The Flow of Metal (Fluid dynamics in VR)

One of the technical challenges in making a VR experience about working with molten metal is, at some point, you’re going to have to make some molten metal! Below you can see a visual demo of how we managed to create the look and feel of molten metal inside a headset. It may sound simple, but although VR is incredibly clever, the reality is that the headsets we are using are no more powerful than a high end mobile phone. Getting something that lights up and moves like molten metal is much harder than it sounds. Add to that the fact that in VR we need to make sure the frame rate at playback is kept very high, otherwise people feel sick, and suddenly a simple idea creates a big challenge.

Luckily, MBD has expertise in house. Couple that with a whole lot of patience, some head scratching, a few failed attempts, and a lot of coffee, and you end up with what you can see below. We are never going to exactly recreate the conditions of a steel works (at least not without contravening a lot of Health and Safety guidelines!) but we can get close to the look and feel in a way that helps people understand just what it was like to be at the heart of this heavy industry.

Another triumph for the team, but more challenges to come.

Animating the Steelworks for Act 2

It would be incredibly difficult to tell the story of a steel works without depicting the steel works themselves. Despite our extensive research into this area, we remain novices when it comes to the process of turning raw iron into steel (what exactly does a ‘Bessemer’ do?). Not to be put off, you can see from the images and animations below that we are really starting to get under the hood of those colossal machines at the heart of the steelworks. If you checked out the experiments in fluid dynamics (or molten metal) in one of the previous posts, then now is your chance to see what happens when we mix all of that molten goodness into our working models of the steel making process.

Lighting up the inner workings of the steel plant, with our molten metal.

If you checked out the experiments in fluid dynamics (or molten metal) in one of the previous posts, then now is your chance to see what happens when we mix all of that molten goodness into our working models of the steel making process.

Concept Art and Look

We talked earlier about our process of developing the script, but this is only half of what makes the final VR experience, the rest is how it looks and feels.

When putting visuals to our work, the first place we start is with concept art. This is usually a mix of reference images, quick sketches, colour swatches and anything else we can get our hands on!

A plan of the Steel Works SIte

The things we come up with at this stage won’t all necessarily end up in the final experience, but it’s an important part of the process for us to have somewhere to start working from. As we are recreating a real location as part of this project, one of our most valuable assets is a plan of the old Corby steel works (something we already had thanks to all our hard work researching this project). As discussed in an earlier blog, we’ve got our rough three act structure in place and known WHAT we will be saying in each of them, we now need to know WHERE they will be taking place. As a digital organisation we create a lot of our concept art through digital tools, such as Affinity. This allows us to create art as if they have been created using different mediums (paint, pencils, etc) but also iterate and copy and adjust much easier than using physical mediums.

While we were writing the script we had a rough idea of the where the acts would take place: 

ACT 1

The first act, telling the history of Corby, will be taking place in a real location in Old Corby (on the junction of Stock’s Lane and High Street) through the ages.

As people can move around the experience, we want a way to focus their attention on different areas. Our working idea is to place a firepit in the centre of the space and have it show a map of Corby as it changes. Towards the end of the scene we also want the steel works to loom large over the space.

A Screenshot of our Old Corby setting, with the looming blast furnaces on the horizon.

ACT 2

The second act will transition into the steel works at its prime. Throughout our interviews and research one thing that really stood out was people talking about how the steel works were almost exclusively lit by the light of molten steel. We want to reflect this through the use light and colour. Focussing on reds, oranges and sparks flying, we want people to almost feel the heat coming off the moving and clanking machinery.

Sparks fly from the molten steel.

ACT 3

The final scene will be set in the ruins of the steel works just after the demolition. Following the dark and oppressive environment of Act 2 in the steel works, we want to open up to the sky and have a much more muted palette. However, to match the hopeful tone of Act 3, we also want to have some bright bold colours. Our idea at the moment is to focus this around the Corby Candle.

We are imagining colour emanating from the candle and adding colour back to the world until finally everything is a vivid dreamscape. This will reflect the colour being brought back into Corby by the people who still live there.

Paint strokes in vivid colours radiate from the Corby Candle.

Now that we have the building blocks for what we want to create, the work begins of pulling the raw materials together, heating them up and forging them into one story; one experience.

Involving the Community

The adage of “nothing about us without us” is one of the key tenets we are following with this project. We are very conscious that, as a Leicester based arts organisation, we are telling the story of a place we do not call home. Throughout the lifecycle of this project, and long after we have written this blog post, we have been committed to engaging and bringing along the community of Corby with this project.

We have partnered with a number of organisations based in Corby, worked with community groups and attended events where we can meet members of the town face-to-face. Of course, part of the work has been to capture the stories of those with lived experiences of the steel works. We’ve already talked about that in our blog about interviews, but we wanted to spend some time here talking about all the work we’ve been doing with the community and how warm the response has been from the people of Corby.

