Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies VR, created a 6-DoF and interactive narrative The Key, has spent over 20 years doing LARPs, and recently starting a game design company. I had a chance to talk about he journey of storytelling across multiple mediums, and dive deeper into her experiences of LARPing, living stories, and becoming so connected to characters and situations that it bleeds into her life. We also unpack how she sees that storytelling is moving from 3rd person POV to 1st person POV and increasing the levels of immersion with VR, AR, immersive storytelling, and LARPing.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So, continuing on with my coverage of South by Southwest 2022, today's episode is with Céline Charicart. She's an immersive storyteller and XR creator, and who's just recently also started her own game design company. But she gave a keynote at South by Southwest. And so, basically, there's one big keynote every day at South by Southwest. with Lizzo and back. And then on Monday, March 14th, 2022 is when Celine Tricart gave a keynote to the entire South by Southwest community about immersive storytelling, her journey of starting with writing and then to film and then expanding into cinematic VR and then more interactive XR, and then 20-plus years of doing live-action roleplay, which ended up being a big focus of this conversation. There's a big part of this immersive theater or live-action roleplay where it's more of a living story, where you start to be embedded into the experience as a character. There's different types of LARPs that have evolved over the years. We all think about the people with the foams, and they're doing this Dungeons & Dragons play-to-win type of scenario. Then there's play-to-lose as a genre of LARP, and then there's a slice-of-life, which is the most recent trends within live-action roleplay that Celine had a chance to explain a little bit with her keynote, but also these aspects of emotional bleed. To be so immersed into these stories that you start to identify with those characters But then there's aspects of those experiences that then bleed into your life And so there's new expressions and of your character or tapping into different stuff that goes above and beyond the third-person perspective we're outside and not as deeply immersed, you know, she has the spectrum of The third person, not immersive, but we see a lot of the traditional broadcast media as it stands today that's seen through this 2D frame. And then you go into the more immersive realms with virtual and augmented reality and immersive theater, as well as live action role play, but also this first person perspective of being directly embodied in this deep level of immersion. really fascinating to hear some of her own journeys of what that's been like for her to dive into these different live-action roleplay and how that and her aspects of lucid dreaming start to impact her vision of the future of immersive storytelling. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Celine happened on Tuesday, March 15th, 2022. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:30.477] Celine Tricart: So my name is Celine Tricart. I define myself as a VR storyteller. I originally come from the film industry. So I worked on movies and then virtual reality. And now I am working on my very first video game. So I try to explore all forms of storytelling.
[00:02:46.669] Kent Bye: Maybe you can give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR storytelling.
[00:02:53.440] Celine Tricart: Sure. So I'm originally from France and I grew up being passionate about movies and TV and just addicted to storytelling in general. So I went to film school in France and there I decided to specialize in new technologies. So at the time, new technology was stereoscopic 3D. You know, when you put glasses, you see in three dimension. And so my goal was to explore 3D and understand how we can enhance storytelling, how we can create new kind of emotions. So that's what brought me to the United States. I moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago to work on 3D movies. And then everybody who was involved in stereoscopic 3D, we knew that VR was coming next. We knew it was right around the corner. And so I started experimenting with small cameras and rotating on the nodal points and stitching when there was no stitching software available. So just a lot of experimentation. And then in 2014, kind of took it to the next level, which was when Facebook acquired Oculus and understanding that this was going to be big. And a lot of us from the 3D industry kind of started doing a lot of explorations. That's when I filmed my first 360 movie. The first years my involvement in VR were cinematic VR because of my background in film and as a cinematographer. So cinematic VR is when you shoot with cameras in 360 mode in the real world. So that's kind of what I knew. And it's only recently in 2019 that I started doing game engine based virtual reality experiences and interactive experiences.
[00:04:38.529] Kent Bye: So we're here at South by Southwest and you had an opportunity actually to give one of the keynotes which is actually a pretty big deal because there's like one keynote per day and you're on company with like folks like Lizzo and other big names in a wider realm of culture and they are still relatively a small niche community and obviously your award-winning piece of the key that is innovating in its own way of the grammar of immersive storytelling and Song Ladies VR, which we've talked about both before on this podcast, but VR and the wider culture is still emerging. So maybe you could talk a bit about what it was like for you to get up on stage at South by Southwest and be able to talk about your journey as being an immersive storyteller.
