Horror instrument
In early 2018 I worked on a VR game developed at Aardman that was an puzzle adventure through a huge dilapidated tower. The tower, it turns out, was a huge instrument which you gradually ‘solve’ and then play. We were having difficulty envisioning how the specific mechanics and games might work in VR, so I decided to build an instrument that could be used as part of a ‘game’, to hopefully inspire and start a conversation amongst the dev team.
That turned into the first version of the Horror Machine. (see above)
That then moved onto wanting to make more of a live instrument that could handle horror to beauty so I redesigned it, adding more plucky things and a guitar neck (realising that people had thought about this sort of thing before and actually guitars are a very efficient way of being able to play chords and melody in a small about of real estate), a piano wire on a cello bridge and a looping pedal and the second version was born!