The people of Corby have been incredibly generous with their time and we quite simply couldn’t have made this project without their engagement and the kind donation of their stories. They are as intrinsic to this project as the iron seam running under the town itself and we wanted to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you!!

Story and Script

We’ve been finding out a lot about the stories surrounding Corby and steel working in the UK, but the time has finally come for us to start forging how our story is going to look. At the heart of everything we do at MBD is storytelling, whether it's our story or somebody else's, we are passionate about bringing our audiences on a journey. With this project, it’s really important that the voices of Corby are what is front and centre. We’ve captured some amazing stories through our interviews and really want them to shine in the final VR experience.

With this in mind, we now have to stitch together snippets of our recorded interviews into a cohesive narrative that will allow the audience to come along on the journey, whether they’ve lived in Corby all their lives, or if this is their first experience hearing about this little Northamptonshire town. Since the inception of the project we’ve had an idea of how we want to structure the final experience, starting with the origins of Corby and touching on the Viking history and founding of the town. We then wanted to put the audience in the shoes of a steel worker and help them imagine what it would have been like standing in a steel works and, more importantly, what does everything do. Obviously the story of the steel works in Corby can’t shy away from the closures and the mass loss of jobs, but through immersing ourselves in this place and its people, we want to finish off with the hopeful tone that is present whenever you talk to the people about the place they live.

Keeping this rough three act structure in our mind, we now scour through the interviews to find snippets of what the people have said that will feed into the story. Luckily we need to be listening and cataloguing the interviews for inclusion in the audio archive (more on that in a future blog), so it's two birds with one stone!

Over a number of weeks we slowly start to tease out audio snippets that work well together. However, just putting interview excerpts together isn’t going to tell the whole story. We’re still going to need a narrator to add context and help breach the gap between different peoples parts of the same story. Our aim is to say as little as we can and let the interviews stand on their own, so we take an iterative approach. Adding narration between two audio clips. Taking it out. Adding in new audio clips and moving the existing ones around. Just like the process of removing impurities from molten steel, we refine and work on the script until we have something we are happy with. Of course, this is just the first draft of the script, as we progress through there will be necessary rewrites and tweaks, but we’re very happy with where we are and excited to take the next steps.

We have the cast of our experience. Now to smelt all the research we’ve captured so far and begin the forging process!

Interviews

Having started the project off by absorbing knowledge from various sources (our visit to Magna Science Adventure Centre; delving into the archive at Corby Heritage Centre) it’s time for us to start talking to the people who lived and worked in Corby and, in particular, those with connection to the steel works.

There has been utilisation of the natural iron deposits in Corby since long before Corby was a town. The village of ‘Corbei’ is noted in the Domesday book in the early 11th Century as an ironworks site. Industrial scale iron extraction began in the late 1800’s with Stewarts & Lloyds opening their new blast furnace in 1910. The steelworks were already in place, and the population swelling, before Corby became a town in 1939. However, all things cannot last and the steel works closed in 1980 after manufacturing nearly 2.5 million tonnes of steel.

With the steel works, at times, employing about 40% of the towns population, most lives of those who live in Corby will have some connection to the plant, be it: working there themselves; parents who work there; or just the light emanating over the town at night. But with the unending march of time, many of the people with the closest association to the steel works (those who worked closely making the steel) are sadly getting older or are no longer with us. It is a key aim of this project to capture this heritage at risk and preserve it for the future. Through working with our partners in Corby and putting ourselves into the community, we have been lucky enough to speak to a number of people with varying different experiences of working and living with the steel works. A full playlist of all the interviews can be found in the archive, but we wanted to tell you a little bit more about some of the people we spoke to:

Frank

We sat down with Frank in the Library at Corby Cube. He was a tall older man, proudly displaying his union badge. Although initially quite quiet, and speaking in a raspy husky voice, acquired from breathing in particulate from the steelworks, he proudly talks about the sense of camaraderie in the steelworks. Even while working there, he was working towards making the working environment better for his fellow steelworkers. Originally hailing from Ireland, he’s now a tried and true Corbite (along with the Corby accent - which if you’ve heard it you know!), and you can hear the pride in his voice when he talks about the people of Corby as “the best in the country, the most generous”.

“ “often wondered what hell would look like, but now I know”. ”
— Frank

We’ve read a lot about the steel making process, but this is an opportunity to talk to someone who was actually there and actually did it. One area we’ve been puzzling over is how steel ingots get made into tubes. Luckily Frank is a wealth of information and describes the rolling process in detail. We know we want to show some of the steel making process in the final experience, and having this first hand account will help us make it as true to life as possible. But more than just technical descriptions of how it worked, we get how it felt to be in the steel works. Frank describes a conversation he had with a fellow worker that they “often wondered what hell would look like, but now I know”. Ordinarily this would be a damning description of your workplace, but its said with a smile, a chuckle and wistful look in the eye that shows the affection the steelworkers had for this “hell”.

