Victoria Mapplebeck has been a storyteller for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She’s a self-shooting director who shifted to smartphone filmmaking, & more recently immersive 360 video & immersive sound. We talked about these projects that have shown at the IDFA DocLab over the years:
- Testing Times (DocLab 2021)
- Motherboard [In Development]
- Waiting Room VR (DocLab 2019)
- Missed Call (DocLab 20)
This was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021 as a part of a collaboration with IDFA’s DocLab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. All right. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and I do the Voices of VR Podcast and I'm collaborating with DocLab to be able to do a series of conversations, both reflecting on the history of DocLab, now it's been 15 years, but also just talking to some of the creators and their own journeys into this realm of immersive storytelling. So we have Victoria Mabel back. Victoria, maybe you just go ahead and introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive storytelling.
[00:00:36.067] Victoria Mapplebeck: Sure. So I've been storytelling, I guess, for 30 years or more. I suppose I've worked across lots of different platforms and genres and technologies. I was a filmmaker, self-shooting director for a long time. I've switched to smartphone filmmaking and came to immersive, I suppose, quite late on, more as coming to it as a critic, actually. I used to love attending IDFA and seeing all the amazing doc lab projects. I've attended Venice for many years. And so I think I got really fascinated by what immersive storytelling could do. So I made my first VR piece about three years ago, and then I've recently made an immersive sound piece, which was at IDFA doc lab called Testing Times.
[00:01:26.107] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And so maybe you could give a bit more context as to your 30 years of filmmaking and storytelling and your journey into this space and, you know, where you really got started into this realm of storytelling.
[00:01:37.750] Victoria Mapplebeck: Sure. So I kind of feel like I've had a career in two halves, but both have sort of very different of kind of informed each other. So, uh, used to be in the nineties and the early two thousands, a self shooting director. I've always loved, the kind of intimacy of just being a one-person crew. So I was self-shooting at a time in documentary when it was quite frowned upon and broadcasters didn't like it and didn't think that the tech was good enough. And I fought lots of battles to get broadcast films that were self-shot. And so I used to work on Hi8. I suppose that shows my age. That would have been the camera of choice then for self-shooting. And I did that for many years. And then I, at 38, found myself single, pregnant and broke. And that's quite a game changer for a woman in terms of career. And I went into academia and had quite a long time out, really, because you very quickly lose your contacts and then got back into filmmaking with the smartphone filmmaking. And then a really brilliant turning point in terms of immersive filmmaking was that I received an academic grant, which was an EPSRC. It's one of those Research Council grants that University of Bristol, University of Bath had managed to get. And in that, Oscar Raby had one of the grants because one was for an experienced VR director. And two others were for filmmakers that were passionate about immersive storytelling, but hadn't made a VR piece before. And so I got one of those and Lisa Harewood got the other one. And it was fantastic. I mean, it sort of shows you the power really of academic and arts funding and how life changing it can be because I suddenly had a very big budget again, you know, a decent budget, £50,000 and I'm used to making works for nothing. I'm a sort of guerrilla filmmaker and I can make films for nothing or just a few thousand pounds. But I have to say it was probably the scariest commission I ever got. And another thing I suppose I should say is that the second part of my career was me getting very interested in autobiographical documentary storytelling and in a way turning the lens or the sort of storytelling lens upon my own life. And so the VR commission was called the Waiting Room VR. And I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017. and the commission was to make a virtual reality piece which would explore what that diagnosis and treatment and the sort of fallout of that diagnosis was like, not only for myself but for my son who at that time was only 14. And it also had an accompanying smartphone short as well. So throughout my cancer treatment, I was using my phone. You will see that in my immersive pieces, the phone features a lot. I think mobile phones and the audio and the photos and the videos that they store are kind of amazing. And I have used them a lot in my works. And I suppose, yeah, defining feature of my work is how Seduced I Am by Verite Audio. I think it's a coin that Nonny de la Pena termed for her early works and her early VR pieces that use that kind of Verite Audio, sort of real-time audio, I think the most powerful and hugely influential to me. And so I use that a lot, I suppose, in my immersive works and in my films. But I use voice mails and I use Zoom audio conversations with my son. When I was going through cancer treatment, consultants were happy for me to just on voice recorder, just record the consultations. So I had, I mean, a lovely oncologist called Mr. Garg, but he was a bit unreconstructed, I suppose, about how you talk