Missing Pictures is a five-part episodic series that translates unmade films from famous directors from around the world into a spatialized VR story pitch and treatment. French Director Clément Deneux created a episode short film version called Jamais sur vos écrans (Never on Your Screens) that has been translated into an episodic VR series featuring the unmade films from Abel Ferrara (USA), Tsai Ming-Liang (Taïwan), Lee Myung-Se (South Korea), Naomi Kawase (Japan), and Catherine Hardwicke (USA). I had a chance to break down the five episodes with Deneux and Atlas V producer Oriane Hurard at the Tribeca Immersive festival.
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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, a podcast that explores the frontiers of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. If you enjoy the podcast, please do consider supporting it at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So, continuing on my series of looking at some of the different immersive storytelling pieces that were featured at the Tribeca Immersive Film Festival, today's episode is on Missing Pictures, which is an episodic series, a five-part series, that the first two episodes premiered last year at Tribeca Film Festival, and the episodes 3, 4, and 5 were showing at the Tribeca Immersive this year. So this is a really, really interesting piece, just because they're talking to different famous film directors from across USA, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and they're trying to get films that are unmade. So these are unmade films, so they're missing pictures. So talking to filmmakers who, for one reason or another, these pet projects that they're never able to actually bring to completion. So over the course of these different episodes, they start to go in and get the story of these different projects and the vision, but then use the medium of virtual reality to actually do a little bit of a spatialized cinematic story pitch for what the story would have been. So it's in some ways a story pitch or a treatment or trying to get the essence of a story, and in its own way, using the medium of VR to be able to tell the story that would be told within film. And of course, if it was told as a film, it would have a completely different vibe, but this is just Using one medium to reflect on upon another medium. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the severe podcast So this interview with Clement and Orion happened on Friday, June 10th 2022 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, New York so with that let's go ahead and
[00:01:53.309] Clement Deneux: Dive right in! So I'm Clement Deneu. I'm the French director of the series Missing Pictures. And we are here to show the episodes 3, 4, and 5 to the series. So it's like the opening and the premiere of the series, world premiere. We already showed the first two episodes at Tribeca last year. So I'm here with Oriane Heurard, the producer, and we're happy to show the full series to the audience.
[00:02:19.222] Oriane Hurard: And I'm Auriane Hura, I'm a VR producer at Atlas 5, the French VR company. I've been working there for the past 18 months and before that I was already a VR producer but I have a smaller company on my own and it's my first time at Tribeca with a physical festival because my previous project has been featured last year but it was online only edition.
[00:02:47.742] Kent Bye: Maybe could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space of immersive storytelling.
[00:02:54.227] Clement Deneux: Yeah, sorry. So I am director. I was mostly come from the graphic design storyline. I made a lot of broadcast design, opening titles, things like that. And I slowly moved from graphics to directing. I made some shorts movie and working on music video, advertisement, and narrative, and documentary. And I made a documentary series about unmanned things called Never Unseen. So it was the same concept, same ideas, and after that I was working with the same producer than Missing Pictures, Antoine Quirrell from Atlas 5. And when he created the company, we talked a little bit about some project on VR, some ideas, and I proposed to him to adapt the concept into VR. So that was the starting point of the full whole idea. It was five years ago. And from this time, we starting to looking from phones and directors and things like that. And we slowly create the project. So yeah, that's my first VR piece. And yeah, that's it.
[00:04:03.767] Oriane Hurard: So I myself came also from movie and audiovisual fields. So I made production studies in France and I started to work for Arte and other production companies like 10 years ago about transmedia. It was already about interactive storytelling and how to engage the audience in new innovative projects and writings. And then when I discovered VR I think it was at South by Southwest in 2014 and I saw the project from Felix and Paul and I was immediately amazed by this new medium and this new way of storytelling. So I founded a production company in France and I've been able to produce a few pieces. The first one was I Love the Dead by Benjamin Nuel and it won a Venice VR award in 2018. So it was really, really amazing. to premiere in such a large festival like Venice and it was my first piece as a producer, my first VR piece as well, so it was a very good start. And last year I decided to join ATLAS 5 as a VR senior producer and Missing Pictures was my first project at ATLAS. It was already, as Clément said, it was already Partly funded, the first was already made, the second episode was in the middle of production, so I mostly work on the last three and know for the world distribution of the piece.
