I spoke with Navid Khonsari about Fire Escape at the Vancouver International Film Festival 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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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 voicesofvr. So this is the third and final episode in my trilogy of vaulted backlog interviews with Ink Stories. This is again with Naveed Kansari at Vancouver International Film Festival where they were showing Fire Escape. So this was a piece that was produced by like Google or Google Daydream and and it eventually came out on steam in 2020 but it's a piece that's heavily inspired by some immersive theater mechanics where you're kind of like outside of an apartment building and you have this ability to kind of zoom into these different apartments and there's all these different characters that are walking around and there's a murder so it's a murder mystery you're trying to figure out who did the murder based upon observing each of these different characters both inside of their apartments and outside the apartments and just trying to gather a bunch of clues around them and so I think it was structured around like a three-episode series. I think the first and second episodes were on 20 minutes and the last episodes were on 15 minutes. But with all these storylines, there's like anywhere from four to six hours worth of content within the context of this piece. And so you have lots of different content that you have to make choices around what you're going to – capture it so it's a kind of highly replayable type of experience but also they were starting to do some like group collaborative exhibitions of this where they would have like one person in a movie theater watching it and then everybody would be also watching it trying to gather information and clues yeah so it's kind of like this mix between like an immersive theater mechanic and virtual reality and just a lot of different narrative innovations for what you can do with the medium of virtual reality So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Naveed happened on Sunday, September 30th, 2018 at the Vancouver International Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:04.372] Navid Khonsari: My name is Naveed Kansari, and I'm a co-founder of Ink Stories, which is a storytelling studio, and we just kind of take our stories and put it on the right medium. Obviously, VR has been a great way for us to be able to express stories, so we did a Project Hero, which we've obviously spoken about, but here at VIF, we've got Firescape, which is an episodic, interactive VR experience that puts you on the Firescape in Crown Heights and you have the ability to kind of look into the apartment building across you very much like a Hitchcock rear window influence experience with the ability for you to interact with the characters in the via emojis as they ask questions and as the episodes kind of play out you become more and more involved with this murder that takes place and everybody in the building is a suspect. And as you're trying to kind of figure out who it is, at the same time, you're getting some feedback on the sorted characters that they are. So each person that gets to do this experience is going to have their own unique experience because all six departments are live simultaneously. So what you click look into it closer is going to be define who you might think the suspects are.
[00:03:13.720] Kent Bye: Yeah, I loved the experience because I felt like this is the closest experience that I've had that gave me the feeling of like an immersive theater type of experience. There's not a lot of locomotion, but you have this really nice kind of zooming in so you can kind of highlight. And anytime you highlight, you're, of course, not paying attention to other rooms. You have this inherent kind of built in fear of missing out. Like, you're making choices, and any time you make a choice, you're diving into a certain context, but you're also eliminating other contexts. But having it as a mystery creates a narrative structure that makes sense, because you're just inherently kind of suspicious of everybody, and you're trying to gather information and clues. And any kind of mundane interaction in that context of trying to determine whether or not they did it or not takes on a different feeling as just sort of being a voyeur and have no other deeper intention other to try to solve a deeper puzzle. So maybe you could talk a bit about, first of all, your inspirations in terms of immersive theater or these different types of narrative structure with how you built it up to be able to actually kind of pull this off in VR.