about cancer. And so when he's diagnosed me, he sort of comes up with this crazy analogy that my cancer cells are like terrorists and they've got to cross the border and they could be hiding out in Scotland. And I used that audio and he gave me permission to use it, which was extremely generous of him. I never wanted to take the piss out of him directly, but I'm sort of fascinated by the baggage we bring to illness and to chronic illness and to cancer. I think it scares the hell out of us all, people going through it and the people around it. And it brings out some craziness, I think, in the way people talk about illness. So the piece, I think, is very much from a patient's point of view. I was sort of thinking actually the other day, because I was also at IDFA this year pitching this smartphone feature documentary I'm making, which is it's sort of almost a documentary boyhood. It's watching my son grow up on camera. And I was thinking so much of my work is about the baggage people have when you're a misfit. You're either a misfit. I'm a misfit because I brought a child up on my own, not in a nuclear family. You're kind of a misfit because a lot of people understandably feel very private about their emotional life or the darker things that you go through. And I'm not. I'm quite unusually open. I'm quite happy. to share it. I think it's interesting to share it. And I suppose I really love filmmakers and artists who've done the same. But I was thinking, yeah, a lot of the work, something that defines my work is that it's trying to challenge the baggage that people have when you are a bit of a misfit for whatever reason. It's trying to say, look at me differently, or challenging, like I say, the cliches or the baggage that people might bring to you.
[00:07:35.925] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a great summary of your journey and the work that you've been working on. And before we dive in, I have one logistical question, which is, when you went back into your turn into academia, was that as a student or as a professor or teacher? And what was the area that you were going back to?
[00:07:52.111] Victoria Mapplebeck: So as a teacher, a lecturer, I got a job at Royal Holloway, which is part of London University. And it was running a master's in documentary filmmaker. And I'm now a professor there.
[00:08:04.095] Kent Bye: OK. Yeah. So you're on the sort of academic side of looking at the theory of documentary as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And when did you first come across DocLab then? You know, this is the 15 year anniversary that, you know, this series is in help celebrating. So when was your first encounter with DocLab?
[00:08:20.636] Victoria Mapplebeck: It was quite a long time ago. So I think it would be about 2014, 2015. And it was when I had a big multi-platform project called TextMe, which was the beginning of me being fascinated by the stories inside phones. and it was linked to an autobiographical smartphone short which is my first smartphone short called 160 Characters and 160 Characters tells the story of the messages that were in my old Nokia and I'd unwittingly over three years archived the text message thread between myself and my son's dad, you know, from when we first met, went briefly dated, relationship ended, and then I found out I was pregnant. And then there was this obviously much bigger communication about whether he would be involved or not, raising Jim. And I wrote it as my own story, but was also really interested in other people's stories, the kind of secrets and stories that are hidden in phones. And so I developed a project with the support of DocLab that was thinking about how do you talk to people about stories in their phones, either regret texts, texts where somebody said something that you hate, but you know it's always there, whether it's a relationship breakdown, whether it's a work fallout or family difficulty, but also the treasured texts. People talk to me about really being moved by the final text that they received from a parent before they died, or somebody that was lost in some way. And so it was a piece where you could have an appointment to watch your regret text burn live, or you could submit to a sort of text message tree, and then it would be sort of memorialized. And it was a good lesson to me, and it really was great. I developed it with Duck Lab. But it became a huge lesson to me about how you don't need technology and high budgets to make projects happen. And in fact, I went a whole pitching at IDFA forum and raised 70,000 euros from Arte. and then couldn't get, it was an enormous budget, it was probably about 200,000 pounds, couldn't then raise the rest of the budget quickly enough, so I lost the Arte money. So I was like back to square one after years of developing it. And instead I took it to galleries and I did these workshops where people would come with a text message that they wanted to share. And we made little Nokia cardboard coffins where you could kind of lay the text to rest. And so there was a sort of physical ritual of that rather than a digital one, which was much cheaper. So I think that's another defining feature of my work is that I don't like technology for the sake of it. And I will very, very happily embrace low tech. And I don't like barriers of entry to work. And it was one of the things, again, I found very difficult about the waiting room VR. was I felt that it was inaccessible, that I almost needed to learn unity, that I couldn't get to grips with the storytelling. And the people I was working with were sort of encouraging