[00:05:42.617] Kent Bye: Yeah, I want to dig into the piece, but before I do, one of the things that I really was struck by in watching the credit sequence of these pieces of how many co-production collaborations you have across in Taiwan, in Korea, in France, and maybe you could talk a bit about the cooperation or collaboration of this piece amongst so many different leading-edge producers across many different countries.
[00:06:06.893] Oriane Hurard: Indeed, this is the biggest international co-production we ever made. Even at Atlas 5, we are used to international co-production, but we have five countries financially and legally involved. So we have France, UK, South Korea, Luxembourg, and Taiwan. And with different international filmmakers involved in the series, we've been able to shoot also in the US and in Japan. So it's two more countries. and did with working with, I think, 14 or 15 different studios for volumetric capture, for sound design, and for animation and VR integration. So it had been like a production challenge for my part. And also a creative challenge because the three last episodes, even the second one, have been made during pandemic. So some shootings and some production have been totally remote. And it was also, let's say, an interesting challenge for Clément as well.
[00:07:07.902] Clement Deneux: Yeah, but it was really complicated. The communication with the studio from Asia, Taiwan and Korea. We always have to talk with people who were like translators. All the creative ideas need to be understable by the studio. So yeah, it was challenging, but interesting too. And yeah, the pandemic, it was interesting to shoot volumetric capture, shot remotely from my place to Taiwan or South Korea in the middle of the night. So yeah, lots of lost in translation in a way, but we struggled a little bit regarding the pandemic, but it was very, very interesting.
[00:07:50.091] Kent Bye: Yeah, and also just the number of languages that these pieces are in as well I think is a reflection of those different co-production efforts of those five different countries. And also I'd say the creators of the filmmakers that you're featuring seem like they are maybe well-known filmmakers within the context of their own country, maybe could give a bit more context as to, well, so I guess the overall theme of this piece is prominent filmmakers who have ideas of unmade pictures that you'd mentioned that you did a whole documentary about, but then, in some ways, these VR pieces end up trying to capture the essence of the story, so what it feels like in some ways is like, this would be like a spatialized story pitch, or a story treatment of, this is what the story is about in some ways, and that They're able to at least collaborate with you to get parts of the story told. If it's not in the full length of the film, they're at least to get the idea of the story out there. And that you're collaborating with these filmmakers who spent years on these projects that were never made. You come along and say, hey, let's make this thing that even everybody will make, but in this more poetic treatment or a pitch. So yeah, that's I guess how I make sense of it, and the range of styles that you have across each of those pieces I think is also interesting to see the experimentation of storytelling techniques of how to encapsulate the essence of a story in a short period, but also tell the story. So it seems like you're doing multiple things of documenting these people as individuals, but also trying to give the essence of the story that they're trying to tell. Yeah, I'd love to hear a bit more about your process of finding these different filmmakers and how you're going to translate their many years of work down into more of a poetic experience within VR.
[00:09:27.499] Clement Deneux: Yes, when we did the first season, in a way, not in VR, but in 2D interview, we were a little bit frustrated because, in fact, most of the time, the reason why a movie didn't happen, it's the same. It's because of the money or one actor decline. So it was really interesting because the first season was more focused on why the movie didn't happen and we realized at the end of the process that we were a little bit disappointed but we really want to see more about the stories itself more than the making of or things like that. So when we talk about a new season or a new way to show these stories, we really want to focus more on the stories itself, more than the behind the scenes. So that's why also we try to create the essence of a story in 10 minutes. And also it was a really interesting challenge to use different narrative way or different graphic way to show stories. as we wanted to make like a very wide range of panorama of contemporary cinema. It was important to us to show different artists with a very very different language, cinematic language. So for us the important thing was not to have a similar style for every episode as we wanted to show the diversity of the cinema. So that's why each episode has its own style, and it's also something I really like to experiment, to have a fluid style, to be able to adapt or adjust, and to show the story with a proper style. So that was for me maybe the most interesting part of the full project, to be able to adjust and to create different styles for each episode. We really want a big panorama of contemporary cinema with women, with people from not just European or American Asian cinema because we really think it's one of the most interesting cinema now in Korea or in Japan. So it was part of our goal. And yeah, it was one of the challenging, most challenging part was to cast the directors because we had a lot of, it's a really tricky subject to talk about failure and everything. For the first season, it was quite easy to have big names because it was only one hour interview. So in terms of commitment, it's really easy to say, okay, I can talk about this topic for one hour. But for this season, we asked them to stay a full day of shooting because volumetric capture is really, really time consuming. You need to spend a full day for 10 minutes of material. We also take them into the creative processes. We ask them some material, script or image or storyboards, anything they have from the pre-production stage of the movie. When we start to work on the episode, we show it to the directors, concept art, so we ask them some feedback to be sure that the thing we work is good for them because we, in a way, illustrate their image or their story. So, yeah, it was to find five directors, women, who are okay to talk about this project. and interested enough with the VR to jump into the project. So the 18 months of production, we maybe spend one year to find the people.
