“ONCE” is the name of a project of the Berlin Bundesdruckerei (the state mint) which aims at the creation of a mobile app that can replace official documents, like ID cards or driving licenses. One has just to show the phone’s screen “once” and his/her digital identities are verified.
An ambitious plan that, along with the technical challenges, has also to be communicated to the population: I teamed up with beier+wellach to develop a special “digital signage” system that shows in a peculiar way how ONCE works. For this project I did camera, editing, programming and prototyping for the physical display.
This is the interesting object we ended up building. The display is designed to be installed in public places and attract groups of audiences with an stand-by clip running on the front screen. As the user decides to start the interaction, the magic happens. The display is able to show a film on its outer layer…
…but its also able to turn transparent and reveal a full miniature stage in its interior. This stage hosts a Pepper’s Ghost hologram, which is synchronized with the front screen video. This means that the inside and outside layers interact with each other, enabling various surprising twists in the plot, like jumping literally to a new location, or providing a “spatialized” shot/reverse shot editing, and probably much more.
In order to make the most of this technology, we had to produce the contents accordingly. Two storylines were developed. On the inside stage, an old-fashioned and rigorous clerk inhabits a seemingly infinite archive full of official papers, and expresses all the doubts and worries about the new technology. The scenography is a real-life paperboard model, the actress was shot in green screen and moves holographically around it.
On the outside layer, a more conventional shot shows a young, dynamic driver of a sports car, who expresses all the benefits of the “mobile ID” and starts a surreal dialogue with the clerk in the archive. The action alternates between the car scene and the archive scene, until at the end the clerk magically leaves the stage and jumps on the car, to the surprise of the driver. She has dispelled the doubts and is ready to take on the new challenge. The ONCE logo appears.
The path to this happy ending was long, starting from the first concepts and passing through difficult material research. The front screen had to switch between projected surface and transparent layer, without compromising the quality of the image and the visibility of the hologram. The inside stage had to contain a perfectly clear Pepper’s Ghost image, meticulously aligned with the scenography. All this had to be put in sync and built-in in the box, with inner lighting, sound and a number of other devices (fans, motors) all ready to go just after plugging the box and hitting “start”.
I packed a lot into it and as usual, when I was able to close all panels and the labyrinth of cables disappeared under the clean lines of the case, I could breathe that nice sigh of relief – and satisfaction.
CREDITS
Client: BDR-Bundesdruckerei, Berlin
Concept, design and production: Ruudi Beier, beier+wellach projekte
Direction: Katrin Nowak
Actors: Claudia Lietz and Jan Andreesen
Scenography: Ruth Münzner
Camera, editing, programming, technical solutions: Michele Pedrazzi
All the nice studio photos used in the article: Roland Horn.