[00:05:17.453] Celine Tricart: Yeah, originally Blake, the curator of South by Southwest Immersive and also film, I believe, he contacted me a few months ago asking if I wanted to be a speaker, which I thought was an incredible honor. And I was like, sure. And I was like, what do you want me to talk about? It's like, oh, whatever you want. I thought it was quite interesting. I was like, OK, I guess I'll talk about my passion, which is storytelling. And it's only maybe a month and a half ago that he recontacted me and be like, by the way, it's going to be a keynote. And then I kind of started freaking out because, yeah, I went on the South by Southwest website and realizes all those big time people doing keynotes. I'm not a big time person, but OK, I will use that opportunity because it's a beautiful opportunity for me to talk about what I'm passionate about and also try to encourage people to see storytelling in a slightly different manner because there is something that is very important to me is that everything I do there's always some kind of social good message involved. It could be hidden or it could be very blatant. But there's always this effort trying to make a little change in the world through storytelling. I was like, well, maybe if they give me the big stage at South by Southwest, if I can speak about that, that would make me very happy. So yeah, so the whole process was just extremely stressful. The night before my keynote, I actually rehearsed with two of my best friends, and it was terrible. So they gave me lots of good feedback. I spent the whole night rewriting it and then eventually ending up on the big stage. And I was actually really happy. What made me especially happy after the keynote, which you can actually go and watch online so you can find it, is a group of young women that came to find me at the end of the keynote in early 20s. And they told me that it was very inspiring to them and that they were looking up to me. And it's not an ego thing, but it's just I'm really happy to see the next generation of men and women being inspired by things that I say, because they are the one who will take this to the next level and then the one after them. So, yeah, that made me very happy and very, very grateful for that opportunity.
[00:07:37.823] Kent Bye: Yeah, it was interesting to hear your own personal journey through each of the different communication media, from going to film school, but then being very interested as a gamer yourself, and then to have different aspects of the VR and the cinematic VR and the interactive VR, and then the whole live-action roleplay, which is a whole other thing of LARPing that we can get into, but Before we do that, I wanted to first reflect on some of the different frameworks you had. On one axis was the third-person point of view being disembodied and observing an experience with the center of gravity of most of the existing media, aside from maybe video games, which tends to have a little bit more of the first-person perspective. And then on the vertical axis a little bit more, I think it was the agency in terms of really having control of being able to make actions and have control over how the story's unfolding. And so there's a way in which that most of the broadcast media is in the lower left-hand corner, which is third-person perspective and non-interactive, and then the more interactive and immersive, where you have VR more towards this first-person, generally. There are third-person perspective VR experiences, but for the most part, VR's strength is the first-person embodiment. And then in the upper right-hand corner, the most exalted, in some sense, was this live-action roleplay, or the immersive theater realm, where you're embedded into a physical reality, but also in a context that allows you to embody a character within the context of a story. Maybe you could first reflect on some of these different communication media and how you start to think about it in terms of perspective and agency.
[00:09:10.172] Celine Tricart: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, this chart does not reflect on the quality of the medium. It's not like one is better than the other. It's just a general reflection on how they communicate with our emotions. And actually, POV was one of the factors, but the other one was what I call the degree of immersion, which is more of the physical distance between the viewer or participant and the story itself. And yes, what was interesting to me is really look at all the mediums that I've worked in and that I enjoy consuming and kind of seeing where they are in that chart and yeah clearly there is this extreme top right corner that was a first-person POV and completely physically immersed in the world of the story and I was LARPing and the opposite end of the spectrum was Movies or TV or traditional theater where you are outside of the story, physically removed and third-person perspective. But all of that is just this kind of like consultation of what really matters to me and everything I do is to create certain emotion. that people keep with them after consuming the story. And that's what is called emotional bleed, which is something that we're very familiar with in LARPing, which is when after the LARP, after the live-action role-playing games, you go home, but you have a lot of feeling and nostalgia and things that stay with you for a very long time. And as a storyteller, I am passionate about that thing because this is how we change the world. It's by creating emotions that are not just at a specific instant in time, but that will actually create a lasting memory in your head and potentially change the way you see things. And there has been instances where I experienced emotional bleed watching a movie. It's pretty rare, but it works. So again, it's not about certain mediums cannot do it or not as efficient as others, not at all. It's just that sometimes the language is better crafted for this kind of effect than others. For example, when I was younger and I watched Amelie, the Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, I walked out of the theater and I just had that urge of helping someone. I had that urge of doing good. It lasted a few days and I did some good deeds as the result of watching that movie. So it works in movie as well. But when it comes to LARPing, and I believe VR as well, it's much easier to create this emotional bleed and there is a beautiful opportunity for storyteller in those field to really foster positive emotions instead of a negative emotion and really try to push forth the values of collaboration and generosity.