[00:12:49.012] Oriane Hurard: Yeah, before the 18 months of production.
[00:12:50.973] Kent Bye: And actually the first season, I didn't work on it, but it was only... Just to clarify, is the first season you're talking about the 2D film that you made, the unmade? And the second season is the VR piece, so episodes 1 to 5, right?
[00:13:02.380] Clement Deneux: First or second season, maybe it's a mistake to say that. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that. It's just the same concept, and I directed both, but it's really different. It's just the concept was good enough to make a VR piece.
[00:13:15.890] Oriane Hurard: Let's say the first iteration of your concept was only male and mostly French filmmakers and American. But it was also the idea with Arte when Arte and BBC decided to commission this project. It was supposed to be their first co-commission for this VR piece three years ago. And the idea for them, and it was also for Atlas really obvious that we couldn't make only US and French director and only male. It was also about diversity and inclusivity in cinema. So it was also why the casting took so long because just mathematically there is less women involved and especially less women with a big track record in cinema and enough films and enough big career to have missing pictures because it's some logic but young filmmakers don't have missing pictures yet. They may have one day but they still hope they won't. So it was also why we were looking for really experienced filmmakers with a diversity of style also, of origins. And we had to find also filmmakers that had enough confidence. and willing to tell this story and this missing story. It's about, like Clément said, a failure or like a gap in their career. So it was the most tricky part and we are very glad to find these five amazing filmmakers. They have been very generous also to to play with us, to give us some material, some time for the volumetric capture, and in some episodes they are the volumetric capture. It's like they're playing with the characters, like Katherine Hardwick in the Monkey Ranch Gang episode, she's playing with the 3D. virtual characters around her, so she was really committed in the making and in the piece. And we have also other filmmakers like Tsai Ming-Yang for Episode 2 or Lim Young-Se for Episode 4, they get very committed for the post-production. For the 3D assets, the choice of backgrounds, colors, they get very precise because their Missing Pictures is about childhood memories. so they wanted to recreate them correctly. So each filmmaker had his own way to approach our project and to be involved in. Clément did an amazing job to adapt his work to each filmmaker.
[00:15:57.785] Kent Bye: So maybe you could talk about the process of making this piece, because you're not only looking at the existing script and screenplays, storyboards, all this material to make the film, but then on top of that you have to tell the story of the creator, and so do you do the interview first and then have the volumetric capture and then see how you're able to build out the story, or do you need to have the art first to be able to have an idea of what kind of spatial story you tell? Seems like it's a chicken and egg problem there, where to start, and you need to do both and maybe iterate a bit, so talk through a little bit of that process of how to get started on a project like this.
[00:16:32.561] Clement Deneux: Once we get a name, in a way, or someone is enough interested into the process, I watch the movie that I didn't see from him or her. And after that, the really first step is we do an interview, sometimes remotely or in face-to-face when it's possible. And I spend most of the time, one, two hours with the director, and we talk about the project and what happened and everything. It's not even recorded at some point, or just only with a repo or some device. So it's like main starting point. After that I collect everything they have, scripts, image or anything. And I will use the interview and all the material they have to write a script. Where I place some sentences or some words they said to me during the interview as dialogue from them. And after that we send to them the script and we do a new interview but properly recorded this time.
[00:17:28.026] Kent Bye: The fully volumetric capture, right? Or just a 2D interview?