me to do, I suppose, what feature drama script writers do, which is almost write the piece, finish the story, and then hand it over. to the sort of Unity developer to sort of bring it to life. And I think that probably works for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for an artist because you're used to much more organically, whether it's with paper and notebook or smartphone, that to me, the story unfolds with me actually making it. And I had to find a way of doing the making. And so that's very much been sound for me. or like I say, bringing the technology down. So, you know, in the waiting room VR, we shot it with two cameras, one a much more high end 360 camera. which is probably technically the better shot, which I just thought was completely boring. And then a little GoPro Fusion sat on my head, which I'm sure a lot of people would say is a sort of messy amateur looking shot. But I loved it straight away. And I also felt that it could work as a durational take. And that was also quite interesting at the beginning, the resistance that I had that no, you couldn't put people in a durational real time take that you needed to be more tricksy than that, that it needed to dissolve to a unity sequence. And I was convinced that you could, and that in fact you could do it even more successfully in a 3D space than a 2D space. And I remember making the point that the pieces that I'd really been inspired with were fiction films that were shot in one take, like Russian Ark. And I feel that like if you're actually in a 3D sense and that you're really in the space, you can actually do real time much more effectively. And I was sort of thinking actually about, I've got a student of mine who did the MA that I run, and she's got an opportunity to be involved in some immersive story funding that we've got at the university called Story Futures. And she was saying, what do you think? And she'd be perfect because as a documentary filmmaker, she does really beautiful observational filmmaking, which is very real time. And I think it appeals to 2D filmmakers who've actually in their previous careers been very interested in getting the viewer into a kind of real-time space. So, okay, it was a two-dimensional real-time space, but, you know, I love Agnes Varda. I'm a huge fan of Agnes Varda. And Cleo 5-7 was one of a very inspirational film for the waiting room VR. That is a 2D film, but it has an enormous sense of real time. You know, it is literally trying to convey the two hours from when a woman is diagnosed with cancer and then she's waiting for biopsy results and you see this sort of weird journey and people that she meets as she's sort of killing time to find out her final results. It just does that real-time space so well, but it does it in a completely two-dimensional way. So that's why I think immersive sort of suited me, because I've always loved that sense of not dictating a story to people, but trying to bring them into your world. You're literally bringing them into your world, which is obviously what VR did so well. And I remember being very influenced by Nonny de la Pena's early writing about, you've got to think about its presence design. It's like you're putting people in the space. You're not telling a story in a more traditional way. So I think that's probably why it appeals to me. The other thing I think a reason it appeals to me is that I definitely over the years, especially in a sort of British broadcasting context, British broadcasters don't particularly like female stories, which they see as small. They don't like domestic stories and they don't like emotion. They accept it in a fine art context, but they do not accept it in documentary. Documentary is meant to be the world out there. it's not meant to be subjective in a sort of traditional viewpoint of it, you know. And I was thinking that what I've loved about a sort of community of people working in immersive storytelling is that that doesn't seem to be the case and that it's much more rooted in fine art in that it can take much more challenging stories or concepts, much darker, much more emotional. It's not fearful of emotion. And I remember being on Venice in the VR Island, I think it was 2017, and it was When I did Jordan Tannehill's Draw Me Close, and probably because it definitely had a lot of resonance for me, this was actually before I was diagnosed with cancer, because it's got a cancer narrative. But Jordan Tannehill was brought up by a single mum, and this amazing experience that you become the child. and you were literally being put into bed by a sort of virtual mother. And I was really, I suppose it triggered all sorts of memories of me being brought up by a single mom as well. But I remember coming out of that, and it was quite a short iteration of the piece at that point. I think it was maybe about 11 minutes, perhaps, maybe 15. And I came out, and I was just sobbing. like sobbing to the core of me. And then it was a bit embarrassing because there was no sort of decompression place. I was sort of thrown out into a room, you know, just quite distraught and embarrassed that I've had that effect. And I couldn't imagine perhaps a sort of two-dimensional film experience getting to me so quickly and so profoundly. And I very much thought it was something about the genre, something about being in a headset, something about feeling that you were in this space. that fast tracks you to something very, very powerful. And like I say, because I'm not scared of that, and I'm very intrigued by that, that's probably also why it's appealed to me as a form as well.
