Behind the scenes: Virtual Reality

When visiting The Story of Emily, guests can experience a five-minute virtual reality film while sitting in a replica bell tent reminiscent of those used during the Anglo-Boer War.

During this unique 360° experience, you enter a historical world set in a British concentration camp in 1901. Guided by the words of Emily Hobhouse and the actors involved, you step back into a world utterly different from the present.

Experiencing this virtual reality is probably the closest one can get today to how it was to be forced into such a camp.

In 2024 the VR film was a finalist in the 8th International AIXR XR Awards, honouring excellence in Immersive Storytelling and cutting-edge museum experiences.

But how was this production made to be as close as possible to reality?

Approximately 37 miles South-East of Johannesburg, the setting was a farm in the Heidelberg district in South Africa, with wide open spaces and a grassland landscape, which was still very similar to what it was before. 

Women and children were in the camps from September 1900 until the middle of 1902, even months after the war, when many struggled to get home. The grass was trampled within days of being occupied, and only bare soil was left. Before filming, to prepare for the concentration camp site, the owner graciously cut the savannah grass for us and the team offloaded tons of soil on the site. 

Décor and props were sourced long in advance, and replica bell tents were erected to mimic a concentration camp of the period.

The film has four scenes written and directed by the award-winning South African playwright, Nicola Hanekom.

During the first scene viewers experience arriving at a camp with hundreds of other women and children after travelling for days on either an ox wagon or on open railway trucks, it is chaotic and confusing. People mill around, trying to offload their possessions, children get lost, and babies cry, British soldiers are also present.

On one side, the “railway line and train trucks” were built on-site. In fact, the line was only 20 meters long. One truck was constructed, while the rest were digitally added in post-production.

The story of Susanna, a Boer woman and her children – whom viewers would have seen previously in the War Rooms – is told in the VR.

The next scene shows an area of concentration camp life that is not often talked about or written about but which was a source of great humiliation and pain. The trench toilets, which the women had to use, gave them very little privacy.

In this scene there is little dialogue between the elderly woman (the well-known South African actress Dorothy Ann Gould) and Meghan Oberholzer (who plays Susanna in the War Rooms at The Story of Emily) but their superb acting tells the story, while viewers can hear British soldiers walking around the private space.

In the third scene, within a bell tent that Susanna, her mother, and the children share with another family, viewers see the intimate details and hardships experienced when the children fell ill. It is evening, and the rain is pouring down, the tent leaks and it is muddy. The other South African actresses in this scene are Amalia Uys and Joanie Combrink.

The last scene is further away from the camp, in the graveyard. But let's not give the ending away..

The trick of the camera

On location, the team dug approximately 15 graves; these were multiplied digitally in post-production, as were the number of tents to suit the accurate historical figures.

Apart from several professional child and adult actors in the cast, there were 50 extras, including children of all ages and the adults who accompanied them. The youngest was a 14-month-old baby and three toddlers.

Everyone wore period-correct, historical costumes, which were referenced from photographs of the time. Sylvia van Heerden, who has 35 years of experience in this industry, made the clothes for the professional actions, and the rest were hired. Laura Woods and her team were in charge of hair and makeup—this included no hair colouring for the females, no long or painted nails, and clean-shaven “British soldiers”, and no visible tattoos.

Because the production involved many children, the only window to do this was during the winter school holiday in July 2022. Everyone involved was on location in the pitch dark at 06:00, and left by 18:00.

Winter in the High Veld in South Africa is cold in the mornings and warmer by midday and the veld is often covered in frost.

Joost Meijer and his team from Public Agency in the Netherlands filmed the VR. As it is a 360° experience, a challenge with VR is that no one can “hide behind the camera”. Everything and everyone who was not supposed to be in a take had to be hidden – sometimes as far away as 800 metres away in base camp.

The team were able to use one of the bell tents as the production tent, and as a place for the actors to rest but it had to remain closed. Many of the scenes were emotional and trying and had to be done repeatedly, however, it was a magnificent cast and crew, totalling close to 80 people.

As the day became warmer, the team began to realise how these tents, without any other shade around, must have been terrible to live in, especially if you had sick children; there was no natural shade around, as in most of the camps during the Anglo-Boer War.

Just after one day in the veld on location, the team would become extremely dirty and when they returned to the hotel in the evenings, they would shower or bathe with clean water. When cleaning my face, the cotton wool would be completely brown. It was then that I realised again how impossible it was to expect the women and children to be clean without soap and water.  And yet they tried, amid the criticism that they “were dirty.”

We invite you to visit the War Rooms at The Story of Emily where this cutting-edge VR experience allows guests to step into an immersive, interactive story and explore the harsh conditions of the concentration camps.