[00:12:02.317] Kent Bye: Is this a term emotional bleed something that comes from the LARPing community like that's something they discussed before?
[00:12:07.677] Celine Tricart: Yes, absolutely. I'm not exactly sure who invented it, so I don't want to make a mistake, but I am 99% sure that it comes from LARPing and people analyzing LARP storytelling, because a lot of players of LARP experience emotional bleed. And it's not that common in other mediums, so I guess nobody has quite thought about it. So because it's very common in LARP, I guess somebody must have analyzed it and put the name on it.
[00:12:32.477] Kent Bye: Okay, so my understanding from the little anecdote that you shared during your keynote, which, you know, you're talking about a LARP and then you saw a salad outside in physical reality, outside of the magic circle of that story, and then it evoked emotions that were either connected to that character or maybe your emotions were connecting to the character already from experiences and that was just triggering something that had already happened. So for you, maybe you could share that little anecdote and unpack that just so we can help flesh this concept out because that was an interesting moment to point to this thing that you experienced after going to a LARP that you don't usually experience in other media?
[00:13:06.607] Celine Tricart: Yeah, yeah, so I call it the salad story. So what happened is I played a LARP that takes place in a small village in France during the occupation, so during the World War II, where it was a very difficult time for everyone, and there was not a lot of food, and the food was usually not very good. There was a lot of black markets, And so over the course of the two days LARP, so it's only two days, but LARP is so powerful that only a few hours you really feel strongly embodied in the character that you're playing. Just because everything around you puts you in that world. The setting, the costumes, other players. being in their role and their character. So it creates this feedback loop of immersion, constant immersion. There's nothing that comes to break the game. There is no moment where we'll be out of character or we'll see something that's out of character. We don't have phones. We don't have any of that stuff. So after playing that LARP, being in the life of villagers under the occupations and having really heightened emotion and very tough times, the Monday after the LARP, usually LARPs are during weekends in France, I went to a business meeting, a business lunch, I wasn't thinking about the LARP, I was all about the meeting and I ordered a salad and then we were talking and suddenly the waiter brings that salad and place it in front of me and it's one of those beautiful salad that we do today with like avocado and tomatoes and all those colors and it looks delicious and it looks so generous and I look down and suddenly I felt in my heart and my stomach and my guts I felt that moment of oh my god I am so lucky I cannot believe I have this salad in front of me because I know that it's not for granted and I know it's all it takes to bring to my plate in front of me that beautiful salad and it was so powerful that I immediately started crying in the middle of business meeting and then I had to explain why I was crying and the LARP and all that stuff but again it was deep, deep, deep inside me that that outburst of emotion came and was not control. I was not even thinking about the LARP at that time. So that is the sad story of like that emotional bleed and how powerful it is.
[00:15:25.153] Kent Bye: So what was it about the experience that you think helped catalyze that then?
[00:15:30.036] Celine Tricart: You know I think there's something powerful about living a slice of life of somebody else and at first like 10-15 minutes it's always a little bit weird there's always this like uncanny valley moment of like are we gonna burst out laughing because we look so stupid pretending to be somebody else but because again we keep the illusion going and nobody breaks it and so you kind of like your brain switches into truly believing that you are that person. I don't even have parasite thoughts that come to my... That's why I love LARPing so much is because that's the only thing that can truly take my mind off my work, which is 99% of my life. This is the only thing that makes me completely disconnect from the real life. Because I guess our brains are just wired for storytelling, I guess. And that's something that I talk about in my keynote about how we make sense of the world. And we commonly share some intangible myth So there would be no civilization, no society, no community if you weren't for, I mean, apart from very small community and very small villages. But the minute you grow communities beyond a village, you have to have shared myth that we have to believe in for reality to make sense. And I guess our brains are just excellent at this. They're just excellent at believing and learning from all of those things. So LARPing being extremely realistic and with very few elements that comes to disrupt. There is of course a lot of rules. There's minimal rules in LARPing, but the few rules there are usually tied to emotional and physical safety. So some scenes, some moments can become a little bit too much for people. You can also wake up past trauma. So the only rules we have in most LARPs is we have specific words. safe words I would say to slow down the intensity of a scene or to stop a scene if it's really really overwhelming because we know how powerful emotional bleed is in LARPing and it's very important that nobody gets traumatized or develop PTSD because of that. I'm not sure I answered your question, but I really do think that our brains only get what the senses or five senses send them, and then they just make sense of it. And so if the five senses send them specific sets of stimuli that are in harmony with each other, which happens in VR sometimes, and it's beautiful, and then the brain will just think it's reality and will just learn from it and adapt and feel from it the same way we do with actual reality.
