case study

Bill's Attic

An Arts Council England funded arts project in Cornwall, preserving the creative collection of theatre-maker Bill Mitchell.

Interactive 3DWeb developmentArts and culture

Explore the attic (opens in a new tab)

Bill's Attic website on a laptop, showing the cluttered attic with a hanging tin bucket and a painted clown figure behind the project's mission statement

Bill's Attic website on a phone, with a tribute to Bill Mitchell, 1951 to 2017

The story

an attic full of ideas

Bill Mitchell was Artistic Director of Kneehigh and founder of the landscape theatre company WildWorks. For years his attic in Cornwall was filled with thousands of objects he used to spark ideas for his shows. After he died in 2017, the people closest to him wanted the collection to stay open to artists rather than boxed up and hidden.

Bill's Attic was the result: a physical creative space at Krowji in Redruth, plus a set of digital experiences that let anyone explore the original attic, wherever they are.

The challenge

from scan to walkthrough

Before the collection moved, the original attic was 3D scanned using photogrammetry and recorded with ambisonic audio. The challenge was turning that scan into something people could actually explore in a browser: a walkthrough of the attic where clicking on objects reveals new artworks they've inspired, from film and poetry to music, zines and performance.

What I did

Built the web technology and server side behind the online experience
Integrated the 3D scan using the Sketchfab Viewer API, so visitors can move around the attic in their browser
Connected highlighted objects in the scan to artists' work, so the tour doubles as a living gallery
Built the site to sit alongside the project's dome and VR experiences as one connected whole

The team

This was a genuinely collaborative project. The digital work was led by Scott Fletcher, with design by Matt Wilson, photogrammetry by Steve Flanagan, photography by Steve Tanner and Ian Kingsnorth, audio by Ciaran Clarke, and VR and dome experiences by Benjamin Walbrook and Zubr. The project was overseen by Creative Kernow and FEAST, and funded by Arts Council England.