The Blue Paradox was a two-week pop-up immersive experience in London
that sought to engage, educate, and inspire action on the critical issues surrounding Ocean Plastic Pollution.
In 2021 my team at RadicalMedia created a short-term Blue Paradox installation adjacent to the WestField Mall in Shepard's Bush.
The RadicalMedia Studio researched, concepted, designed, developed, and produced almost every aspect of this Pop-up experience as well as managing the construction, fabrication, technical infrastructure and installation.
The experience consisteted of five experiential chapters. Each of these immersive/interactive spaces guided visitors through a particular part of the ocean plastic crisis story.
Room 1 Experience: The Role of Our Oceans
➔ Chapter One of The Blue Paradox is an immersive film experience presented in unique format within a custom-built theater space. The film established the importance and critical role of the oceans to all life on this planet, and that disruptive change is needed now, to confront the global ocean plastic crisis.
The film played across a custom 'wave-shaped' 24-screen array that floated above a custom curved LED floor within an infinity mirror space — creating a powerful, dramatic and completely enveloping experience for visitors.
In close partnership with the amazing VFX director Warren Chapmen at the London-based animation studio Treatment, we concepted, developed, designed and produced this unique and immersive film.
Driven by an emotional score and celebrity VO, this cinematic immersion established the critical importance of our Oceans to all life on Earth and set the stage for the exhibit content to follow.
Matched-action and clever editorial techniques took full advance of the screen design and format, drawing the visitors focus up over their heads and across the floor — creating an almost disorienting effect as the stunning ocean imagery unfolded all around them.
As visitors first entered the dark space before the film began, they found themselves walking on a responisve LED floor — covered in glowing bioluminescnet phyto plankton.
As they moved around the space the procedurally generated plankton would glow brighter and move away from their feet with life-like fluid dynamics.
Experience Room 2: The Problem & Impacts
➔ The second main room in the exhibit was a large immersive space where every surface was covered in high resolution projections. A series of four short films educated visitors through graphic and easy to understand animated data visualizations and illustrations.
Each looping film focussed on a different aspect of the harmful impacts of Ocean plastic pollution — Global Impacts, Microplastics, Marine Life Impacts and Total Ocean Plastic Polution over time.
We engaged the amazing boutique design shop SetReset in London to help bring our Animated Data Stories to life. Translating these complicated subjects and data sets into a visually consistent and easy to understand visualizations.
Experience Room 3: The Plastic Paradox
Within the tunnel-like space, visitors were encouraged to engage via interactive touchscreens. An animated infographic-based game let them learn about the challenges, misconceptions and paradoxes inherent in the quest to reduce plastic usage in our everyday lives.
Each row of LED Arches and interactive plinths responded to visitor inputs — pulsing and animating colors coresponding to the chapter of the game they were on.
➔ Interactive Educational Game Plinths
➔ Responsive LED Installation
Experience Room 4: The Scale of The Problem
The fourth room in the experience physically illustrated the dispariety between the enourmous amounts of plastic that are created for mass consumption and what is actually recycled.
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The installation displayed common categories of plastic packaging on conveyors that cycled endlessly. These were highlighed with UV light to turn them into physcal data visuaizations.
Room 5 Experience: Solutions & Actions
The final chapter of The Blue Paradox focuses on the power of individual and collective action.
By teaching visitors about their own plastic consumption, how it compares to others' and what small changes they can take to have big impacts in their day-to-day, we reinforce the idea that this is a collective problem, which we can and should address as a global community.
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