[00:18:06.485] Kent Bye: Just to go back to the LARP. What was the context again? Or was the theme of that LARP that you had come from right before the salad story?
[00:18:13.210] Celine Tricart: Yeah, we play villagers in a small village in the countryside of France in I believe it's 1943 so it was after Germany has invaded France and was occupying France and so it's not active war zone, but There is a resistance, there is the people who collaborated, and there is the majority of the population that is in the grey zone in between the two. And so we had to deal with issues of resisting, not resisting, collaborating, not collaborating, and just trying to survive in a very, very hard environment where there is very little food, no coffee, no cigarettes, no nothing, and everything is kind of like black market. And so the question is, what are you willing to sacrifice for what you believe in? And what are you willing to sacrifice for what you need?
[00:19:03.304] Kent Bye: Okay, so part of the context that you were coming from was that you were recreating this Germany's invasion of France and that there was not a lot of abundant food or regular times to eat and that anything you did have to eat had to go from like underground trading in a black market, even within the LARP.
[00:19:18.102] Celine Tricart: Yeah, and this lab was very realistic in that sense, although there was a remote room that the organizer told us if you really need a coffee, if you need food, if you need to smoke a cigarette, go in that room over there. It's considered out of the game. Don't talk, because we don't want to leave the character. They didn't put us in physical harm of any kind, but personally I like to stay completely immersed when I do LARP. So yeah, I ate maybe two mushrooms and three potatoes over the course of the weekend. And the interesting thing about this LARP is that it's really about the values of grey and it's really trying to be realistic in a sense. And so there were some players who were playing Germans. Right? And it's again, it's LARPing now has evolved past the kind of Dungeons & Dragons phase where there is a good guy, there is a bad guy and we fight. And it's way more complicated than that and way more realistic in a sense.
[00:20:13.691] Kent Bye: Yeah, it sounds like your nourishment over the course of the weekend was voluntarily constrained in the context of the story to really embody what it would be like to be there and then to see the salad was like this abundance of coming out of that. And so to really empathize with that, you know, in the experiences that you've done before with the key and exploring themes of the refugee crisis and now that we have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there's themes there around this imperial impulse to invade these countries, but you were putting yourself in the context of that story and that experience and then coming out of that and feeling the contrast between those two is what I imagine. That there was an embodied experience that then carried over into that emotional bleed.
[00:20:53.425] Celine Tricart: And I cannot really say that I fully understand what people in war zones or people under occupation live because mine was only a two-day experience and for them it could be years. But I have a much much much much better understanding now than I used to. And I remember crying a lot after the LARP just because I was thinking of my grandparents. And I was like, I had no idea that they had to go through this. Like, I've read it in books, I've seen documentaries, but now I feel it in my skin. And it's completely different. And so when people talk about, you know, virtual reality, can't believe I'm going to say that, but like the empathy machine and all that stuff. I often think for myself like yeah but it's only like 10% of what we can do with LARPing. And my goal really when I work in virtual reality is maybe to get to 50% of what we achieve and really try to push that sense of that emotional bleed again in a positive way because you can also do harm. Everything that do good can do harm. It's just how it is. If you can cure PTSD, you can induce PTSD with the exact same technique. So we have to be, again, sense of ethics, always question what you do, and always question whether you're doing for the best intentions, and always wonder if you might do harm for some people. And in that case, how do you prevent that? I always, always, always remember the day I showed Sun Ladies to someone and I didn't know that that woman was a vet and she had a PTSD attack after one minute of watching Sun Ladies. And Sun Ladies, there is no violence in it. I mean, there's a lot of violence in the story, but there is no visual violence, there is no blood, there is no gunshots or anything like that, but yet just being immersed in the landscape of Iraq started a PTSD attack and that was a very valuable lesson for me and now I always have little disclaimers. My new experience as a disclaimer at the beginning, even though it's very Soft on many sense. I still like insisted that we put something. Okay, it tackles difficult subjects and will mention abuse and violence and For a lot of people they will see that and they will know that it's not for them So that the same way I've learned that lesson the hard way with some ladies now. We have to be very mindful of that
[00:23:12.278] Kent Bye: You mentioned in your South by keynote that you have done over a hundred LARP since you were 17 years old And so what have been some of the highlights of experiences that you've had an opportunity to have?
