Here’s my interview with Deirdre V. Lyons, Founder of Ferryman Collective and winner of the 2023 Women in XR Innovation Award, that was conducted on Thursday, June 1, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See my conversation with the
XR Women Real World Impact Award recipient Paige Dansinger in episode #1308 and as well as XR Women The Trailblazer Award winner Athena Demos in episode #1192. See more context in the rough transcript below.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: the Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. So continuing my series of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with Deidre V. Lyons, who is an award winner of the XR Women Innovation Award at the Augmented World Expo 2023. So I had a chance to speak to her after she had gotten this award. Another winner of that year was Paige Danziger. It's an interview that I've previously published featuring her work in XR Community. And I've also previously interviewed Athena Deimos. She was also one of the award winners that year. But Deidre, she's doing a lot of live theater within the context of XR. I've covered a lot of the projects that she's been working on over the years in collaboration with the Fairman Collective, with Welcome to Respite, to Gumball Dreams, to Uncanny Alley, which she mentions here. This was in 2023. So the following year at Venice 2024 is when Uncanny Alley was premiering. And so I had a chance to do an interview with the co-directors of Steve Buchko and Rick Trewick, Metarik, as well as with Screaming Collar slash Christopher Lane, as well as Deirdre there in Venice. But this is kind of just more of an overview of her work and journey into the space, kind of a standalone, like catching up and capturing the moment of her winning this innovation award, honoring a lot of the work that she's doing at this intersection of immersive theater and VR, which I'll be covering some other folks that have been looking at this intersection of narratives and theater and VR as well in my next couple of interviews. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Deirdre happened on Thursday, June 1st, 2023 at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hi!
[00:01:54.498] Deirdre V. Lyons: Hello Kent, it's Deirdre. Deirdre B. Lyons. I do live theater and virtual reality and I am excited to be chatting with you about what it is that I and our lovely collective do, which is bring people into the VR space with an actor and do live performances that are interactive and immersive.
[00:02:14.573] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:02:18.798] Deirdre V. Lyons: Oh, my. I started not that long ago in VR, starting with Tender Claws' The Under Presents. I was a performer in that, and then I moved to The Tempest, which was an incredible experience. Tender Claws really hit it out of the park when they created this experience. Not only The Under Presents, but The Tempest, where you have an actor interacting with these different, we call them sprites, time sprites in this virtual world. And Samantha Gorman and Tanya Leal-Solto and Paisley Smith were all a part of that as producers and creators and honored to have worked with such amazing women in a space that created such imagination and fun for audiences to come and experience this. So I started with that as a performer and then moved into doing our own productions with Ferryman Collective. It was during the pandemic, of course, and there wasn't a lot going on at the time. Everybody's like, what do we do? And so Brian Tull was one of a friend of mine who was one of the people who had gone to see The Under Presents a lot of the times. And he's like, well, I hate that Halloween's been canceled. So let's do something for Halloween. And Braden Roy wrote a script and I I was like, okay, I'll come on and help with the actors. And I said, Steve, I turned to my husband. I said, please come and help us, you know, with the acting and the producing and all the things that need to be done. And so the four of us got together, did a 20 minute proof of concept, which went great. And then we did a hour long show the next month. Cause it was December. and Brian Tull's moniker is Krampus so we of course we had to do Krampusnacht so we did that and it was a hit it was nominated for an innovation award for the PGA Innovation Award we're like okay we're onto something here so then we were like I really wanted to do something that was more intimate and we were like let's keep doing stuff and I brought to the team a show that I'd seen in real life called The Severance Theory Welcome to Respite. And I approached Lindsay Skagg and I said, hey, I'd really like to bring this into VR because of the intimacy and the interactions that it provided. That it's a two-actor show and it's just one audience member, which we extended to another about 10 audience members by the time it was done. But... That went well. We went around the world. We won lots of awards. And so we're like, OK, what else can we do? And Lindsay got pregnant, so we couldn't continue on with the series, because she's going to have a baby. And she's now have a baby, a little one-year-old child, which is adorable. And we decided, OK, our wonderful animator, musician, dev guy, screaming color, aka Christopher Lane Davis, had this beautiful world that he'd built over the pandemic to showcase his music. One was Gumball Dreams and Club Gumball. And I was like, this is such a cool world. I want more people to see it. So I asked him if he liked the script that I had written around it. And he's like, I love it. So then we worked together to create a more finalized version of the script that stuck to his lore. And we put together a show for South by Southwest in 2022. won the audience award and went to Venice and this one won a lot of awards too and we're up for an August at the AWE conference so I'm super excited about that and that went really well and then we were collaborating with a group from Korea called GEOI to take Welcome to Respite to Korea and do a Korean language version at BFAN And then they approached us and said, hey, can you do something for South by Southwest in 2023? So we took their show, helped translate it into English and do an English version at South by Southwest that one of the other team members, Witt and Frank, directed. And that went really well. And so that's how I ended up here at AWE. And I just won Innovation Award from the XR Women, which is an amazing group of women who meet every Wednesday. For my time, I'm in Los Angeles. It's 8.30 in the morning. We do a little networking. And then for an hour, we get to listen to amazing people talk about the things that they're passionate about, the things that they're doing in this space. I learn so much. Sometimes we go on field trips. Like, we'll go check out a platform or we'll go check out a world. But yeah, I won.