[00:04:15.593] Navid Khonsari: Sure. So, I mean, I think for us, the initial inspiration actually came from what we were seeing in where we live in Brooklyn, this continual conversation of gentrification. I think Ink Stories has always been very much interested in telling the stories of people who we consider to be on the outskirts of entertainment stories. So as a result, we wanted to kind of reflect these very diverse kind of communities, but also kind of put it on you and see what kind of baggage do you carry in terms of the way that you look at these different people who have, first of all, different genders, different sexual orientation, different race, and how your own baggage adds to the actual story of how you see who could be a suspect. So that was kind of the psychology that inspired us to jump into it. Now, the technology of VR, as soon as you put on that headset, just by its nature, has very much like this being a kind of a voyeur approach to your experience. So we wanted to embrace that because we felt that that actually helps our story kind of push forward in the way that we want the story to kind of play out. Immersive theater is definitely a huge influence on a lot of the stuff that we do because it's kind of the live version of being in VR. So for us, we took definitely influences from it. But I think probably even more from theater just itself in terms of how we were shooting these linear scenes, giving the actors the ability to have real freedom. And it was funny, as soon as you kind of opened that gate for them, not only would they embrace it, but as actually the seconds led to minutes of their scenes, it became even that much more of a natural process. performance, which kind of draws you in as a result. So it was a combination of all of these things that kind of brought us. And obviously in terms of Hitchcock and Rear Window, I mean, I think he really addresses this idea of what you see might not necessarily be actually true. And for you to kind of start piecing the pieces together, how you jump to certain ideas that might not be necessarily accurate based on what you're seeing or the manner that the apartments that you've kind of jumped into.
[00:06:24.594] Kent Bye: Right, yeah, and I highly recommend people check it out, especially if you're listening to this. It's always tricky because I want people to see the experience, but I do actually want to dive into different sort of structures of things that are in there that may be spoilers. But there's a character that's in there that you're interacting with who's kind of like this shadowy character, but he actually engages you in a dialogue in a way where he's actually— you can tell that he has opinions of people, and i found myself kind of more often than not agreeing with whatever his opinions were as to not engender conflict but then at the same time he would say oh this guy is blah blah blah and then you have all these emojis and how do you think of this guy and one of them was a snake and i was like oh i guess i'll agree that this guy is a snake he seems kind of like whatever but then but then i realized oh am i is i saying that because of this guy am i saying that because He's like an Iranian. There was all these things that in that moment it was like, oh shit, like what am I doing? Am I just responding to this guy or is this some sort of unconscious bias that I have? And so maybe you could talk about how you were architecting these moments where you're asking the audience to sort of make these value judgments about people that they've just been observing from a distance for just a few minutes.
[00:07:38.311] Navid Khonsari: Sure. So, you know, we definitely wanted to play off your unconscious bias. That is definitely something we planned on. But what we also realized was that when you jump into the second episode, when you're starting to engage with him or he's starting to start engage with you, part of the things that he's putting out there. And I think part of the reason it's really hard to kind of navigate and be very, very black and white in terms of how the world kind of plays out is that he actually hits you with what we call half truths. Right? And so he can kind of suck you into it. And then at the same time you start realizing, hang on, am I being influenced by this person so much that I'm actually not thinking clearly? Or am I suspicious of that person that I'm watching enough that I'm going to listen to somebody who I've never actually met, influenced in terms of my interpretation of them? And obviously that ability to give you self-reflection while all this stuff is playing out, is truly what we think is kind of engaging you into the experience. So it's very much immersing you actually in the narrative and having you kind of be a player in it, but also being extremely subtle in our approach of engagement from the characters that can. In episode one, you're not really getting anybody to kind of give you their ideas or reflections of the other tenants in the building. Episode two goes to that level and then combine that with the introduction of detectives that are now questioning these folks. You've seen what they were doing in the first episode. So as a result, you have a greater knowledge of the detective suspicion combined with this voice that's telling you how sordid these characters are. You start really questioning actually... who is right, who isn't right. You start understanding their motivations. And some of their motivations might actually be ill-intended, but you understand it. So as a result, you become more sympathetic to it. So it's really playing off of all of these elements.
