With 360-degree floor-to-ceiling screens all in cutting-edge 8K resolution, Outernet London has become known for hosting the city's best high-definition and immersive installations and displays.
On Thursday (January 11) the giant Tottenham Court space will launch its latest exciting project, Forsaken: a short film by award-winning director Roland Lane illuminating the strange and wonderful life cycle of jellyfish – one of the planet's most fascinating creatures.
At a quick glance, jellyfish are just the weird-looking blobs trailing long stingers that make swimming in some waters a bit of a risk. But look a little closer and they are revealed to be one of the Earth's most extraordinary marine animals: they are tens of millions of years old, having lived on Earth before the dinosaurs. Some are bioluminescent; they have no heart, brain, bones or lungs; and they are made up of 95 per cent water.
In Forsaken, Outernet is telling the story of the remarkable sea creature's life cycle. It's a captivating tale: jellyfish have the unbelievable ability to take a step back in their development if their environment becomes too testing. They can hunker down on the seafloor for years, transforming into small, domed-shaped cysts while they wait for conditions to improve. One species, the Turritopsis dohrnii, has even been nicknamed as immortal for its ability to reverse its life cycle.
Made in collaboration with Greenpeace, the new film conveys a powerful ecological message while being aesthetically gorgeous: "Species are being lost at an unprecedented rate, the oceans are in crisis, but all is not lost. Life in the oceans can recover...but we must act now," says Outernet.
While jellyfish are not currently a species under threat, this isn't the case for many of the other inhabitants of the seas. Forsaken will draw attention to the fragility and beauty of nature by exploring the life of just one of the 240,000 known species currently living in the ocean (incredibly, 80 per cent of Earth's oceans are still unexplored and unmapped so there's likely to be thousands more). The piece also features official statistics from governmental biodiversity and ecosystem bodies, looking at species extinction caused by climate change.
Award-winning photographer and director Roland Lane uses innovative filming methods in his work: his virtual reality film Spatium (which celebrated the work of legendary hat designer Philip Treacy) premiered at SXSW in 2017 and he directed the first rap video ever filmed with 3D Volumetric Capture (a technique for filming a 3D space) for London artist Tino Kamal's track V.I.P.
In 2021 his mixed reality installation SONZAI opened at the V&A, and in 2023 he won Art Council England's Content Creator of the Year award.The animation in Forsaken has been created by Cinesite, the film studio behind animations The Addams Family franchise and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank.
