No.1 Smithery — Installations / interactives
The Historic Dockyard Chatham
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Client
CHDT
Exhibition Design
LandNo.1 Smithery is the main exhibition gallery of the Historic Dockyards at Chatham. The dockyards were the production line for the British Navy for over 300 years and the site is an incredible historic location. ISO created all the media and interactive installations for the new Galleries.
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SS Jervis Bay
The SS Jervis Bay had a rich story of passing from Passenger Liner and Merchant Seaman to sacrificing itself against a German battleship in WWI to buy a convoy of ships time to escape. Its story is told via a four screen film employing a mix of timelapse, photography, archive material and motion graphics, with a stirring atmospheric soundtrack.
The film is presented across within a floating cube of screens, positioned above the National Maritime Museums scale model of the ship. This staging encourages visitors to examine the model in detail whist being surrounded by the film above. The cube also allows us to focus the soundtrack within this specific viewing space.
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Dazzle Ships
Dazzle Ships is a graphic film illustrating the bold visual treatment designed by the British art movement The Vorticists to be applied to British ships to try to confuse enemy submarines.
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The Kings Dockyard
In the 1770s King George III visited the Dockyards where he was presented with an amazing scale model of the site that presented it as a modern production line, where he could see the construction stages of his battleships. The visit and model so excited the King he guaranteed the Dock’s future and major re-investment in the Navy.
The Kings Dockyard uses the actual model and wraps around it a film that re-stages the Kings original visit. Using extreme close-up footage we shot of the model we trace the Kings journey and illustrate, with archive illustrations and eye witness reports alongside contemporary mapping images.
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Floor Flotilla
Floor flotilla presents visitors as they enter Mo 1 Smithery with a cluster of ship profiles (based on radar repeater images) travelling along the gallery floor. Using motion tracking cameras and specially build software the ships will sail around visitors, and even if they try to block their path they will change direction till they manage to make it from one end of the hall to the other.
When they reach the end of their journey they are revealed as ships plans and elevations on the large screen above. The plans revolve and spin revealing the 3Dimensional form of the ships before they in turn leave shot. The floor profiles and plans are based on actual ships, for which the models now reside at No1 Smithery and are available to visitors to view.
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