[00:23:25.110] Celine Tricart: There's so many of them. So yeah, it's a you know, I Like to feel emotions and so I tend to really love the LARPs that put me in very difficult situations and really make me sometimes very sad for a very long period of time. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know, but I value those feelings. When a story can create strong feelings in me, It's I guess the same reason I was reading books a little girl with a flashlight or I was addicted to TV and movies. It's just everything that can create emotions from storytelling is something that I deeply valued. So yeah, I mentioned during The keynote LARP that I did that takes place in Argentina right after World War II during the time that Perón was elected, married Eva Duarte Evita and there's all those very interesting things that happen in a country politically. I didn't know much about Argentina history before the LARP, now I'm kind of, I've become an expert in that period of time. And because of the LARP I took tango lessons and I still do actually because it started a new passion in my life which is tango dancing. But just having that slice of life of a person in a country that I barely knew and understanding all the crazy things that happen in politics. And also feminism, that was a very interesting couple of years for feminism in Argentina. So this is definitely one of the highlights. There's also another LARP that's called the Moon Reaver that takes place in the South of America in Three Axe. I mentioned also that LARPs are also getting influenced by other medium because it's not the ultimate form of storytelling at all. It's just one other medium. So right now there is LARPs that started doing acts structure. So we have in that specific one, the Moon River, there's three different acts that takes place six months of each other. So we'd play for a few hours. Then there is a specific event and the organizer will say, cut, basically stop. We're not allowed to talk. We see a little theater scene that plays in front of us that cannot tell us what's happening in the next six months. And that happens during the crash of 29. And everything changes for a lot of people. And then act two, and then a little break, and then act three. And having this moment of seeing the life of your character completely changing over the course of a year and a half, while the LARP itself is only seven hours. So that was a very powerful experience as well.
[00:26:05.116] Kent Bye: I see. So you're there just for seven hours, but it's covering like a year and a half, but you have it broken up in explicit three act structure with little theatrical scenes to kind of fill in the gaps of the time.
[00:26:14.558] Celine Tricart: Yeah. Yes. I mean, that's really fascinating what you can do. Everything is open and it's really where it merged with immersive theater in a sense, but we never tried to break the immersion and never tried to break that first person perspective. That's very important. Otherwise I think it will considerably diminish the emotional bleed and the effect it has on people.
[00:26:36.326] Kent Bye: You mentioned that there was an evolution of different types of LARPs with the competitive, and then where you're trying to play to win, and then there's actually LARPs where it was designed for you to lose, and then the slice of life. So maybe you could talk about how you've seen this evolution from this more zero-sum play to win, and then deliberately lose, and then the slice of life.