[00:17:56.525] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I remember seeing your piece of Waiting Room VR at the Venice and at Venice that year there was actually a number of pieces that were in this genre of the durational take, which allows you to really be immersed in a place and have the patience to see whatever is unfolding and the conceits of narrative that we usually have is that you need to have something that is unfolding and that it's quick cuts and quick edits, but in an immersive space, it kind of mirrors those similar experiences that we have in life where you can't edit, it's just you have to go through the whole experience. And so I can see that through line both in that piece that you did with Waiting Room VR, but after watching the short film of Missed Call from 2018, which went to BAFTA, and then the trailer for Motherboard, I also saw that you had been recording all of this self-shot footage and audio since, you said like since 2000, and so since the beginning of you interfacing with a lot of these mobile phones and just mobile technologies to be able to capture this incredible archive of raising your son as a single mother and this next project that you're working on. But I see this through line between these moments of real vulnerability where you're not only showing this story of your son who wants to reconnect to his father who is basically left when he was one or two years old and that you're out of touch with him and he's kind of moved on and there's this moment where you just sort of have this phone call and you pause and you just kind of break down in a way that and just hearing you talk about how emotion is not really taken seriously within the context of the British media that you're going up in. It was a powerful moment as I was watching it. What I thought was also how we have social media where people may be doing this in a way that isn't a performative sense to get attention or for clicks or whatnot. But this is you're doing this in the context of a story where it really is embedded within the arc of the story. But it's also kind of the first time that you're revealing how you really feel about or how intense it is that interaction. I just thought it was such a striking moment and really quite powerful. And there seems to be this thread that you're going to be elaborating on this larger story. It feels like the both the missed call and the waiting room VR were kind of like snippets of these little moments that were these turning points in your life. and that perhaps you're going to sort of draw a larger narrative of the full arc of your son's life or your personal reaction. But I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how you deal with the ethics of being vulnerable and is it exploiting yourself or is it making you too vulnerable versus something that's authentic and real and that is really in the context of a larger story that you're trying to tell.
[00:20:31.153] Victoria Mapplebeck: I was really pleased recently when I was pitching the feature doc at the forum, and I think it was somebody from Catalyst Film Fund, I forget her name, but a really great woman. And she made this point about how sometimes in documentary, if people are taking you into like a very, very emotional, vulnerable space, that it can be really uncomfortable for the audience and that you have to kind of be aware of that. And she felt that I took people into that space, but with some sort of boundaries, with some sort of critical distance, even though it's very intense, that I'm somehow aware of that. And I think it's what makes my work quite different to the world of social media. which I think there's some amazing, fascinating storytelling, but is often just a naked sort of visceral display of emotion without that critical distance. And if I think about one of my favourite artists is Sophie Kao, and I think she does that balance just so beautifully. It's incredibly exposing and yet there's just some Like I say, it's that sort of critical director's gaze that sort of makes it okay. And maybe it's also about also embracing irony and a kind of gallows humor. Tone is everything. I remember when I first made the piece, the 160 characters, and I just started working with this amazing editor that I work with a lot called Lisa Forrest. And I remember saying to her, I don't want us to make this film like I've been abandoned by some sort of Victorian cad, and I've been left with Babe in arms, and that my life is a tragedy. It isn't. It's been informed by loss. But I don't want it to seem that. So I think I'm aware of how I represent myself in terms of that vulnerability. Again, teaching helps. And again, you know, sometimes students will just be too exposing. And I have to talk to them about how can we do it where it's got some kind of boundaries as well. And I think you also have to be aware of how the audience might experience that if you're going to take them into an area that could be quite dark. and difficult, that you have to be respectful of that. And so I think a big part of my work in the edit is exactly that. And I found a really brilliant Atlantic piece today, which was a piece that was talking about responding to the sort of culture of toxic positivity, which you get enormously around cancer, that you must see your cancer as the gift that keeps on giving, and that it somehow transforms you, and you become a better person, and all of this. And he said that a better, he was a Holocaust survivor, I forget his name, I really wish I could remember his name. But he comes up with a term which is so much stronger, which is tragic optimism. And I thought, oh, my God, you could put that over all of my work, that it embraces a sort of tragic optimism, that it does not disguise the absolute awfulness of loss and tragedy and illness and aging and separation in terms of family, love and loss. But I also hope that it's really life affirming. And that I think it does. And I think I use humour a lot. You know, I was just listening to Testing Times again, and actually I played it to my mum for the first time. So obviously Jim's heard it, but my mum couldn't come to Amsterdam because of the Covid difficulties. So she's just heard it now, actually, and she really likes it.
