- The Opera House Project started
with an idea that came from the Opera House Trust, actually,
to document the story of the Opera House digitally online
so that we could examine it, but also in 3D.
The moment you look at the story of the Opera House,
you realise it's one of the very great stories of the 20th century.
Although on the surface the idea of it being a Greek tragedy
might sound a bit dramatic, it actually is.
Because there was such an earnest quest for perfection.
That aspiration to perfection and then the failure to achieve it
is a really strong story and that's what happened here.
We pitched the idea of telling the story
from 1954, which was a time of pure aspiration,
and Cahill seizing the idea,
fed by Eugene Goossens, that Sydney needed an opera house,
all the way through to Utzon's withdrawal from the project,
all the way through to the modern day with his re-engagement,
really all the way through to the present-day,
which is an epic story in terms of architecture, design,
engineering, politics, but also human stories,
an emotional story like a Greek tragedy on some levels.
- (Woman) In these first 12 chapters,
explore the detailed story of the origins of Sydney Opera House.
- We told a story pictorially with audio and we tell a story with video
and we mix those into a mixed-media presentation.
Clearly there were old reels, wonderful reels of black-and-white film,
a trove of photographs from the New South Wales State Library,
state records and other sources including the Opera House,
the Wolanski Foundation,
a very mixed media bag, and then an audio history as well,
an oral history that had been recorded over time.
So you don't have one perfect media,
and, of course, online isn't about one perfect media anyway,
it's about synthesising those together.
A lot of the story elements are quite subtle.
There are some very great people involved in the story,
very eminent minds,
and they are obviously subtle people themselves.
So having the story told about them is only part of that story,
you also have to include their voices and their opinions,
and some of them are in contradiction with each other.
So presenting all of that enriches context massively.
A book isn't really able to do that.
And a documentary on television isn't really able to do that.
Sometimes they get close, but again,
you don't have that luxury of on-demand space to really go as deep as you want.
The other side is the 3D.
So the 3D we approached in two different ways.
One part of the 3D is interactive,
so you can go into this first-person environment.
We use a plug-in called Unity 3D for that,
which is almost like a game engine, if you like,
a game engine that allows you to produce an environment
and then put someone first-person inside that environment.
So we used that to produce a studio room
which has models in it and books in it, pictures on the wall,
and explorational multimedia,
so that you can go in and learn facets of the House.
The other side of the 3D was what we call rendered 3D,
so video of 3D models,
where the camera is flown around that model and we record the camera's path.
And you watch that as video on the site.
And that was done to make more understandable and spatial
some of these very complex ideas.
How do you derive the shells from the plane of sphere,
which is the idea behind the spherical solution?
What does that actually look like in spatial terms?
How did that help the engineers prefabricate the entire building
and therefore build it in an affordable way?
Those are explored in a spatial way through these 3D videos
and through that 3D environment.
And we built all those models from scratch.
This is a website that works from your smartphone up.
It will work on your smartphone, your tablet, your laptop,
your desktop PC or your 55, 60, whatever-inch screens,
and that's quite a challenge.
But nobody had developed a way of handling media as we needed it,
so we actually built that system ourselves.
And we're really excited with the way that turned out.
One of the things that online allows you to do
is synthesise a story and tell a story from a 360-degree perspective,
or certainly from as many angles as possible.
And that's definitely been done here for the first time, no question.