Immersive exhibition dedicated to Lotte Reiniger

Charlotte Reiniger is an innovative pioneer in the filmmaking industry, who is still not widely known. She worked in the period of the First World War creating fabulous fairytales. We decided to focus on her unique style, her inventions and techniques that contributed to the further animation development.

One of our aims was to reveal for the visitors the laborious process of silhouette animation creation. Another emphasis is the shadow puppetry technique that the artist used in her films. To present it we decided to build a silhouette theatre with the visitors as the main actors, as such theatres influenced Reiniger and she herself was equally engaged by live shadow puppetry.

The exhibition is divided into 4 parts: artist introduction, silhouette theatre and the artist laboratory, where the visitors can observe Lotti working and contribute to the animation creation themselves.

Introduction area

As the artist is not widely known in the first part of the exhibition we show the visitors a short film animated in Reiniger's style about her life, her techniques and inventions.

Silhouette theatre

In the second part of the exhibition, we are going to implement a large scale shadow theatre where visitors are the actors themselves. For doing that we put the background silhouette objects and leave a space for the visitors before the screen where they can walk and play.

On the very back, there is an area light that creates the silhouette. The structure of the theatre resembles Lotte's invention - "trick table" which she used for the animation. In this way we are giving people to experience her technique and be a movie by themselves. We film visitors playing and show them it in real-time in the theatre area. So people can see themselves while playing. Later they can download their piece of play through the app. In front of the theatre, there is a resting area where visitors can relax, watch other people play and film them.

Immersive space with artist's movies

After the visitors got familiar with the artist and her techniques we want them to experience her movie. To do that we created a cinema with cozy pillows to lay down and the projection on the ceiling. It shows a compilation of her most famous movies. The gentle light around the room corresponds to the movie main color. We introduce a corresponding fragrance to create a more rich experience.

On the walls of the room, there are Lotte's quotes. They invite people to come closer. When they approach it the birds from Lotte's movie appear and follow the visitors. We detect their movements with an infrared camera and interpret it with TSPS and Unity.

Interactive part - let them create their own movie

The interactive part consists of 2 stands. On one stand participants can draw the accessories for the character that is going to act in the movie. They are free to draw whatever they want in the given dimensions.

On another stand, they can see the movie with their character and adjust the backgrounds and foreground. The logic and the structure of the stand are referring to Lotte's "trick table" again.