ROOT (Running Out Of Time): Theater in Mixed Reality

ROOT is a Mixed Reality Immersive Play about NOT DYING!

Pluto’s dead… But not for long. Like everyone else, she gets three months of digital Life Extension. Unlike everyone else, she bought more time. A lot more time. Now at her ascension ceremony, the masses are here for a reckoning.

You’ll hold your phone and see digital humans in the room with you. The ceremony happens around you in real time. You’re not watching a screen, you’re attending a live event where the digital and physical blend together.

Call (951)GET-ROOT to learn more! Then buy tickets for only $15! (or use Discount Code ROOTTHEPLAY for 25% off tickets)

In the near future, death isn’t the end… It’s a countdown. Every single person (including you) is granted three months of Life Extensions. That’s three months to live digitally after death… unless you can afford more.

Pluto Kennedy Price bought more. A LOT more.

Now at her ascension ceremony – part funeral, part celebration – she’s trying to convince everyone that what she did was necessary. That immortality is worth the cost.

But the masses are here for a reckoning.

You’ll hold your phone and see digital people in the room with you. The ceremony happens around you in real time. You’re not watching a screen, you’re attending a live event where the digital and physical blend together.

Experience the future in this Mixed Reality play: ROOT (aka Running Out Of Time)! Call in and experience a spoiler-free interactive audio story at 1-951-GET-ROOT.

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Meet Pluto Kennedy Price:

Pluto had everything any outside observer could want: money, status, power, looks. But all Pluto ever wanted was to belong. And she didn’t belong here. Not on this planet where the heat killed thousands of people a day. No. She belonged in the digital world, where the only limit was her imagination.
Her Mother died giving birth to her, but thanks to Life Extension, Mom was always a click away. As Pluto grew up, she spent more and more time in the comforting digital world of games and fun. Pluto and her Mom would come up with digital foods, tasting things that you could never eat in real life. She found the taste of rubber oddly pleasing. What else would she discover?
By the time Pluto turned 16, she knew she would become digital as soon as she could. After all, her Dad self-terminated that year so that he could prepare for his mission to another star system. Her Dad was one of the wealthiest people on the planet, and he was using his wealth for good. He was going to make sure that the human race survived. He was going to find a new planet to live on. He would never be able to do that if not for digital Life Extension.
Now at her 24th birthday, the proven age for the digitization success rate, Pluto had an easy choice. “This digital world is where I belong.”
Join us to witness Pluto’s Ascension in ROOT!

Call the ROOT Teleplay:

Want a preview of the show without any spoilers?! Call the ROOT Teleplay to access the Digital Archives! 1(951) 438-7668

See us at The Broadwater Main Stage:

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How ROOT Was Made: AI Disclosure

ROOT’s story began in 2019 after I first watched San Junipero. Well, I guess it began earlier, when in 1999 The Matrix BLEW MY MIND. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with science fiction and the nature of reality. San Junipero and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (weirdly) brought the idea of ROOT to my mind. Since then, I’ve been reading climate change books and looking for a way to survive. I wrote this story in a hundred different ways for many different mediums (feature film, VR TV pilot) until finally finding the right expression: live theater with a digital component. I have spent the last 7 years on this story. I brought on a writing partner two years ago, and together, we wrote this play. I have hundreds of pages of notes, hundreds of journal entries documenting the creation of this story. It is not AI generated. But at times, we did use AI for research. At one point, the story was even going to be powered by an AI chatbot we built, but that didn’t serve the story, so we dropped it.
For the digital performance: A real human actor pilots the avatar in every performance. That’s live, every night.
Here’s where AI comes in: We use AI to generate some the avatar’s visual appearance like wardrobe concepts and then our human developer comes in, modifies it and rigs it to work. Our human developer was hired to build the creative and technical infrastructure that makes the mixed reality experience work live every night. This includes human made digital assets as well as AI generated concepts. We also use AI behind the scenes to generated marketing ideas and test messaging. For these marketing ideas, we paid a human for their custom built AI, which trained solely on their own material. For marketing materials, we built custom designs in Canva, and some Canva templates are AI-generated under the hood; we can’t always know which ones are, so we’re saying it straight. Our pitch deck (used on Kickstarter as well) also contains AI generated images to set the tone of the story.
We believe in paying artists for their work. We created this project with a human team. And we hope that this critical examination of AI and our survival on this planet will help us balance the need to create with the need to survive.

ROOT Pitch Deck

Check out our pitch deck here.

Special Thanks to our Kickstarter Backers!

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