[00:06:34.568] Kent Bye: Well, congratulations, first of all, for, you know, this well-deserved award for what was it called? The Innovation Award.
[00:06:41.394] Deirdre V. Lyons: Yeah, it's the Innovation Award. And, you know, for bringing and changing, possibly changing the nature of theater in the world. And I hope to bring more people into this space, not only creators, but audience members and building an audience for this space, because it is such a powerful platform for telling stories and particularly interactive and immersive theater. because the space just creates this feeling of being seen of being special and so that's the kind of work that we focused on but others are doing other amazing things there's you know alien rescues working in neos there's brendan bradley who's working in you know a web 3 platform you know there's all these creators doing these things and the more people who join us creating their own things the more audience we get and then the more they will look for more stuff so that's the hope is that we continue to build on this thing that we're growing, more entertainment theater. And people think of VR and they think games. That's all they think, games. Like, yeah, it's the low hanging fruit and it's really cool. But there's other things too.
[00:07:44.667] Kent Bye: Well, I know that we've crossed paths a number of times on the film festival circuit where a lot of these immersive stories are being shown and premiered and debuted. But there's also other entities like Oregon Shakespeare Festival that has been doing some more experiments within virtual reality. And so I'd love to hear some of your reflections of what's happening in the broader theater world. I know that the next stage immersive gathering is happening from everything immersive and no proscenium is happening in Denver. I think actually maybe like right now or over this next coming weekend. But yeah, I'd love to hear how some of this type of work is being received in the broader theatrical world where you have more of these intersections of the digital and the virtual with the theater realm.
[00:08:22.358] Deirdre V. Lyons: Yeah, actually the next stage it sort of overlaps AWE and one of our team members is on a panel over there so she's got to run off and be on the next stage panel as soon as she leaves AWE. It's an incredible time to be a part of this space so it seemed to me that movies and film and television and festivals around those spaces have been much more interested in adapting and opening up their doors to theater and the idea of theater and VR experiences than theaters are. Theaters have been a little bit more conservative, a little bit more traditional in this space and haven't really explored it too much until recently. And Quills Fest, what they're doing is great. I want to shout out to the PXR. I think they started in 2020 and then 2021, 2022. They're doing some amazing stuff up in Canada. Canada has such a great art support system anyway, which is lovely. The European Union has a much better art support system and I think that theaters now are starting to dabble in this space and realize that there is a platform here that they can use to expand their offerings to audiences, to get audiences more excited about theater and coming to theater. We have so many different ways of entertaining ourselves. We've got all the streaming services. We've got all of the platforms on, you know, our 2D normal internet. We've got, you know, movies and games and, you know, theaters. Harder to get people out. But the thing that people love about theater is that it's live and you can't get that experience anywhere else and getting people to experience that the intimacy that theater can offer that's different from anything else and I feel like the time is coming where people are going to start curating their own forms of entertainment so instead of trying to reach a broad audience you're really trying to reach more of a smaller very excited fan base of a particular genre And as it grows, that base is going to grow, but people can now curate their favorite things instead of being forced to watch, oh, well, blah, blah, blah is on Channel 4 tonight, and so-and-so is on Channel 7, and that's all we've got, right? Now we can get people from the Midwest to come and see theater in VR. They don't have to leave their homes. Mobility isn't a problem. limiting factor in these kinds of things and to see a live experience so I do believe that theaters are now starting to explore that option as something that they can offer and how everybody's trying to figure out how to create for it and we're all learning as we go
[00:10:55.390] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just want to shout out a couple of other theater companies, because I know there's also the National Theater of London, there's also the Royal Shakespeare Company, and there's also, this is an impossible name for me to pronounce, but Gertrude, they've had a number of different pieces at IFA Doc Lab. But there are other theatrical companies that are looking at it, but I trust your assessment that it's easier for the already digital-based companies places to bring in the theater folks and it is the theater folks to bring in more of the digital and the virtual. So yeah, it's interesting to hear that. And yeah, so what's next for you now that you've picked up this award? What are the other projects that you may be working on or what's coming next here?