[00:17:31.270] Clement Deneux: Because we will use it as a voiceover, because volumetric capture is really expensive technology, so we can have 10 minutes of even expensive money wise, but also in terms of resources for the headset. So most of the time in each episode we have 3 minutes of volumetric capture. Because once you put an asset of volcap inside the headset, all the lights, everything needs to be shut down. So we had to play with the voiceover, the volumetric computer. So once we make the final interview and we will use as a voiceover, We do the volumetric capture but we will know exactly the three minutes and that's why it was quite challenging even for the director because it was not an interview at all. It was really more like acting, more like performance capture because we need the one minute and it needs to be full take. We can't edit a volumetric capture. So they need to look at the right place and good timing. So that's why we take one day for three minutes of using of material. The process is like that. So first interview just to understand the project and to be free to say anything you want and everything. And after that, I write the script with pictures and the script and everything. And we send to them and we discuss a little bit about that. And after that, we record properly the song for the voiceover and the structure of the episode. And I will make like a storyboard with the voice to have a precise idea of the volumetric capture, which size, what action, everything. So once we do that, we are good for the shooting in World Cup.
[00:19:10.153] Kent Bye: Yeah, for me, as I watched the pieces, I really appreciated both the style and the stories. For me, I think one of the stories that stuck out for me, at least the most, was the Monkey Wrench episode with Catherine Hardwicke.
[00:19:21.417] Oriane Hurard: Actually, I don't know if you saw their movies, but her first feature was Thirteen. It was, I think, maybe 20 years ago. I saw it when I was a teenager and it really struck me and I think it was one of the first appearance for the actress, even Rachel Wood. So it was really a teenager movie but with lots of violence and coming of age, but really interesting. A second feature was Lords of Dogtown. It was a skateboard movie in Los Angeles downtown. And after that, she directed the first chapter of Twilight, the big franchise. So it was her first blockbuster movie in Hollywood. And then she made also a couple of films and she's involved in other series now and films. And she was very excited by the idea to be part of Missing Pictures. And she was really generous with her time and her assets and pre-existing material. Actually, the development phase for The Monkey Ranch Gang went pretty far because she, at the time, she made a storyboard and she made also a scouting trip for locations, for a scouting location. So she made a video about that for the studio, which was supposed to green light the movie back at that time. So we used all that and even the scouting video, we used it in the ending credits. It's a video you can see at the end of the episode. It was really interesting to make this episode but maybe Clément you can dive in a little bit more about the process.
[00:20:59.042] Clement Deneux: It's maybe one of the most interesting episodes because the Monkey Ranch Gang is a really famous book from the 70s. Ed Pressman is a producer who owns the rights and he tried to make a movie about this book since the 70s. So it's like, it's one of the very very famous unmade projects that he tried for 50 years now. and I'm still trying now. I know the book quite well since I was a teenager, when I read the book. So I was quite excited when we asked Catherine which project is good. Most directors, sometimes they come to us with two or three ideas. There is this project or this project, and we discuss with them which one maybe is the most VR-compatible, where we'll have most of ideas and visual opportunity. So when she talked about this one, I was, oh yeah, I already know the script, so let's do this. So it was really great to work on this project. It was really the best definition of Missing Pictures because it was a project Robert Redford tried to make, or Denise Hopper, a lot of people since 50 years. So it's one iteration of failure for this project. But this one was really interesting on this side of the project.
[00:22:08.057] Oriane Hurard: Actually, the reason why the missing pictures didn't get made, it was not a budget reason or availability reason, but it was more a political reason about eco-terrorism, because the studio gets afraid. It's what Catherine Hardwicke said to us, so we didn't. check this information but she really convinced that the reason that her movie didn't get made at the end is because of the political issue about eco-terrorism that can be tricky at the time and it's I think still be a tricky issue now. So it was really interesting because she tried to do it way before Knight moves It's a film by Kelly Richard, which is about the same theme. So I think it would be maybe easier to do the movie now. But 20 years ago, it was still an issue. And it's also a theme that resonates today with our current issues and ecological climate changing. So, yeah, I think it's an episode that summarizes the core concept of the whole series.
[00:23:15.297] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think because it was one of those pieces that goes beyond just the budgetary reasons, that there's other political reasons, I think that's an interesting subtext to look at these projects that didn't get made and some of the reasons why they maybe didn't get made. And just the way that that episode starts with Katherine Hardwick sitting at the campfire with the characters and you get introduced to each of these characters. like it felt like I was sitting around the campfire with her and that she was really going full into the pitch and like she's telling you the story and so you're aware of her as an entity and I think other pieces almost erase the presence of the protagonist of the volumetric capture and it's more about taking you into this other world like the one that I think about with the overweight teenager I wondered the reasons why a piece like that didn't get made, like the fatphobia type of issues around the culture, but I'm curious to hear your reflections on that, because it felt like that was another piece where you created different cinematics that gave me a sense of that story, hitting each of those different beats, but in a different animation style, but also trying to tell the overarching story that has some interesting twists and turns I wasn't expecting as I was watching it.
