The Prodigal project is the brainchild of Carl Warner, a photographer, director and artist who has spent the past two years creating this Rock Opera Fantasy.

The first part of Carl’s photography career was primarily working in the advertising world, but in the late 1990’s, he stumbled upon the idea of creating elaborate landscapes out of food and other objects . This body of work earned him a worldwide reputation as an artist and innovator for creating worlds out of everything from vegetables to car parts to the human body.

For the past ten years, Carl has taken these worlds into the realm of the moving image, where his vision and imagination have led him to directing. But as a keen musician, composer and writer he has always wanted to develop a musical work that would complement his visual ideas.

Working from his home studio, and with the help of a few industry friends, he has written, played, sung and produced twenty-four songs which tell the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son as never heard before. These unmastered demos convey the narrative of the story alongside the storytelling visuals, as a progressive rock opera without any spoken dialogue.

With twelve songs in two acts, each song feeds into the next as an immersive experience, following the journey of the Prodigal Son through Carl’s fantastical visions and dream-like worlds. Together with the backdrop of stunning, epic landscapes to the macabre stuff of nightmares, each song takes us to a new passage of the story that will be both spectacular and visually intoxicating.

To give a sense of this epic journey, Carl has created a series of images to accompany this pitch. Each one has been crafted with a blend of real and computer- generated elements. Each image is based on the use of a live action foreground set, blending and interacting with a cinematic wide screen backdrop. The idea being to blend cinema and theatre into one ‘180’ degree immersive experience for the audience.

Although the Prodigal Son is a parable taught by Jesus, Carl is keen to not make this a religious platform, but to offer the story in a more universal context, as a mirror for us to consider to what extent our material desires have consequences upon the spiritual needs of our hearts. Whether love, compassion, contrition, humility and forgiveness are concepts that we as a society still see as valid, life- affirming and vital to our well-being and to the hope of mankind.