The Abbey Road project was the next step on from the Rope Project. Having re-familiarised myself with SketchUp, I wanted to choose a space that was relatively simple to recreate but had news value. I am a fan of The Beatles and spent two years listening to nothing but The Beatles during the height of the COVID pandemic, so they were in my thoughts. Studio 2 at EMI Studios was the main space that the group worked in, so I thought it would be interesting to recreate this space from a particular time and speculate how it might be used to tell a story. Like the Rope Project, I was able to access blueprints of the space- (online) and build up the studio model from those. I also referred to contemporary photographs, particularly from 1966, of the studio space in use. This will have been contemporaneous with the recording of the Revolver LP.
Studio 2 is a relatively simple space. The main area is a large rectangle, which was easy to model using the extrusion method I developed when producing the Rope set. However, there were some difficulties and idiosyncrasies, including a control room on the second floor looking down onto the main studio. In addition to modelling within the space, I used the software’s connectivity to Google Warehouse to add some prefabricated elements to the studio (guitars, mic stands etc). Towards the end of the project, when I was looking for ways to distribute the space in VR, I used and explored a variety of high-definition rendering plugins.
Feelings
Using SketchUp for this project was challenging. Crafting the control room was difficult, and this element was not finished to the level that I would have liked. I will return to the project and remodel the control room as a separate space. The particular difficulties were around authenticity, i.e., ensuring that the control room dimensions matched those of the actual control room from 1966. Although the control room is in the plans of Abbey Road from that period, few accessible photographic sources show the positioning of doors and equipment. There is a specific mixing console in the studio, and photographs of this console are available for study. It is a challenging object to model from scratch and is a project in itself. Additionally, the studio has unusual arrangements of baffles and drapes, which had to be modelled individually. This was more successful, and I am happy with how it turned out.
Evaluation
I worked on this project in parallel to another set in an outdoor environment (based on the death of Chris McCandless). The interior modelling was ultimately more successful, and it supports my more comprehensive observation that VR development is best confined to finite spaces.
I can imagine an augmentation of this project that begins in the boundaries of the Abbey Road courtyard, outside the steps of the building that leads to doorway/portal transitioning into the next space (Studio 2). Similarly, I would want to create the control room as a third distinct space with significant interactive optionality (again, accessible via a doorway/portal).
This is a 360-degree image. Click and drag to look around the scene.
Application
Ultimately, it is and will be essential to ensure that in modelling any space to match the authenticity required for journalism, a combination of accurate measurements, whether via blueprints or digital capture, and good photography of objects, surfaces, and textures is available. In a reporting situation, when a journalist can go to a scene and photogrammetrically or photographically capture that scene, this may not be an issue. The difficulty lies in recreating spaces that no longer exist or are difficult to access. Abbey Road Studio 2 is one such case.
Conclusions
As a proof of concept, the Abbey Road project showed that it was possible to rapidly prototype a space for storytelling. However, the space I envisioned was more like a museum or gallery space than a narrative space. It allowed players to explore historical nuggets of information attached to and related to a specific space. For it to be journalistic, the space could be repurposed to tell the story, for example, of a specific recording session. This would mean scripting and producing content that led players through the narrative within the space. It is common within games for spaces to tell stories retrospectively, that is, for a space to be empty (of other characters) and for players to be able to experience embedded stories through documents and objects. This might be one approach we could take; however, to keep players on the critical story path, that would mean restricting their navigation options (as a rule) within the space.