[00:24:23.438] Clement Deneux: You were talking about the first scene of Hardwick. In fact, we did these two episodes at the end. It was really the last episode. In fact, the Hardwick was the last one we worked on. So I also improved in terms of working with the volumetric capture because the first time it's a very, very recent technology. It's really, really limited at some point. For example, one of the tricky parts we discovered when we did the first episode is, in fact, the volumetric capture can't really look the audience in the eyes because it depends on where you are. So we had to find some way to create the illusion that the director looked at you. And the interactivity between VolCap and CGI model was something we didn't think it was possible at the beginning of the project. And episode after episode we said, maybe she can take something. So yeah, it was something very challenging for the last episode with Arduk because she also She burned matches and she... So we're trying to use a little bit more the interactivity between the volumetric capture and the environment. And yeah, I think it's the right way to work with this technology.
[00:25:33.907] Oriane Hurard: And regarding the Odebu Kawase episode, it was also interesting because it's very different and even the pace of the piece, I think it's the longest episode, it's almost 14 minutes, but the piece is also really quiet and the tone is also, even the sound design is lower than other episodes. It's not a mistake of sound design, it's assumed because Naomi Kawase, filmmaking and her previous movies are really about nature, about relationships and it's mostly intimate dramas. She made intimate drama movies and Her missing picture, so her debut, was her own attempt to go in a different genre of cinema. She wanted to make a comedy and she didn't make it because she changed her mind. So it's also interesting because the reason why the film didn't get made, it's not an external reason like financials or... studios or actors changing their mind. It's really an intimate reason, an internal reason coming from her directly. She wrote a script, she co-wrote a script with a Japanese writer and then she decided that she was not ready for this movie yet. Maybe one day. She said that she didn't totally abandon this idea to make this film one day, but she wasn't ready at this time. So it's also, for me, a very overwhelming reason not to make a film. And it's really interesting to have this kind of episode also in a series like Missing Pictures.
[00:27:18.182] Kent Bye: Yeah, the big thing I'm taking away from this entire series now I've seen all the episodes is that it feels like the opportunity or platform to experiment in different forms of storytelling because you're summarizing an entire story but you're allowing the creator to kind of almost come in and narrate other aspects of the story and that you're able to give a pitch of the story or treatment and so I'd love to hear any thoughts or reflections about what the spatial medium of VR is giving you in terms of telling a story that maybe is not available when you tell stories in the 2D medium. Like, now that you've done the first season in 2D and then the second season in the fully spatialized VR, like, what new affordances do you get from the VR that you couldn't do within the 2D film?
[00:28:03.510] Clement Deneux: In fact, one of the frustrated things on the first iteration is we wanted to show image from the unmade films and at some point we figured out that it's not making a movie instead of a director. So the idea is to talk about cinema through the specificity of another medium. We think it's interesting to make a documentary about a medium with another one, because we didn't make Abel Ferrara a movie without him. So that's one of the interesting parts of the project is also to talk about art form with another art form. And for the VR, I think it's really, really interesting as a medium with just one element, one sequence, something really, really short. You can give a lot of feeling or a sense of a bigger scale. So as we will have only 10 minutes to talk about the full stories as a summary or something really, really short. One of the origins of the project was Derangelica. When I saw it, it was one of the first VR pieces I saw. And I thought it was really, really incredible. And also because in Derangelica there is the story of a young teenager who remembers her mother, she's an actress, and she remembers some scene of a movie where she was an act. And so you have inside this art piece some image of movies, but in VR. And when I saw that, I said, oh yeah, you can in fact have a feeling of a movie with just one scene in VR. Because also the use of the scale and the fact that you can have in very, very short time something really gigantic and something just after something really, really minuscule. So you can easily go very very far on something huge like a blockbuster and just after in the same scene talk about something very intimate. So this specificity of VR to be able to are going very very different scale very fast visually but also emotionally. I think it's really, really good to tell a story in a very, very short time because you're able to use a lot of different scale of element in the same, almost in the same sentence. That's why, for example, in the Chiming Yang episode, he talked about the moment where he's taken from his grandparents. And he was really devastated by this. So we just showed a huge hand of his father taking him from the... So it's almost like a metaphor. It's just a really huge hand taking him from the... So you are able in VR to do something like that without editing. It's really efficient in a way to be very strong emotion, very simple emotion. And also because it's a series about imagination, a dream. So you are, in a way, diving into a world of a director. It's like you are in his brain. So at multiple layers, it was making sense. It's making sense to make this series in this medium.
