Launching on 21 April at Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes, Draw Me Close blurs the worlds of live performance, virtual reality and animation to create a vivid memoir about the relationship between a mother and her son in the wake of her terminal-cancer diagnosis. Weaving theatrical storytelling with cutting-edge technology, the project takes a deceptively simple and humanistic approach to the immersive medium: it allows the audience member to experience life as a five-year-old Jordan, inside a live, animated world.
Created by award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill, described as “the future of Canadian theatre,” Draw Me Close is the first major co-production between the National Film Board of Canada and the UK’s National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, in collaboration with multidisciplinary creative studio All Seeing Eye, led by its founder, Ollie Lindsey, with illustrations by Teva Harrison and Olie Kay. The experience is unlike anything the form has seen before, integrating 
live performance and VR into one seamless narrative, with the audience member as performer — an actor in the immersive world. This unique collaboration between the NT and the NFB began as a Research and Development Lab, spearheaded by the NT’s head of digital development, Toby Coffey and the NFB’s producer, David Oppenheim to advance the language of creative non-fiction VR. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible with dramatic storytelling, the experiential project, produced by Coffey and Oppenheim and co-produced by Johanna Nicholls of the National Theatre and the NFB’s Justine Pimlott, has emerged from the NFB / NT Lab as a ground-breaking exploration of the theatrical potential of VR and beyond. For rising international talent Tannahill, the studio project commission marks his VR debut and first collaboration with the NT and the NFB. The world premiere of Draw Me Close at Tribeca Storyscapes is the first chapter of what is to be a feature-length immersive experience about Tannahill’s relationship with his mother, to be developed in 2018.
“There’s no other story that weighs more heavily on my mind right now than my relationship with my mother—a story that’s still in the process of unfolding. Draw Me Close has been an extraordinary opportunity for me to reckon with all of the challenging and ultimately unknowable questions around mortality,” says Jordan Tannahill.
This immersive experience is convincingly brought to life through live performance combined with a real-time motion-capture system, Orion, which utilises HTC Vive and is currently being developed by IKinema. This room-scale VR experience transforms an ordinary room into a 3D virtual world. Audience members enter the performance space and put on a VR headset to become a young Jordan, navigating seamlessly through both physical and virtual environments. As they walk through the physical set, they use the motion-tracked controllers to manipulate objects and take action in the virtual space. They are guided by Jordan’s mother, played by an actress. As the mother engages with the audience member in the physical world, her movements are translated by motion capture into the virtual world. In this first chapter of Draw Me Close, both actor and audience member experience an early childhood memory as they bring it to life.
“I’m very proud of what we have achieved with Draw Me Close. Jordan is an incredible storyteller and his approach to audience experience and immersive narrative aligns completely with the ethos of the NT’s Immersive Storytelling Studio. At the Studio, we work with artists to understand what emerging technologies can mean for their craft of storytelling; artistic exploration leading to audience experience,” mentions Toby Coffey. “At this stage in the development of the medium, that’s incredibly important to me. Working with Jordan and the NFB has been a wonderful example of what that approach realises. I get such pride in seeing audience reactions to something that is, on the one hand, a fundamentally personal and interactive narrative experience and, on the other, a very progressive and completely relevant use of technology in storytelling.”
