Los Angeles Immersive Invitational

May 15, 2022

"We can guarantee this: it will be some of the most creative fun you have all year." - Noah Nelson, No Proscenium

“After Hours Theater Company is excited to announce the second annual Los Angeles Immersive Invitational.

In 2019, four teams were invited to create an immersive show in only 48 hours, competing for the title of LA’s most inventive creator. Two of the shows created during the weekend, “The Sleepover” and “Casting” went on to receive full stagings, with “The Sleepover” taking home the 2020 No Proscenium Award for Outstanding Achievement in Livestream Production.

Three years after its original staging, the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational is back, and bigger than ever. This year, the competition will be held in the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, where up to eight teams will be selected to conceptualize, rehearse, and perform an original 10-15 min. immersive production – all in 48 hours or less.”

What Was the Experience?

I worked with Rogue Artists as their sound designer on this immersive invitational. The experience meant coming in and learning the prompt and then building something from the ground up in so little time. I spent the first few hours setting up my speakers behind all the set dressing. We had a little section and split it up into four sections. Our theme was science experiment so we created S.C.O.B.Y Survivors. In the first room, the guests would come in and be birthed, my sound included ooey gooey slimy sounds and some farts, we wanted it to sound funny. This would then transition into a little lullaby as our “mother” spoke to the children. We had to incorporate stamping our guest’s “passports,” so in the next room, we had their “father” naming them and stamping their passports. The guests got to this next room by crawling through a tube to it. While they crawled and their dad named them, I had elevator music playing just to ease them into the next part. The third room included two scientists and then we had a live stream of aliens talking to them. Guests played games to see who the winner would be. I had family feud and game show music playing in the background for this. At the end we had the group pick a person to be eliminated, they would go to the last room where the operators (myself included) were. They would push a button that would “blow up” the rest of the people and the person chosen would survive. For the death, we had a giant big explosion that ended with the little jingle of when you die during old Mario and Luigi games.

Check out pictures of the experience below!