[00:31:06.358] Kent Bye: I like that using one medium to document another medium because I'm doing a podcast to document VR so I can understand that but also I've seen a lot of pieces just in terms of documentary generally as a form to explore the potentials of the medium storytelling wise and then eventually move into the more narrative pieces so I feel like this piece in some ways is blending those two genres of the documentary aspect but also telling the story elements and so it's an interesting fusion in that way but Love to hear if you have any other reflections on storytelling and insights you get from working on this piece and what VR affordances are.
[00:31:40.402] Oriane Hurard: Yeah, at Atlas 5 we focus from the beginning of the company on narrative VR. Narrative either documentary or fiction based and I think a project like Missing Pictures was a perfect combination of what's storytelling in VR with a documentary based material but with dreamlike sequences like Clément said we can't recreate a movie that doesn't exist. So it was not about recreating some real images, it was more about a dive into each filmmaker's mind and trying to, as you say, get a glimpse of what 90 Minutes feature film could have been if it hadn't been made. And yeah, at Last Five we care a lot about finding the right way to tell this specific story and VR or AR also because we are making some augmented reality projects in this moment. So each story has a way to find his own medium and the relationship between medium and stories and the way to tell it, it's really, really important for us. And now, I think in the past five years, we made maybe a dozen or maybe 20 VR pieces and narrative-based pieces. And now we are trying to do more interactive and to add more interactivity in narrative. And it's a really interesting challenge because in some projects, when you add more and more interactivity, it's often in this balance, we can say, of narration. Because the more power you give to the user, the less space you give to narrative and to the creator. So it's always an interesting balance to make. And we're also developing some VR games. And gaming is one other challenge regarding story and user experience. It's really something we care about at Atlus, and we really want to continue to make some impact or meaningful documentaries and storytelling in VR.
[00:33:56.868] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:34:08.618] Clement Deneux: I think it's really the interesting part to work and create things in VR. It's so recent that it's almost like being there at the invention of cinema. So all the language, the ideas, the format, everything is new. So it's really interesting to work on this medium now because everything changed also because the technology is really, really moving fast. So you always need to adapt, adjust, and when you see someone need an AI, it's a really, really interesting idea. So it's really something organic now. And it's also, I think, one of the problems of the VR is that all the audience, it's really hard to know When you have a page of a store, is it a movie look? Is it a documentary series? There is no clear format yet. So everything is almost like a jungle now, still. So it's really interesting to be there at this moment and to think about what, for example, at the beginning, Missing Pictures was always a documentary, but what is a documentary in VR? In fact, a lot of Atlus 5 pieces, like Spheres, it's almost a documentary about space. So, yeah, everything is more organic or more blurred, the age of narrative piece, documentary. So, yeah, it's interesting, for sure. But I don't know if I have a vision of what, because it's so technology related. For example, we start the first episode of Mystic Pictures for the Oculus with Link, the Rift. So it was the style and everything was really, really more details, more lights, everything. And after the Oculus 2 came out and it was really more easy to find people who have Oculus, so we had to change the spec and the size of the project and everything. So, it's really a medium linked to technology market and new technology. So, it's still in process. Everything is still in process, in progress. So, it's really, really passionant. It's really interesting to be there, to think about the future of the VR. Even it's really hard to know what will be the next step in one week.
