Space Station Earth
Space Station Earth is an epic concert experience that allows you to see through the eyes of an astronaut, made by Ilan Eshkeri. The award winning British composer had always been inspired by space travel and started this project to create an unique experience for both space and music enthusiasts like himself. The experience consists of a live music performance, three huge screens with atmospheric video and images, and to top it off, lighting. That is where The Art of Light came in.
Concept
The Space Station Earth experience starts with a Q&A with a local astronaut, in collaboration with ESA. The concert experience itself has no dialogue of narration but the emotionally charged music tells an impressive story. Through the music of the orchestra and never seen before images filmed by ESA astronauts, the viewer explores the mind expanding experience of viewing earth from space.
The journey starts comfortable and familiar, with warm feelings for planet earth. Leaving this home base is impressive. The sounds are big and bombastic and you are curious about what’s to come. Floating through space feels cold and slow but captivating. Once you arrive at the space station, you look down on planet earth and realize this is the spaceship that contains all of humanity. It will make you feel both important and insignificant, at the same time.
Challenge
Ilan Eshkeri is a real pleasure to work with. He is very passionate about space travel and told us about being present at several rocket launches in person. This way, Eshkeri shot some of the footage himself. Even with keeping a 5 km distance while filming, the experience is really impressive.
The biggest challenge with projects like these, is working with a first draft. Eshkeri is very creative and knew exactly what the experience should feel like, but we only had a first version of the movie and audio to work with. Eshkeri trusted fully on our expertise and as always we felt responsible to enhance the whole experience with the lighting design. The final movie was delayed and the composer visited our studio at the very last minute, so we could watch and fine-tune the whole experience together in the virtual world we built. We are used to last minute changes like this. Luckily, we are very flexible and we enjoy every minute of the process.
Result
We are very proud of the epic experience we created together with Ilan Eshkeri. The huge screen with images creating an interesting ambiance, the music telling a story without words and the lights filling up the space with emotion and amazement: together these elements create a truly unique experience that will leave you speechless.
After 3 years of ideas, getting inspired, drawing, filming, composing, improving and fine tuning, Space Station Earth is now touring in Europe, accompanied by famous and record keeping astronauts from different countries. Performing the very first show live at the Royal Albert Hall in London was amazing. The ideas of creative mastermind Ilan Eshkeri really came to life! We are very grateful to be part of this fascinating project.
Photocredits: Zdenko Hanout