Linda

We meet Linda in the Corby care home she is currently living in. We’ve also interviewed her husband, who worked in the steelworks, but for this project we want to make sure we’re capturing the larger impact the steelworks had on all the people of Corby. It’s really powerful hearing how, even for those who didn’t work there themselves, the steelworks were an ever present part of their life.

“ “women and men were parading around with placards saying don’t close the works’”.”
— Linda

Growing up in Corby, Linda remembers how the furnaces would “.. light up the whole sky …”. She also told us about the closing of the works and that “women and men were parading around with placards saying ‘don’t close the works'”. Although we don’t learn much about the mechanics of steelworking from this interview, what we learn about what the steelworks mean to Corby is immeasurable. We’re not just making this project for people that worked there, it's for all of the people in Corby, both past, present and future.

Alan

We meet Alan at the Corby Cube. Having found him through our research, when we reached out to him, he enthusiastically volunteered to get involved. Although he left the steelworkers for academia, he still, to this day, thinks of himself as a steelworker because “that’s where it began”.

““[The other steel workers went as far as] doing a whip round to send [him] to night school”.”
— Alan

He’s incredibly articulate in how he talks about his experience in the steelworks and, where his passion really lies, in his work with the unions. Coming directly from school into the steelworks, Alan talks fondly of the care shown to him by the older steelworkers. Having not fitted in as well at school, the familial atmosphere of the steelworks was a welcome change. The other steel workers went as far as “doing a whip round to send [him] to night school”. Unlike others who started at the same time as him, he was not scared of the hotter and more volatile areas of the steelworks, in fact he sought them out and, as a result, has worked across so many different areas of the steelworks. This means he can, and does, talk at length about the full breath of the steel making process, giving us valuable insight into the mechanics, but also the sounds and smells of the plant, something we want to capture in the final experience.

These are just some of the stories we captured, but there’s lots more that can be found in the archive. We’ve learned all about the mechanics of steel working; we’ve delved into the history of Corby; and we’ve heard the stories of those who have lived and worked in the steel works. Now all we have to do is bring it all together into an experience that honours the past but also looks to the future of the town. The bubbling pot of molten ideas is simmering away and the time has finally come for us to tease out the story and start forging the experience.

Research Visits to Corby Heritage Centre / Archive

Having whet our whistle for the history of steelmaking, we thought it was time to get into the history of Corby. One of the project partners for Steel Town Tales, is the North Northamptonshire Council funded Corby Heritage Centre run by Billy Dalziel. Housed in the oldest residential building in Corby, the Heritage Centre has a number of exhibits telling the history of the town, including a large section on the steelworks and the people who came to work there, but what we are really after is the archive!

Boxes of photographs, documents and artefacts line the shelves of the archive. We’ve spent a good number of days looking through, talking to Billy and learning the stories behind the items in the archive. One of the outputs of this project, on the very website you are reading this blog, is to house an archive of pictures, interviews and other artefacts that contributed to the creation of the VR Experience. We will be updating this archive throughout the life of the project so, depending when you are reading this, have a look here and see what’s already made it into the archive.

To take you through everything we’ve seen in the archive would take an age (and spoil some of the wonder you can have by discovering them in the archive yourself), but we wanted to share a couple of the pieces that particularly resonated with us.

Certificate of Long Service
Amongst the various files and pictures lies a stained oak frame. Inside is a highly ornate, Colourful certificate of long service

Stewarts and Lloyds Limited - Colourful certificate of long service.

The level of detail absolutely astounds us. We never would have thought this would be the equivalent of a “sorry you’re leaving” card and a bunch of flowers. It would look more at home along the walls of a banqueting hall in a medieval castle. You’ll notice the five coat of arms dotted around the border. These are (clockwise from top) Glasgow, the City of London, Australia, South Africa and Birmingham. This reflects the history of Stewarts & Lloyds, being founded originally in South Africa, but the Glasgow coat of arms (featured prominently at the top) really speaks to Corbys reputation of “Little Scotland” - coming from the influx of Scottish workers in the 1930s to work the steel works. The thing that strikes us the most is the clear level of respect the firm had for the workers. Many people we have spoken to have talked about the steel works being a core part of who they are, and the steel works clearly knew how much the people meant to it.

Steelworkers Protective Gear
On a shelf in the archive sits, what looks like, a large rolled up ball of tin foil. As its unfurled it reveals a jacket and pair of trousers, all made of the same, shiny silver material.

