The Art of Immersion: how to build powerful story experiences

Meet the world builders breaking us free from our screens

Image © Adam Westbrook

For a long time, audiences have been silent partners in the storytelling experience. In darkened cinemas we sat, passively consuming a story just the way someone else wanted. But now we want back in, and storytellers are learning to design experiences that make space for The Artist Formerly Known as The Audience. Here are some of them.

On one cold November night in London, journalist Nick Curtis was on his way to prison.

“We were herded into a hallway by yelling guards,” he writes, “told to strip to our underwear and put our clothes and possessions in numbered sacks that contained our prison uniforms. Then we were marched through showers where a naked man lay crouched, bleeding, on the floor, to cells where we were banged up.”

If this sounds like a horrific experience for Curtis and the 400 others, you might be surprised to know that they paid to go through it, part of a growing demand for London’s most popular underground event, Secret Cinema.