[00:24:17.079] Kent Bye: Yeah. So testing times, this is your new immersive sound installation that just premiered at if a doc lab, I haven't had a chance to see it at all. And I think you mentioned it briefly, but maybe you could set the context for how this kind of fits into your overarching body of work of doing this self shot, recording all these different experiences. And so what was the testing times that I think I saw a trailer that had some audio clips, but maybe you could set the context for what you were trying to do with this piece of testing times.
[00:24:45.378] Victoria Mapplebeck: Sure. So it's a piece that I began at the very first lockdown that we had in the UK. And I'd already begun to get very interested in voice in terms of the phone. So I think I've gone from being very interested by how we put really emotional dialogues into one sentence text messages, but actually how voice, you know, whether it's voicemails, voice calls, voice notes that my son uses all the time with his friends. And I noticed that I felt in the pandemic, at the beginning, there was more time at home and less of the sort of usual work distractions and commitments. And I couldn't see my mum. We're very close to my mum. So obviously I've raised my son on my own, but I couldn't have done it without her help. So she's very, very close to both of us and she lives nearby. And like many people, we couldn't see her. At the beginning of the first lockdown, before vaccines, it wasn't safe. We felt that it would be putting her at risk. And so I don't think we saw her for about four or five months. So we phoned instead. My mum, she's of a generation that's really fine. I mean, landline now just seems such a weird dated term, doesn't it? But the landline calls, you know, she's of a generation that's easy with those. And so I'll easily can talk to my mum for like an hour. And so I was doing an hour a day and also I've got three brothers and my dad and I just recorded with like a little earpiece into a Zoom recorder. I recorded really a lot of the phone calls and that actually became quite difficult because it was a huge archive. It was about 60 hours of phone conversations plus the voicemails. I think voicemails are so beautiful because they're kind of like a little micro narrative. with the tone of the person that's actually leaving the message, whether they sound stressed or worried or jokey. You know, you can hear all of that because that's what's fantastic about the human voice. And this piece actually was the piece that I think has been the most collaborative with Jim and also the most exposing of Jim. So then it also had a lot more ethical questions and explorations than even my previous work because this piece was about Jim and I in a tiny two-bedroom flat. really feeling the frustrations of being housebound. You know, you've got raging hormones in the teenage bedroom and a sort of distinct lack of them in the living room. And I felt like Jim and I were living in completely separate bubbles. And at one point in the piece, I talk about a dream that I had, which I think is an amazing metaphor, which is COVID and that lockdowns hit my anxieties, but also this very important part where Jim becomes an adult. and separate from me and obviously we've been very close because I've brought him up on my own. That's a very difficult experience and I think it's been happening really since I was diagnosed with cancer when he was about 14. But then all of poor Jim, you know, can you imagine what teenage life you've been used to being out there in the world and then suddenly your world shrinks and you're with your middle-aged mum and we just led completely separate lives and then occasionally we had some really terrible rows. And in the past, he's been able to go to my mom's if we've ever had a row, but he couldn't do that. And so the piece really doesn't disguise how awful some of those rows were. And then in the summer, actually, when I was in Venice this year, I thought he was just about old enough to be home alone. He's coming up for 18. and my mum lives around the corner, and I thought, you know, what could go wrong? Like, everything went wrong that could go wrong, in that he decided to dabble with every Class A drug known to man within about a three-day period, and then had terrible comedown. And so it's a piece where we talk about, in retrospect, we have all the voicemails of that crisis point when I was in Venice, and he was in a really bad way, and my mum was trying to get hold of him. But it's Jim's favorite piece, actually, out of all of them. And I think one thing we've both really got in common, two things we've really got in common, because I think we're very different in lots of ways, but we've got the same kind of gallows sense of humor. And I think we've also got the same ability You know, I remember saying to him, look, Jim, we don't have to use the rouse because it's very visceral. And he just said, I don't know how you're going to make a piece that really tells it how it was in this last year and a half if you don't. And he's always been very good about that. And so like I say, he has a co-directing credit because he was very much a part of which would be the key storylines. And he also, we paid him actually for a bit of content providing and that he went through his own phone and just sent me the stuff that he was all right with me using. So I mean, it was a really enjoyable piece actually. And it was, I suppose it was the first piece we've made where it's like working with another adult, you know, because he is now. Whereas the previous pieces, he's obviously on the cusp, but he's been more like he's a child.