[00:36:20.032] Oriane Hurard: Yeah, we definitely want to continue to explore this medium and when I think about what could be my next project in VR, I try to always think about me as a user, as a VR enthusiast and a VR user and I try, I think, when I pick the project I produce because it I know it will take maybe two or three years of my life, so I try to pick them carefully. And when I do, I think I try to feel the amazement, the wonderful feeling. I felt for the first time I was in VR and I discovered some amazing pieces that we had a few years ago, like Nuts and Blindness or Patrick Watson movie. It was a 360, but it was awesome. In a way, it was amazing. towards them from Felix and Paul's Canadian studio. So yeah, I tried to find the way of a maze I had as a user and I picked the stories where I think we could find this feeling again. So it's not about technology. My way of working in VR is not finding absolutely the most technology advance. Each technology has to fit with the story and with the creator we want to work with. So in case of Missing Pictures, the volumetric capture was a really I think good choice to capture the presence of each filmmaker and to integrate the filmmaker in their missing pictures in a dreamlike VR documentary kind of way. But for other projects it can be traditional animation or very simple stylistic way or more realistic way. It really depends on the story and the creator. So I'm not sure I answered your question, but it's a really interesting one because it's what's striking me and why keeping me in my day-to-day work, actually. what could be fit in VR and what could not. And if it's not right to VR, why? So maybe we can change that, or maybe we can change the medium. So it's always story-based, I say.
[00:38:42.330] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the wider immersive community?
[00:38:48.183] Oriane Hurard: Yeah, so we will be as a bunch of other festivals in the next few months in Asia and hopefully in Europe. And I think Arte will publish the series at fall, so hopefully in October. And we will be on the App Lab and I'm mostly 100% sure that we'll be also on Steam and Viveport. And we have 360 version of each piece that will be on YouTube and different broadcasters all over the world. Basic Pictures is an international co-production with a lot of broadcasters involved so we want to make sure that every co-production country will have a way to reach the episodes and to enjoy the rest of the series and we also want to be showcased in LBE installations with a focus on, of course, film museums, film festivals like Tribeca or just film art houses. Everything can be related to film. I think it would be the right fit to showcase an LBE installation.
[00:40:00.071] Kent Bye: Any other final thoughts?
[00:40:01.713] Clement Deneux: I think it's important. One of the goals of the project also was, because it's talking about cinema but using VR, so it was also a way to take people who are movie fans or movie lovers in VR. And also for VR people who are a lot of VR fanatics are more video games, passion. So to talk about dependent cinema to people who are more interested in video games, it was also like a bridge between two worlds. that it was important for us. For example, we think about showing the series inside a movie theater where you can actually see some movies from the directors. So to create, for real, this bridge between VR and cinema through the series and also with real films, I think we will be glad to do.
[00:40:52.167] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, congratulations on finishing the series. I was able to watch the first couple of episodes during the pandemic while all the virtual conferences were happening. And so I was able to watch the first couple of episodes virtually. And then it's nice to see them all together here, all five of the episodes. And so, yeah, quite an epic effort. So congratulations on finishing it. And thanks for joining me here on the podcast to be able to help unpack it all. So thank you.
[00:41:15.096] Clement Deneux: Thanks. Sorry for our English.
[00:41:18.318] Oriane Hurard: Thank you.
[00:41:20.882] Kent Bye: So that was Clement Deneu, he's the French director of the series Missing Pictures, as well as Oren Horare, a VR producer at Atlas 5, which is a French VR company, and she previously worked as a VR producer. So, a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, So at the Tribeca Film Festival, I was recommending people try to see this piece because I think in terms of the diversity of experimentation and the different structures and forms of how to tell a story within VR, lots of different styles and techniques and blending and blurring of volumetric capture with other aspects of CGI and then using animation. just a lot of interesting experimentations and ways of getting you a sense of a vibe. It's like a story pitch using the medium of VR to kind of reflect upon other mediums. And so, yeah, just a really provocative idea and the different people that they're featuring and their stories and why they didn't get made. A lot of times it's money, but other times it's just for some other political reasons, like Katherine Hardwick piece of the monkey wrench story. Yeah, so the other thing is that this was a vast collaboration across many different XR and immersive producers. Just worth looking at some of the co-producers of this project because lots of different important entities that are out there trying to push forward these structures and forms of immersive storytelling across all these different regions from USA, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and UK, Luxembourg. So yeah, lots of different collaborators on this as a production piece. And yeah, it's an episodic series, so there's probably going to be a lot of ways that this is going to be distributed across many different regions. It'll probably end up on YouTube at some point. It's more of a cinematic 360 video depiction of all these. There is a VR native app that I saw, but I think this is a piece that would probably work pretty well translated into 360 video. And it also just has lots of different languages as well, as it's this vast international co-production across all these different countries. So, that's all that 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 list-supporter podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
