Beware Blue Skies is a short film, originally featured in an installation at the Imperial War Museum, London, seeking to curate an immersive experience that thoughtfully interrogates the psychology of drone warfare, and without resorting to explicitly martial or violent imagery.
Rendered through Unreal Engine, a gaming engine used for building complex 3D environments, Beware Blue Skies asks viewers to confront the way emerging technologies mediate the way wars are fought, experienced, known, and understood. In this context, it formed part of the Imperial War Museum’s War and the Mind exhibition season (September 2024 to April 2025).
Beware Blue Skies was a collaborative production, led by Dr Beryl Pong, PI of the “Droned Life” project and head of the Cambridge Centre for Drones and Culture (CDAC). My contribution was to feed into the design process of the installation, regarding the contents of the film, in collaboration with other members of CDAC. The film was produced by Human Studio.
You can read more on the production at this link to dedicated page on the CDAC website.
Header image courtesy of Beryl Pong on behalf of the University of Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum, and Human Studio.
Credits for Beware Blue Skies:
From the Centre for Drones and Culture: Beryl Pong, Richard Carter, Marjory da Costa-Abreu, Amy Gaeta, Zeynep Kacmaz-Milne, Joanna Tidy
From Human Studio: Nick Bax, Dan Fleetwood, Michaela White, Lucas Bax
From the Imperial War Museum: Jack Davies, Claire Dixon, Dan Green, Eleanor Head, Michael Hoeschen, Joe Stephenson, Jack Sutton