How does one do justice to an architectural and historical masterpiece such as St. Paul’s Cathedral? A Cathedral dedicated to St Paul has overlooked the City of London since 604AD, a constant reminder to this great commercial center of the importance of the spiritual side of life. St. Paul’s was the world’s first Protestant cathedral and remains the largest to this day. It was the first cathedral of its size to be overseen by one architect, Sir Christopher Wren, from beginning to end. The state funeral of the great wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill was held here, as was the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. And children still love to test the acoustics of the Whispering Gallery. The current Cathedral – the fourth to occupy this site – was designed by the court architect Sir Christopher Wren and built between 1675 and 1710 after its predecessor was destroyed in the Great Fire of LondonArmchair Travel, the company behind award-winning CD-ROMs and websites such as the Taj Mahal and Kew Gardens, ably meets the challenge. If you’re not one of the three million visitors who have already discovered the sites The Sunday Times of London rates as “Thrilling!” and gives a whopping five stars, then it’s time to make a visit.
The site design of Exploring St. Paul’s Cathedral is relatively simple and easy to navigate but it belies the wealth of information waiting to be uncovered: 360-degree panoramas, maps, music, movies, narratives and text. The movies, narrated with a plummy English accent, are thoughtfully assembled and usually incorporate slideshows featuring old photographs or paintings that add considerable depth and context to the narrative. Other movies cover the Construction of the Dome, Dome Décor, Sir Christopher Wren, Historical Events in St. Paul’s and The Tomb of Lord Nelson, whose funeral was a huge public event at the Cathedral.
The company was granted access to many areas normally off-limits to the public – such as libraries, archives, the roof, and many galleries. They also studied thousands of photos and documents, enabling them to produce over 150 mini-movies about the history, art and personalities of the cathedral, all with original script and narration. The full version is available on CD-ROM and although the website version is smaller with 22 panoramas and 25 movies, it is more than adequate in providing viewers with a tour of the cathedral in its historical context.
The Great Model is another informative movie, with panoramas, covering the construction of Wren’s model, “it’s superb joinery and the exquisitely-worked cherub’s heads, flowers and festoons. As originally completed, some of the detail was sumptuously gilded, and there were tiny statues on the parapets, which are thought to have been Wren's first commissions to Grinling Gibbons.”
William Donelson, who together with William Beckett run Armchair Travel, remembers the St. Paul’s shoot well: They used a 12-shot Peace River camera-head with 35mm cine film. £10,000 of lighting and a generator truck were moved in, 2000 chairs were moved out by teams in the evenings on a two-day period when the cathedral was closed to the public. “My moment of bliss: having the last chair out and switching on all the lights and seeing this gorgeous cathedral of light, it had never been lit like that before. Christopher Wren would have been proud,” he says. The problem occurred in postproduction when the film was sent to Technicolor for processing – and they cut the ends of the film, leaving every other pano with a missing frame. Fortunately, the company had production insurance, allowing them to return 2.5 months later and reshoot. For the second shoot they used a a Seitz Super Roundshot 220 camera. “It’s a beautiful camera,” says Donelson, “very fast and lightweight for outdoor shooting and faster than most digital cameras in difficult lighting conditions. The crypt had a mix of tungsten and florescent lighting, making color correction very difficult, but we only had to film the crypt once and the quality of the imagery is quite beautiful.”
Armchair Travel received the commission to do the CD-ROM after a competitive bid in the late 1990s. The Cathedral was selling the CD-ROM inside it’s shop and asked Armchair Travel do a website version; the company pretty much had all the photography in place already.
When you visit the site, don’t miss the movie about the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed the Old Cathedral and led to the building of Wren’s masterpiece. It includes eyewitness accounts, including one from the 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys, and is a good example of the high degree of thought and background research put into this project.
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Exploring St. Paul's is currently free but the Cathedral may restate the admission fee at some point in the future, so best check it out soon.
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