[00:26:55.445] Celine Tricart: Yeah, this is very much the evolution of LARP that I've seen happen in France. Just so you know, there is a lot of different kind of LARP. There's something we call Nordic LARPing, and that comes from the Nordic countries that has influenced the way we play in France a lot. In France, it's more or less Romanesque, so very strongly storytelling-based LARPing. In the US, I'm not very familiar with what's happening here, but what I've seen over the course of the past 20 years in France is that evolution from PvE, so those are terms that we stole from video games, so player versus environment, you play the good guys usually, imagine a Dungeons & Dragons setting, so you play the knights and the witches or the magician and you wait for the bad guy who are usually played by the organizer or NPC non-playable character they will attack and you have to defend and you had to win you had objective you need to find that treasure in the forest you have to kill that character you have to do this kind of things and so you're Self-esteem at the end of the game comes from whether you've completed your objectives or not. It was a lot of fun. And they still exist. And once in a while I love to do those LARPs. It's very fun. But then it evolved into something that were PvP, so player versus player, where there's a lot of story. When you do a LARP, you usually receive a few months in advance your character sheet. Character sheets in French LARPs go from 20 pages to 50 pages of the story of your character and everything that happened to your character and more importantly the relationship with other characters because that's where the magic happens, those moments between characters. the stuff that we know, the secrets, the things that we did to each other, and that sometimes can be buried for a long time. And of course, because it's a LARP and things must happen, so you unearth old secrets and old, finally, things that went unsaid for a long time will be put to light. So that's when player versus player started happening, and then we started realizing that Winning is not exactly where you get the most heightened emotion, it's often when you lose. So if your objective is to find your daughter that you've lost 20 years ago and at the end of the lore maybe you have the opportunity to find her but you realize that if you find her you will put her in danger and then you decide to not discover who she is, like all of those things that are like OK, I haven't reached this objective of mine, but I felt so much stronger emotion because I didn't. So that was the next wave. And now it's very interesting because we kind of like disconnected ourselves from the concept of winning or losing. there is no more objectives per se, we just have this again long character sheet that puts us in a specific context in time and we will just experience this slice of life in the skin of that person and there is no winning, there is no losing, there is no objective and it's all about living the specific day within that specific context.
[00:30:11.558] Kent Bye: I see. So yeah, it's kind of like embedding yourself into that world and not having like an explicit narrative goal, just kind of seeing what happens with the relational dynamics. It seems like it's more of a receiving of, like I think of something like Sleep No More, where they're recreating the environment of this 1940s hotel in New York City, but it's got a lot of environmental design. But in this case, you're embedding yourself within that larger context, but with other characters. And there's like the relational dynamics that emerge. I guess how do you prevent yourself from slipping into what you would want to do versus what the character would want to do or what type of dynamics that are trying to transport you to another time that represents the culture of that moment rather than whatever our existing culture might do or want.
[00:30:56.747] Celine Tricart: Yeah, that's a very good question because, yeah, sometimes that's part of the struggle of being a character. Over the past five years, I've specifically requested that they give me, when I try to apply to play a LARP, because there's a limited number of players, so you have to apply, and then usually it's kind of a lottery system or a casting system. I've always requested, in the past five years, that they give me characters that I describe as extremely different from myself, from Céline Trichardt. Because it's very easy to cast me into a character that looks like me, that acts like me. So, for many years, I was always playing the same kind of character, that it was Céline taking the decision instead of the character, because they were so similar to myself. And now, since I've started asking for characters that are very, very different from me, It's put me in a very difficult position of there is Celine, what Celine wants to do, which is definitely not what the character would want to do. And there's some moments where Celine would want to be like, stop this, this is not acceptable and like step in. And why the character, because of her history and who she is, would just not be able to do that. And that's also when you play in historical settings like 45 versus 2022, there's a lot of things that have changed also about how women behave and all that stuff. A lot of LARPs try to avoid the pitfall of just being oppressive to female character because that would not be very fun for us. But there is still a lot of things that has to be established or like, at that specific moment in time, a woman would not say or do these kind of things. And so you have to preserve the historical setting, you have to. But for example, that LARP that happens during the occupation, one of the female character was the mayor of the village. And at the time in France, there was no such thing as female mayors. So we still like change a little bit because otherwise it would be extremely boring for us. So those moments where I'm screaming inside and I constantly have to remind myself that I'm not Celine, I'm the character, but it gets much easier as you go. So it's the first 15 minutes is really hard. Then the first two hours, you still have that little voice in your head. And after that, I cannot explain why, but all this Celine's voice disappear. And it's just the character talking. It's fascinating how the brain does this kind of thing. And actually, we do a lot of, we call them atelier, what would be the name in English. We do a lot of preparation before the LARP and after the LARP, too. It's kind of like an inboarding and outboarding. So for example, before a LARP, we do little scenes that puts us in a historical context. It's usually like 10, 20 minutes. And it's very guided, very scripted. It puts us in the right set of mind. And at the end of a LARP that is a bit intense, there is usually the same things happening when we break into smaller groups and we openly talk about how we feel and what we need. And those little scenes are designed to cool down and get our bearings back into the real world.
[00:34:17.387] Kent Bye: OK, yeah, and just to start to wrap things up here in this conversation right now, I hear that you're both working on a cinematic VR documentary, but also starting a video game company. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about what you're working on now.
