Walking with Spirits was an audio/video ghost walk, created by our theatre company Through the Wire. We created this piece in our Second Year of university in our module ‘Drama and Digital Media’. The audience were asked to walk through York at night-time, instructed through an iPad by a spirit-guide played by Jake Ord. We layered the walk with technological components such as live actors, a soundscape created track, fictional/real stories. The sound output was a pre-recorded Ghost Walk we created with accurate representations of the timings of the walk. We created a world where fiction and reality were combined, creating a fabricated mixed reality catering to the ghost walk style of delivery. We created this mixed reality from creating audio/visual elements, playing with the audience’s senses and their perception towards reality.

I think what made this project so successful was the teamwork our theatre company put into each individual part of the process. I was the sound technician for the project and edited all of the sound together, whilst operating the camera in majority of the shots. Jess Wilkins sorted out the costume and logistic side of the process. Bronte Hobson wrote the story and the text used within the project. Jake Ord edited the video elements and did the voice acting work. Our small group of four dynamic worked extremely well as we had clarity of our roles.

Creating a digital performance like this was a difficult task, it required many different technical skills and made think more like a theatre maker than a performer. Walking with Spirits made me ask different questions like: How do I make something fit into a specific aesthetic? These types of questions come up for me every day now as a theatre maker, they give me reason to research different forms and ways of creating something unique. As a concept, I believe the different qualities that we brought to the piece were unique. Adding to that, it is something that I’d like to take further by trying it in different cities and even rural areas.