[00:11:29.836] Deirdre V. Lyons: We are so busy making so many exciting things. So while we still want to continue to bring audiences the Severance Theory, Welcome to Respite and Gumball Dreams, you know, we'll be doing pop ups of those during public runs and stuff. We are working on two new projects. So one is with Kevin Mac is an Academy Award winner and did for I don't have seen it, but if you haven't seen it, you should see what dreams may come. But he's also worked on Big Fish and he's worked on like So many amazing films that like the Grinch that you would know from television. Now he's moved into VR art and VR art space and has made these amazing worlds. And so we're collaborating with him to create a project, a theatrical project that will bring in live actors into his sort of space, his lore. And also working with a gentleman named Rick Treeweek from South Africa, who's part of Eden. or was, he's an incredible creator and community builder in the VRChat space as well as in South Africa as well. He's a beautiful creator of amazing spaces and we're also going to create a theatrical project around his world and he's won many awards at the festival circuits.
[00:12:39.183] Kent Bye: Is that Metarik?
[00:12:40.243] Deirdre V. Lyons: It's Metarik, yes. And he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet. And our team members are collaborating with some other groups. I believe that they're going to be showing Find Willy now in B-Fan, and one of our team members is going there. We are also possibly creating with some other people to maybe do some more prerecorded content in VR and bring that to the public. So that could be happening too. All the things. All the things.
[00:13:08.604] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of this intersection between VR and immersive theater and storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:18.646] Deirdre V. Lyons: Oh, in my wildest dreams. I have this vision, this beautiful vision of like you put on a headset and you go to VR Broadway, right? And on the right, they've got the prerecorded content that you can go and see like 360 movies and all kinds of like fabulous, wonderful movies and stuff. On the left is all these amazing theatrical live experiences that you can sign up for, get a ticket, go see a live show. And different creators have their different theaters on this virtual digital Broadway. That would be like, so you just go down digital Broadway and you sign up for a show. That would be cool.
[00:13:57.830] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:14:01.713] Deirdre V. Lyons: I love the immersive community. They're so exciting right now. It's an exciting part to be a part of the immersive community and the VR community because everybody is trying to figure it out and there's a huge collaborative spirit in this space right now where everybody is much more open and forthcoming and interested in what you're doing and what other people are doing. I feel like in you know some more traditional forms of like film and television that there's a lot more walled gardens a lot harder to get access to the space and create in that space whereas with vr it's just it's just a wild west we're all just figuring it out
[00:14:40.785] Kent Bye: And I know that the women in XR have been meeting pretty regularly every Wednesday morning at 8.30 in Verbella, but I think they're going to also be moving into a new space. Where are they going to be meeting in the future, and how can people get more information?
[00:14:51.788] Deirdre V. Lyons: I just found this out, too, like on the stage. You know, Jilly, who runs the XR Women, was one of many because it is a group effort. So there's... Julie Smitheson and Karen Alexander and Sophia Mashasha and just there's a bunch of people who make this thing happen because none of this would happen without their invisible work that it takes it takes a village as they say to keep this thing going for as long as they have and I just learned that they're moving from Verbella to Engage and Engage is an amazing platform and they're doing some really cool stuff so I'm excited to jump in there now they I think I mentioned they start 8 30 in the morning with about half an hour of chitchat and networking and then about an hour of talking from somebody who they've sourced from the community to come in and share and so join us and come and hang out say hi
[00:15:43.723] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, congratulations again. And yeah, I encourage folks to go check it out. I happened to be in Verbella preparing for iLearn keynote and happened to drop by. And it's a very sweet and nice and open and welcoming community and an opportunity to network and really use the potentials of VR to facilitate these types of connections and communities. So yeah, thanks again for joining me on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:16:05.427] Deirdre V. Lyons: Yay, thank you, Kent. It's always lovely to see you. Always lovely to see you. Oh, and by the way, Kent gave a really incredible talk the other day here at AAWE. So if you have a chance to see it, you should check it out.
[00:16:17.171] Kent Bye: It was a panel discussion with myself, Alvin Graylin, and Tony Parisi and moderated by Amy Lemire. So that was a fun discussion about the intersection of AI and the metaverse. So hopefully the video will be available and folks can maybe even listen to it on the podcast here. So yeah, thanks.
[00:16:31.117] Deirdre V. Lyons: Yeah, thank you.
[00:16:33.015] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of 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 supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
