Inside Out Productions creative director Mike Mizrahi talks technology, creativity, innovation, interactivity, teamwork and storytelling with Transmedia NZ's Anna Jackson.

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Last week I was lucky enough to sit down and have a chat with Mike Mizrahi. With his partner Marie Adams, he has created extraordinary live experiences all over the world including Louis Vuitton’s spectacular 150th birthday celebrations, the Auckland Rugby World Cup opening celebration and the New Zealand pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In less than 25 minutes we managed to talk about technology, creativity, innovation, interactivity, teamwork, storytelling and more. It was a conversation that left me buzzing with enthusiasm and the sense that anything is possible, which is probably why Inside Out Productions (IOP) has managed to achieve things that seem to be impossible.

Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.  You can hear more from Mike at Semi-Permanent Auckland at Aotea Centre, Friday May 2 and Saturday May 3. 

What’s your creative process? Do you start off with a story or a visual concept or are you sparked sometimes by the technology itself?

I guess the stupid answer would be all of the above. Our main objective is always to communicate with the audience and then ask what's the best way of doing that. And if it's using technology, then we will.

I've always been kind of a bit of a geek. It started off, I suppose, with my love of lighting. I always loved lighting when I was young and just taking photos. And then once we started to do theatre I just would spent hours with our lighting designer just lighting the scene really beautifully because the picture was very important to us, and we were primarily telling the story non-verbally, so the visual pictures needed to create an emotional reaction; so the music, the sound, the lighting and the action all work together on the audience. That was the beginning of the technological love affair, then that went into more sophisticated lighting techniques and video and then into all the other stuff.

The danger with technology, and I absolutely have fallen victim to this myself, is that you think you can fix the story with technology, or with some cute theatrical device and you fall into a big fat hole and the audience knows you're in a hole and the technology can't save you. Similarly though, sometimes there's a super beautiful cool digital concept that is so wonderful that you try and figure out how to use it because it's just a lovely device. So it can work both ways. My partner Marie Adams, who is a major force in our work, is a ferocious editor and she's very, very good at putting her feet in the audience's shoes in imagining what they're experiencing. And if she's bored or she feels we're getting indulgent it's 86'd. And sometimes it's some of my most beautiful images, and I'm like 'what? You can't cut that, that's so gorgeous", and she'll go "well how's it driving the story, where's it taking us?” You have to be very careful that you don't get indulgent just for the sake of a beautiful picture or a clever trick.

I believe we have hit a plateau, with technology. This concept of ‘interactive’, I think, is a bit of a myth. So much of what I see is people waving their arms around flailing about trying to have an effect on something. And usually it's banal. I do love the mapping thing. We’ve done quite a bit of it. And it's happening all over the place. It's not terribly new. I've always thought my god, wouldn't it be cool to do a piece of theatre where the whole set's mapped in a really interesting way. And then you click on YouTube and there's 500 productions where people are playing with that thing. It's very hard to be completely original. But the point is to make it meaningful whatever you do, and that is the task. And increasingly I think, maybe we should leave this technology for a minute and just get back to substance.

IOP has worked extensively internationally, yet many people would think that coming from a small country on the edge of the world that must be incredibly difficult to do and a huge challenge. Are there any ways that coming from New Zealand has been an advantage?

We have decided to stay here for very good reasons. And the biggest reason is the New Zealand work ethic is so extraordinary. New Zealanders are, I believe, the most creative and innovative people we've ever worked with. We've collaborated with people from all over the world. There's no one like Kiwis. Kiwis are just brilliant; they are fresh and they've got no preconceptions about what you can and can't do. We've always loved working with engineers, artists, all sorts of different people - that you go, ok you just showed me that, but if you can do that, and you guys can do that, then why can't we do this? And a Kiwi would go, shit, it's never been done but why couldn't we do that? Is there a way we could modify the track and ... and before you know we're doing it, and we've invented something that's never been done before and it's terribly exciting and dangerous and thrilling for everybody. Whereas overseas it feels like the first reaction seems to be ‘no, no you can't do that’. So, we love that New Zealand can-do spirit.

And there is something about the splendid isolation. Certainly it's very important, and it's always been very important, for us to dip into the world and see what people are doing. It's incredibly important to keep a sense of that. And that is hard because our passion is for the live experience. It's not about a video recording of the live experience, it's about the live experience, so while if you're interested in video and you're interested in music you can download the latest album or watch the latest thing on YouTube, we can't do that. We've got to find the funds to get over there and see the people that are changing the world in this area of live events and live experiences. We live here, but we have to dip in there or else we will lose our edge. Saying that, once you're here you're not completely bombarded with what everybody's doing. You are left alone to bubble and be inspired by nature and the power of this place and to come up with completely original things. You think of people like Flight of the Conchords  - their extraordinary originality and their cheeky irreverence. I just don't believe that could have come from anywhere other than here. Unfortunately they had to go elsewhere to become famous because people here didn't recognise their originality, and that can happen here as well.

You are working on projects that are often huge in scale, involving the coordination of people, technology, difficult locations and all the challenges of creating a live experience. What's the secret to managing projects with that degree of complexity?

There is a massive key, and that key is the team. I guess our greatest strength has always been picking that team; the best people for the job who you can trust who are going to deliver for you who are brilliant in their own right, who are independent thinkers, who challenge your thinking, who push your ideas in pursuit of excellence. None of us are lazy. We work so hard to make it so good because unless it's brilliant, and it doesn't matter what the audience says, and it doesn't matter what the press say, we know in our hearts when we've got there and when we haven't got there and we work tirelessly because we hate that feeling when we do all of this work and we don't quite get there and we go 'oh... if only that hadn't broken or if only that had happened on cue. Why didn't that happen?’ It's like a live film. The ideas are so epic and so many things can go wrong - technology, the cues, the smoke, dry ice, the lighting effect, that action, the video - there's a thousand possibilities along the way. If people aren't all on their game, if someone drops the ball we all fail and so it's getting the team to understand how super important they are. If they're a stage hand placing a prop, then their role is critical, even though it's one movement, one prop; if it's a three hour production, if that doesn't happen then somewhere along the line there will be a chain reaction - the actor will feel freaked out, he'll miss his next cue, the lighting guy will go 'shit' ... So it's the team, it's the pursuit of that vision.

What is your Big Idea for 2014?

My first reaction would be... it's terribly exciting suddenly to be thinking about us doing our own theatre work again. We were theatre practitioners and very involved with the theatre community for many years, and then we had kids and it got a bit too hard so we jumped into the world of spectacular spectacular. But we always kind of thought secretly, ok this roller coaster will end and then we'll get back to what we love most, which is to tell stories in a contemporary theatre style.

In the olden days when we were young and wild and crazy, we would literally go, ok, we've got five weeks and it starts from now. So we’d pick a team of people that we wanted to collaborate with, and then the pressure of the deadline would drive us to be as super creative as we could possibly be in the shortest amount of time, because we were on. Posters were printed, venue dates were booked; it was going to happen, whether we were ready or not.

And now it seems we have to wait for a client to ring to give us permission to work. Or fill out a giant form to be the one the government approves to be the one that goes forward and does the opening of the ‘thing’. Maybe it's time to go back to the old days when we decide to work and decide what the work will be and then make that happen, carrying people up the hill on that crusade. And I have a feeling that's probably our big idea.

But now we're a bit older, we want to take our time. I'm not sure what it'll end up being because we don't want to be too prescriptive about the end result. We're just going to let it simmer for a while, read a lot, think a lot, experiment a bit and eventually put something on, certainly won’t be in five weeks starting from NOW!