By Douglas Kruger
DOES anyone have an appetite for launching an immersive projected-images boat-tour of historical Jersey?
That was a lot of words. Allow me to explain.
I recently saw an ad for a US company that transforms houses. No demolition involved, it’s all done with projected light. Proffer your money, and they will turn the street-facing side of your gorgeous colonial into a seething house-of-horrors ahead of Halloween.
The effect is phenomenal. We’re not just talking about coloured lintels, or the outline of a ghost on a door. Static images are a thing of the past. Now everything moves and pulses, and it all looks convincingly three-dimensional. Not only that, but it interacts with the design elements of your architecture.
They start by considering your house as a canvas. Every feature is incorporated. Then they create entire story-sequences programmed in advance to move about those spaces.
Characters stir in your windows, acting out sinister scenes within. Ye slimy things creep from your rafters, crawl down the side of your house and disappear, snakelike, into a drain. Parts of the house appear to “break and crumble”, leaving darkened shadow behind. Finally, sound effects add the cherry on top for an immersive experience guaranteed to traumatise small children for life.
Imagine doing that here. But to the scale of, say, an entire castle. We do have a couple lying around. Isn’t it time they earn their keep?
Now, ghouls look great. But imagine customising it to the unique flavour of the Channel Islands by recreating moments from our history. Picture the arrival of marauding Vikings, rendered to the size of Elizabeth Castle. Or Celts fleeing slaughter by Romans, dragging their hoard ashore, done to the scale of Gorey. St Helier facing the axes of the barbarians on his own rocky priory.
We don’t want for drama. Done well, the effect could be magnificent.
Imagine it like this. You buy your ticket and hop on a boat. The boat has a tour-guide, much like the ones hosting groups on the Thames, but our experience is grander than theirs. In London, the guy simply points to things and delivers witty commentary.
But we’ll show you the march of mammoths, the intrigues of druids, ancient battles writ so large across the canvas of our castles that it makes the heavens thunder.
Imagine how chilling it would be to show Nazis advancing upon our shores. Paint that one over their own bunkers. Then imagine the goosebumps as the story progresses, and the red and black Swastika dissolves before the liberating rise of red, white and blue.
Tour groups could circumnavigate the Island witnessing projected history on every major landmark.
It’s visual theatre of the first order, and the limits of possibility exist only at the outskirts of imagination. You can have lightning strikes across your castle, ocean storms battering its walls, characters blown up to the size of Goliath.
You can even knock down and rebuild the castle itself, before the very eyes of your audience. The whole structure effectively crumbles from sight. Using visual wizardry, it is then redrawn, so that tourists witness the birth of our great landmarks. Do it all to a dramatic score. Say, Conquest of Paradise.
What a phenomenal way to experience history, not as dry factoid, but as living drama, in its native setting…while sipping Prosecco on the deck.
It also comes with no real downsides. It causes zero pollution. The concept is endlessly adaptable, because visuals and storylines can be evolved. It could even be used for one-off events. Our rugby team wins the cup? Alert the news crews, then show the winning try along the length of St Catherine’s Breakwater.
Done well, it could be a compelling reason to tour our Channel Islands. We haven’t even considered what might be done with the storylines of Devil’s Hole, or the Beast of Jersey.
Might such an initiative even entice cruise ships to add us to their routes? They wouldn’t have to berth in our harbours – just pass by near enough.
If so, we could team up with Guernsey, where they might project, say, an old donkey loping gently across a field, then lying down, or some such.
Jersey certainly displays an appetite for the creative. We venerate the novel. Witness the resounding success of the Dreaming Trees, or the Floating Earth, or the many charming statuettes peaking out of buildings in unexpected places anywhere you go. We also have more than our fair share of novelists and visual arts magicians.
I have an inkling that we should be going to town on delightful absurdity in Jersey. We should consciously aim to become the most Instragramed island on earth.
And don’t say this one too loudly, but you know what else you could use it for? To show Islanders what bridges and overwater highways might look like in context. I daresay it might change a mind or two when they see how lovely it can look.
Either way, the theory goes that “if you build it, they will come”. It’s expensive to build here. So what if we just lit it up instead? With a dash of creativity, we could take the concept of living history to a whole new level. A level that extends an invitation to the world.
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Douglas Kruger is a speaker and author based in St Helier. His books are available on Audible and Amazon.
