Five Minutes With Peter Richardson
REWIND sits down with Peter Richardson, Virtual Production lead for StoryFutures and Professor of Creative Industries at Royal Holloway University Of London.
“Five Minutes With” is a regular feature that gives you an insight into some of the greatest minds in the immersive industry, all within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee.
Peter Richardson is the Virtual Production lead for StoryFutures and StoryFutures Academy: The National Centre for Immersive Storytelling and is Professor of Creative Industries at Royal Holloway University Of London a post he has held since June 2021.
After an 18 year career as a Director of commercials, music videos and surprisingly Operas, Peter moved into academia with a remit to research new and novel methods in cinematic visual effects. In 2007 he founded and was inaugural Research Director of the Visual Effects Research Lab at the University of Dundee which by 2013 evolved into the Games and Visual Effects Research Lab (G+VERL) and was based at the University of Hertfordshire. Both labs were funded by EU grants and saw researchers filmmakers and storytellers based in UK Scotland Germany Denmark and Sweden work together transnationally on over 40 innovative screen projects.
What’s exciting you about the immersive industry right now?
Virtual Production is booming right now and presents challenges and opportunities for both the film and games industries. This for me is primarily a storytelling and world-building method, one which is going to really expand our thinking when creating story worlds. We ran a session with writers and showrunners on a LED wall and they were all blown away by the creative possibilities the technology offered them and their projects. I am hoping that we can use the data that Story Futures are compiling to prove the economic and environmental benefits to producers that Virtual Production offers. We are publishing a V.P Skills report next month which will shed some light on the scale of the opportunity and the shortfalls in the skills required to achieve the growth the UK needs in this area.
What advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?
Stay healthy, don’t give up the swimming, stay out of the bar (well maybe limit your visits) keep in touch with your friends, jump at each opportunity but above all don’t overthink everything it will only slow you down.
What and/or who is your source of inspiration?
My daughters, who are aged 15 and 19. Their energy and enthusiasm for everything they throw themselves into is humbling. They ask so many important questions about everything from TikTok to the meaning of life: I can answer the meaning of life question but as for TikTok….
What is your favourite thing about what you do for a living?
I spent eighteen years in the film industry, I shot productions all over the world and honestly loved every minute of it, but the work we are doing now in Virtual Production: trying to understand how to make the story come alive, is like living in the fantasy world I inhabited as a boy. The technology is stunning: actors tell us how amazing it is to act on the volume and as a Director by trade, I think the next few years are really going to be mind-blowing if we achieve what I think is possible with Virtual Production.
Just for Fun
If you didn’t have to sleep, what would you do with the extra time?
In my teenage years, I hardly slept at all (some kind of insomnia) all my most creative thoughts and concepts for films and performances came flooding out at night. I was studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths and managed to create an entire body of work at night, the concepts, themes and obsessions have kept me busy to this day. So I guess if I didn’t sleep I would be hopeful that the time would be productive and fuel a new (later) lifetime of ideas and concepts for me to work through.
What is one piece of technology from science fiction that you would most like to own?
A Babel Fish from Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. I have to quote the guide on its usage here:
“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”
Good verbal communication is at the centre of everything I have ever done, I have always been embarrassed by my inability to learn other languages (despite many attempts over the years), so the idea of the Babel Fish really appeals to me. There is also a handy unintended consequence for an atheist: “it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that something so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.”
Where is one place you want to travel to in the world and why?
I’d like just to get enough fuel to get from my house to work at the moment.
Whilst you’re here, is there anything you’d like to plug?
I was executive producer on an interactive work by Halucid Theatre a group of recent graduates called Philip 21. It was produced by the amazing Jo Nolan from Screen South and is just crackers, check it out on BBC Taster here.
The Story Futures VP Skills Report launches in early Nov and we are running training sessions on the VP stage for Producers Directors and Art Department very soon. Check out the website.
