How TIME Re-created the 1963 March on Washington in Virtual Reality

Tucked away in an office on a quiet Los Angeles street, past hallways chockablock with miniature props and movie posters, is a cavernous motion-capture studio. And in that studio is the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1963, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in The March, a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leader's estate. The experience, which is executive–produced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research in machine learning and human anatomy to create a visually striking re-creation of the country's National Mall circa 1963--and of King himself. When work on the project began more than three years ago, a big question needed answering.