Grand Theft Hamlet team to collaborate with Live Cinema UK for Immersive Arts grant

Director of Live Cinema UK Lisa Brook will be joining creators of SXSW award winning Grand Theft Hamlet Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane and production company Project 1961 as Creative Producer for Be the Players Ready, one of 83 artist-led projects across the UK to be allocated a share of £1.2 million in the first round of Immersive Arts funding – a scheme supporting artists of all backgrounds and experience to work with immersive technologies.

With three distinct grant amounts available – £5,000, £20,000 and £50,000 – the funding supports artists at different stages of their creative development: to explore, experiment or expand how they make work that uses technology to actively engage an audience.

In this, the first round of Immersive Arts funding, £1,180,000 has been awarded as follows:

• 50x £5,000 – Explore grants
• 24x £20,000 – Experiment grants
• 9x £50,000 – Expand grants

The 83 successful projects will be exploring many different art forms, including dance, theatre, visual arts, music, games, animation, film, sculpture and live art. They will work with a broad range of technologies including virtual, augmented and mixed reality, spatial audio, interactive projections, machine vision, responsive environments, artificial intelligence, haptics and connected textiles.

Co-directors of the 2024 BIFA-nominated, 5 star-reviewed documentary Grand Theft Hamlet Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane successfully applied for an Experiment grant, and invited Live Cinema UK to join them in developing a new live durational performance of Hamlet. Starring Sam, they will create a hybrid in-game and real-life performance simultaneously engaging both real-world and virtual audiences through interactive technology and enhanced accessibility. The project team will work together over four months to develop the initial R&D performance, exploring virtual production, projection, traditional theatre lighting and movement design and their possible integrations with both players online via Playstation 5, and live in-person audiences.

Immersive Arts received 2517 applications from across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – a much higher than expected volume, revealing a high level of interest and demand for opportunities from artists seeking to make and share extraordinary immersive work.

Principal Investigator and Director of Immersive Arts, Verity McIntosh, Associate Professor of Virtual and Extended Realities at UWE Bristol, said:
“We are delighted that people have trusted us with their brave and brilliant ideas and are very excited to now see so many of these ideas being taken forward. These artists are exploring immersive technologies in a myriad of exciting and distinctive ways, developing a community of practice, and practice-led research that we hope will last for many years to come.”

A full list of first-round Immersive Arts funded projects is available on the Immersive Arts website.

Funding for Immersive Arts is provided through a collaboration between the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Arts Council England (ACE), the Arts Council of Wales (ACW), Creative Scotland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI). Funding from Creative Scotland, ACW and ACNI is provided by The National Lottery.

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