For this project, HWP helped The Mill design and engineer a streaming architecture and custom software that handled live audio/visual effects, multi-source switching, playback, recording, live titles, and streaming. We also created a smokey signature title effect and dozens of A/V ‘spells’, about 6 of which ended up being used in each of the 2020 live streams.
The project was timely and spectacular, earning over 100 press features and 13 million social impressions in the first week alone.
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HBO + THE MILL: LOVECRAFT COUNTRY: SANCTUM
Client: HBO
Brand: HBO
Production Company: The Mill
Creative Director: Rama Allen
Executive Producer: Desi Gonzalez
Experience Director: Aline Ridolfi
Design Director: Sally Reynolds
Technical Director: Kevin Young
Senior Producer: Hayley Underwood Norton
Strategist: Min Wei Lee
Developer: Kim Koehler
Streaming and Live Graphics System Design, Custom Software, Realtime Graphics: Noah Norman / Hard Work Party
September, 2020
