Draw Me Close
STUDIO — All Seeing Eye
CLIENT — National Theatre / National Film Board of Canada
— Photography by Ellie Kurttz
Written and directed by Jordan Tannahill, and co-created by the National Film Board of Canada and the National Theatre, 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 virtual reality technology, the project takes a deceptively simple and humanistic approach to the immersive medium: it allows the audience member to experience life as Jordan inside a live, animated world.
The performance used a live motion captured actor in combination with physical set elements, virtual reality visuals and spatialised audio to tell an emotional and powerful story.
Draw Me Close previewed at the Young Vic Theatre in 2019, as well as being selected for Tribeca 2017 and Venice Film Festival 2017.
‘Mind officially blown. Unlike any experience I’ve ever had’
— Huffington Post
Drawing a World
The project called for the audience to view the experience like a hand drawn cartoon. I was responsible for illustrating the world and characters with Tilt Brush, whilst also contributing to UX and design.
The world of Draw Me Close is an entirely hand drawn endeavour, encompassing hundreds of separate objects and multiple environments. Everything was painstakingly drawn at a 1:1 scale, allowing a sumptuous and living world to be created. Accurate details in objects around the environments such as posters, VHS tapes and magazine covers help to convey a sense of nostalgia for a past time and successfully establish a sense of place.
