Punchdrunk: The Drowned Man at Temple Studios

The brief

Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, played inside Temple Studios, a former Royal Mail sorting office at 31 London Street beside Paddington station, dressed as a four-floor 1960s Hollywood film studio. Audiences roamed freely, and no two visits were the same.

Punchdrunk wanted that world preserved so people could return to it: every room, corridor and hidden corner, explorable online.

The shoot

We spent just over a week inside the set, working around ten hours a day with a camera and tripod. Every space was captured as a bracketed HDR panorama so the theatrical lighting held its detail from the darkest corners to the practical lamps. Tripod shadows and nadir holes were removed in post so each scene reads as if you are standing in it.

The tour

The finished capture ran to over 1,000 panoramas, secret rooms and tunnels included, with clickable details such as phones and car doors that reveal more of the world. To keep the experience smooth in the browser, the tour was split into a separate tour for each floor, linked together as one journey. The project was kept under wraps for nearly three years and launched on 19 February 2017, the 180th anniversary of Büchner’s death, first to Punchdrunk’s keyholders and supporters and then to the public.

The complete panorama set is also held as a documentary archive of the production.

Why it matters

A standard scan could not have done this. Temple Studios needed a photographer who could plan a capture at this scale, hold the atmosphere of a theatre lit for performance, and build a tour that works as a piece of storytelling in its own right. It is the kind of project our bespoke virtual tours are built for.