[00:34:31.424] Celine Tricart: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Fight Back is a project I've been working on since I came back from Iraq in 2017. It's been a long time coming because it's extremely hard to finance this kind of VR experiences. So originally it was a cinematic documentary about a woman learning how to fight, self-defense and all that stuff. And that transformed into a transmedia project that is now a feature documentary. where we follow four women around the world starting their journey in self-defense in very different contexts, in Kenya, in India, in Norway, in France. We also have a story in the US. So that will be a documentary about the benefit of self-defense and community sisterhood for women empowerment. So that is the feature documentary and a virtual reality game. So it's not a documentary anymore. It's very much a game that we will be releasing later this year. It is almost finished. We are hoping to premiere sometimes this summer. It will be for the Quest 2 with hand tracking. And I don't want to say too much about it because you will discover it soon. As per video games, yeah, I started last year a new company in France called Kaven with Marie Blondio, my business partner. And we want to work and build video games that we like and we love, which are video games that are usually a very strong artistic imprint and carry the messages that we care about. So continuing the work that I've started in VR onto the realm of video games. I'm really excited by this because Coming from VR, it's so easy. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not doing Zelda, but right now we're building, for example, our first game will be a 2D puzzle platformer. And we just did a prototype in three weeks. And this is incredible because in VR, it takes years to do anything. It was also easy to raise money for it because video game is definitely a much bigger industry than our industry. That's also something that makes me so sad is we make all these efforts to do beautiful VR experiences, and there's not a lot of people who can see them. If it's LBE, it's even a smaller number, but I just wish there was more of an audience for what we do. And through video games, I'm hoping to reach a bigger audience. I'm not giving up on VR. I'm very much passionate about VR still, but I also hope to be reaching more people through video games.
[00:37:05.583] Kent Bye: Yeah, at the end of your keynote, there was questions and the question that I would have asked, I'd love to ask you now is how your experiences with lucid dreaming inform all these different media of how you understand story and tell stories.
[00:37:20.346] Celine Tricart: yeah oh thank you for asking yeah so i'm a lucid dreamer and for the people who don't know what it is lucid dreaming is when you are able to half wake up in your dream and be conscious while you're dreaming and you can take control of the dream somehow and you can fly or you can invoke certain things or meet certain people that you want to meet. Lucid dreaming is, for those of you who can experience it, is probably the most powerful, incredible experience that we can live in our brains. It really unlocks imagination and it unlocks It can also help dealing with a lot of things that you want to deal, reflect on. For example, I also use it to write sometimes if I'm stuck on something or I'm not quite sure and I manage to lucid dream. It's not easy for me. It requires a lot of preparation before going to bed and it definitely needs the time to do so. When I have only six hours for a night, I will not be able to lucid dream. I need eight hours minimum. So sometimes he can help me unlock some plot problems or characters that I couldn't quite figure out. I've heard the story of a music composer that hears the music while he's lucid dreaming and then wakes up and writes it. So that's fascinating. So yeah, for me it's a tool and I hope we'll be one day able to approach this kind of freedom in VR. It's actually getting there. I think with the ability to generate content on the fly in VR. Imagine you're in a social VR experience and you can just think about something and it will appear in front of you. Maybe with the use of EEG device or like I've seen prototypes of, depending on your feelings and how you feel, it will change. It was a fashion app, it will change the AR dress that is in front of you, just if you're feeling sad or if you're enjoying. So, with the development of those technologies, we can get closer to emulating lucid dreaming in VR, hopefully.
[00:39:28.404] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of VR storytelling or immersive storytelling or LARPing might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:38.056] Celine Tricart: It will enable us to create a better world. I mean, I know it sounds cliche, but... If as a collective we can imagine a world where, I just watched a project here that's called The Morning We Wake about what happened in Hawaii when they had an alert on their phone about a missile coming and like nuclear weapon. If we can collectively create and share this intangible myth of a world without a nuclear weapon, And if all of our brains can think of that reality, then it will happen. And that's the reason why I don't want to do dystopian projects anymore. I don't want to do this kind of things because it kind of feels like the human brain is so powerful that when we think of something and we're all wired onto this one common idea, it somehow will steer the ship in that direction. and I don't want to do only utopias either because that would be a little bit dumb and boring but if we can all steer the ship together by shaping our mind into thinking a certain way and storytelling can do that then we can have control of the ship sometimes we feel completely helpless, but as a collective we steer the ship. So through storytelling and through the use of all those advanced storytelling techniques, we can create a new shared myth that will get us to a better place. I truly, truly believe that.