[00:30:18.866] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah. And just going back and looking at some of your previous experiences and having seen The Waiting Room and then getting more context of this larger body of work that you're working towards, I'm really looking forward to Motherboard and where that ends up, because that seems like that's going to tie a lot of these different pieces and moments together. But as we start to wrap up here, this is the 15th year anniversary of DocLab. Obviously, it's been a big part of pushing the frontiers of what's coming next when it comes to integrating new immersive technologies and new forms of storytelling. I'm just curious to hear from you what you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies and new forms of documentary and what they might be able to enable.
[00:31:01.944] Victoria Mapplebeck: I think it would be more, I'm more interested in how more people can get access to them and start using them for telling stories. And that's like, you know, we've talked about my liking the more kind of low tech versions of that. So I kind of, I never that interested in the sort of industry speculating, you know, how long will VR last and where will it all go and what will we all be doing? I think they're just tools for artists and storytellers to be able to create new, wonderful spaces and experiences. And like I say, I think that's the one challenge. I think DocLab has met it brilliantly, actually, because I think they've been so good on facilitating so many diverse people and storytelling, you know, to come in. to have their work seen and commissioned. But that would be my thing, really, is that that's the frustrating thing. I'd like that to change in the future, is that more people are able to use it, that the cost becomes less prohibitive. That's what would be nice. And everybody gets to experiment with these new technologies as they come along.
[00:32:10.088] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I've seen the technology disperse, there's the new technology itself and its affordances, but then the artists are exploring those affordances and using the tools to make stuff, and then it gets into the hands of the audience, and then the audience is able to see it, and it creates this loop. But that process between the capturing of the source material and Forming it and editing it as you were saying is a key part But also getting into the hands of the audience for them to see it to them Then be inspired by what's even possible and to learn how to even watch these pieces So yeah, I feel like we're at the very beginnings of all that and yeah as we wrap up Is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say the broader immersive community and the doc lab community? Oh
[00:32:50.025] Victoria Mapplebeck: Just like I say, how fantastic it was to actually be at IDFA DocLab this time, you know, after this sort of two year break. And even though it was a hybrid festival, I thought it worked really beautifully. And it is such a community. And I kind of thank everyone that's part of it, actually, because the meeting and talking to people about their works, it was great to see. Amy and May from Anagram just as I came in. But I think it's an amazing close-knit community that's very interested in supporting one another. So yeah, here's to more of that, I think.
[00:33:22.633] Kent Bye: Awesome. And are any of your other pieces as waiting room VR available anywhere for people to see?
[00:33:27.994] Victoria Mapplebeck: Yeah, it's on, you know, MIT DocLab. I think there's 10 of the key pieces and you can go on their website. And I think Step to the Line was one and Waiting Room VR was another one. But basically, yes, you can watch it, I think, online as a 3D experience rather than need a VR headset. So yeah, MIT DocBase, you might have to correct me on that, but you can watch it there.
[00:33:55.500] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think if folks Google it, they'll be able to track it down. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for dropping by and sharing a little bit more about your own body of work and your journey and all the other projects that you have and your relationship to DocLab over the years. And yeah, I look forward to seeing the motherboard as you continue to work on it and potentially see these other pieces that you're working on as well. But there seems to be this self-shot, first-person, personal, vulnerable stories. I really appreciate how you're able to capture all that stuff and then digest down these moments to be able to share. the story of your life and kind of push the edge of where documentary is going in this particular form, especially with the durational takes in VR as well. I think that's another realm that's still at the very early. We haven't seen as many takes, but I think there's something there that I think is quite intriguing. So yeah, thanks for stopping by and being able to share a little more of your stories.
[00:34:46.059] Victoria Mapplebeck: Thank you. Good luck with it all. Thanks a lot.
[00:34:49.399] Kent Bye: So that was Victoria Meppe-Beck. She's been storytelling for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She's a self-shooting director and shifted into smartphone filmmaking, immersive 360 video creator, and now immersive sound creation as well. This conversation was recorded on Friday, December 3rd, 2021, as a part of a collaboration with IFA's DocLab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