Steelworkers Protective Gear - Shiny silver jacket and pair of trousers

These are the protective outfits brought in to help shield workers from the extreme heat emanating from the blast furnaces and molten steel. What really strikes us is that these only came into service in the late 1960s, nearly 50 years since the works first opened. We’ve seen archive pictures and footage before these were brought in, and the workers are walking around in waistcoats and flat caps, puffing on their pipes and staring at gleaming hot molten metal through a credit card sized piece of glass. Modern day health and safety this is not!

Having delved into the depths of Corby’s heritage there’s only one thing left on our list to set us up to tell this story - the people who live and work there. We’ve read and seen a lot of things, but the next step is to talk to the people who lived and worked here. The fire is heating up and it's time to start gathering the stories to stoke the forge.

Magna Visit…

We’ve come to Magna Science Adventure Centre as a team to immerse ourselves in the process of steelmaking. As we approach the colossal black frame of Magna, nestled within the imposing structure of the former Templeborough steelworks in Sheffield, the scale of what we are trying to create finally hits home. MBD is no stranger to working at scale. We’ve been doing large scale building projection for years, including projecting on iconic buildings such as Bletchley Park and Nottingham Council House, but steelworks are something else!

Outside approaching Magna Science Adventure Centre

We begin with a tour of the site, learning about the history of the Templeborough steelworks. Much like Corby, and other steel producing towns, the natural geography and abundance of iron deposits helped the town grow.

As we walk through the grand halls of the old steelworks, we notice that the rooms, once filled with bessemers and arc furnaces, are now adorned with pictures of steelworkers plying their trade. The sheer size of the rooms strikes us once again; towering four or five stories high, unchanged since the days of active steel production, bearing the remnants of extinguished fires. Small cracks allow streams of light to filter in, reminding us of how the steelworks were once illuminated by the glow of molten steel. The atmosphere we're aiming to capture is beginning to take shape in our minds.

MBD Team explore the vast halls at Magna Science and Adventure Centre

Having finished our tour, we are let loose to visit all the different parts of the Centre. There are four pavilions dedicated to the four elements (Air, Fire, Water, Earth) with experiences and experiments to do in all of them (and believe us, much fun was had in the Water Pavilion splashing around and operating JCB’s in the Earth Pavilion), but the real star of the show is The Big Melt. An immersive show using light, sound and fire showing the steelmaking process using one of the original steelworks arc furnaces. We stand around and take in the sights, smells and feelings that we will be trying to recreate. Getting the sense of place for a world we are trying to bring people into is key to ensuring people have an engaging experience. Witnessing the power, sound and scale of an arc furnace has definitely moved us forward in our understanding of what it must have been like to be in a working steelworks.

Air Pavilion at Magna Science Adventure Centre

We’ve been reading about steelworks for a number of weeks and we’ve got lots of questions, we’re conscious that we need to capture the stories of those who worked in and lived by the steelworks in Corby. We talk about how best to engage with former steelworkers and leave with 101 ideas buzzing around our heads. In just one short day we have gone from small conversations around the office about what our experience could be to overflowing with cool ideas and how we can help capture the sense of place for all who will see our final show. The spark of creation has been ignited and we are ready and raring to move ahead.

An Introduction to Steel Town Tales...

Steel Town Tales is an exciting heritage project focused on uncovering the rich history of steel production in Corby. Poised to capture not only the intricate details of the steel industry's past but also seamlessly weave them into the evolving identity of Corby today and ensure that the town's story resonates for generations to come.

Early Concept Art by MBD - Steel Town Tales VR Experience

Approaching the significant milestone of its 90 year anniversary in commercial steel production, Corby stands as a poignant reminder of a community steeped in industrial heritage. Unfortunately, remaining industry continues to grapple with challenges, and the town has already seen the demolition of many historic structures, placing Corby's industrial past at risk of fading away. Steel Town Tales will ensure that Corby's rich history is not only documented but also presented in an engaging and immersive way.

With a remarkable track record of over twenty years in historical storytelling, MBD recognises the urgency to preserve and safeguard cultural heritage and is committed to using technology to unveil lesser-known stories from our past and connect them to our present-day experience.

Made possible through the generous support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, alongside contributions from local organisations and the wider community, Steel Town Tales emerged as a crucial heritage project for the MBD team.

 

At the forefront of this effort will be MBD's flagship multi-person VR experience. Alongside the flagship VR experience, the website will host the project archive, offering a wealth of heritage materials, including photos, videos and oral history interviews.

This project is designed for everyone, both adults and young people alike. We invite you to join our community participation workshops and activities set to take place throughout 2024 and beyond. We look forward to you being a part of it!