[00:41:05.266] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:41:09.802] Celine Tricart: No, I'm really grateful to talk with you today, Kent. I really appreciate your time. I just hope that the message will resonate and I just encourage everyone who is creating right now to, well again, study That's kind of what I said at the end of my keynote. I'm going to repeat myself, but yeah, study the pioneers of the past and look at our current reality and figure out what's wrong and what you don't like about it and respect the power of storytelling and use that beautiful power that you have to change the things that you don't like in today's reality and craft better realities for tomorrow. It could be through the metaverses or it could be through this good old reality that we are in. So please go explore and make beautiful things.
[00:41:58.725] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Selene, thank you so much for joining me today to unpack your keynote about storytelling and to really dig into live-action roleplay. I do think that's going to be a pretty significant part as we move forward. There's something about, you know, I did the metamovie project, Alien Rescue, where I embodied a character. And it's like more of an immersive theater piece, but to actually be a character in that scene and in that world, there's something that's really compelling about that. So I do think that we'll continue to see this bleeding of the immersive theater elements, but also the live-action roleplay into more and more of these virtual reality experiences and that maybe rather than like the ready player one gamified world, which I'm sure we'll have that just like the early days of the LARP was all about winning and losing. I expect that eventually we'll have more slice of life type of experiences within the Metaverse and live action role play. And I'm personally really looking forward to being able to kind of jump in and have some of these experiences that you've had over the last 20 plus years of LARPing yourself. So thanks again for joining me on the podcast and unpacking it all.
[00:42:54.864] Celine Tricart: Thank you so much, Ken.
[00:42:56.682] Kent Bye: So that was Celine Charikart. She's a VR storyteller who gave the main South by Southwest keynote on Monday, March 14th, 2022. So I have a number of different takeaways about this conversation is that first of all, well, the live action role play, I think is in a lot of ways, what I see is the future of immersive storytelling, especially when it comes to XR. There's the meta movie project, Alien Rescue, which I think is one of the first projects where I really got to be embedded into what I would consider to be a short live action role play. But super fascinating to hear Celine's 20 plus years of experiences of different LARPs and these aspects of emotional bleed of, at least I make sense of it, is that there's parts of your own character that is put into these different contexts. And as you put yourself into these contexts and put yourself under pressure, this is a Robert McKee quote, then there's part of your essential character that's being revealed by doing that. Now, the question is always, well, if you're in these contrived contexts where you're putting yourself into it, then is your response only a response to that context? Or is it maybe revealing a part of your more essential character that you've never really had a chance to be able to be revealed to you before. These concepts of emotional bleed, I start to think about how, as you start to step into the shoes of another personality and really empathize with those points of views and perspectives, you have to differentiate your own identity, but then maybe there are still fundamental aspects of your essential character that are being expressed in a way that have never really been able to have expression before. The level of immersion of really you know not breaking your sense of being that character and all the different ways that you're doing that Goes above and beyond anything that I've ever had a chance to experience The closest I've had is something like sleep no more where you're really kind of a ghost you're not really a character or something like the meta movie project where it was difficult for me to have a character back sheet and know anything other than just it's me in this situation rather than someone else that I'm playing and So that's something that Selena has also said that she's more and more wanting to embody these different characters that are distinctly different from herself So yeah She's got this graph that she showed that I'll have a link to in the show notes where it's on two axes one axis is the third-person perspective where you have in the lower left-hand corner all the existing broadcast media and then the other On the other side, you have the first-person perspective, where you start to get a little bit of the video games, but especially within the XR experiences, where you're embodied as a character, or these immersive theater or live-action role-play. And then, in terms of the vertical axis, you have, at the lowest level, seeing it through a 2D portal. You're not fully immersed within that experience. And then, the full immersion is the degree of embodiment that you have no reference frame of a 2D portal. You're just embedded into that context. And then as you move up to the upper right-hand corner, which is like the fully immersive and the first-person perspective, then you have more and more opportunities for what the LARPing community refers to as this concept of emotional bleed. So that's all I have for today and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a message-supported podcast and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