[00:09:26.195] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think another dimension as we're talking about it that may have been even unconscious is that you're kind of standing on a fire escape and looking at a corner and being able to look into all these different apartments. And as you zoom in, you're able to hear things. But as you have this kind of hacker hooded character who's very shadowy, hack into your system. Like he's sometimes calling on my phone, but sometimes he's hacking into my system. So there's this power differential where he's someone who in this situation is a little bit more powerful than I am. And there's a bit of like unconscious fear or terror just by this guy who's taking something that in the context of this VR, my context of usually having a safe and secure communications devices and to have those be hacked into, there's a bit of like, oh wow, how much else is he able to kind of violate my sense of security and privacy here in this moment. And in those conversations, having those interactions, there's a part of me that was also just generally is pretty conflict averse. So I'm just going to go along with it. But there's a lot of dynamics there of even as a participant, as a witness, where I felt like there were some really interesting dynamics that were starting to play out there with this construct of a phone that allows me to listen and have this very low level passive, like I'm essentially sending back emojis and being able to communicate. So it's like a symbolic way of communicating in a way, but it's a way for them to kind of check in and push the narrative forward, but also give this illusion as if I'm a participant into the story, whereas I'm just kind of just listening to these things. But having the cell phone creates this specific context of that.
[00:11:00.757] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the key elements or key words to think about is manipulation, right? Two sided conversations. So you feel like this person initially comes off wanting to be helpful, you know, and then as he gets kind of more and more pent up and gets aggressive, he puts aside formality and that kind of catches you off guard and he comes straight at you whether he's hacking into you but his communication becomes less and less subtle and more and more aggressive but the context of what he's saying you can understand you might not agree with it but you can understand and i think that that's really kind of what we wanted to play with was that if you can't understand it then you're automatically out of the conversation But if you can understand it and then go to that next level of being sympathetic or not sympathetic towards what their ailment is or what their commentary is on the people, then you're taking people in that much, much deeper. And when that starts happening repeatedly in different apartments with different perspectives coming from this single player, then... It starts making things, we're like slowly tearing away any kind of protective layer that you have of being passive in the experience and we're drawing you in further and further and further. We give you the physical distance from the subject matters, but what we're actually doing is trying to get you as close to them. So when you do the close-up to these apartments, you're not just taking in the physical actions of what that person in the apartment is doing, but you're seeing how they're engaging with their environment without them knowing that you're looking at them. You're seeing the kind of conversations they're having. You're seeing how they're almost lying to themselves, you know, and then how they're talking to detectives with a much more of a kind of a standoff approach or with a certain element of threat in their approach when they're talking to them, which is they're not confident or they're overly confident. And so it allows you to kind of read further and further into it.
[00:12:54.465] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious logistically how you both structured and produced and developed this. Because the construct is that it's moving through time. I don't know if it's real time, one to one. But you have scenes that are playing out. And I've done face shift technologies that are doing dialogues, but we had to record them separately. had to do a lot of editing of these blend shapes that end up being really difficult to sync things up when they're not happening actually at the same time. And so is your approach to let the actors kind of improv? Was it very highly scripted? And then how you capture this stuff, and if it's through motion capture, and then how you piece it all together to create this kind of seamless moving about where things are moving in synchrony, but to actually have things line up, I know how difficult that can be.
[00:13:42.048] Navid Khonsari: So for us, the first thing that we did was really focus on the story and the characters. And we really wanted to flesh out these characters. We also wanted to provide the right reflection of the diverse communities that live in New York. So those were key. As we started creating these characters and really establishing who they were, their apartment, the props in the apartment, as a result, started becoming these supplementary elements that helped even further understand who these characters were. So as a result, we started not only writing these characters, but we also started creating their world for them. So when we were committed to the script that we thought was going to work best, we then shot motion capture. We rehearsed probably five to one ratio. We just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. We did read-throughs with the actors. We cast them based on not just their skills as an actor, but also... what they look like. We scanned all of them to become also the aesthetic look for the experience. And we really gave them ownership. We allowed them to change dialogue because we had rehearsed it so much that they understood the intent. But we definitely had a structure in terms of also design by bookending the experiences at certain points where everybody would come together. So the non-linear approach of how these apartments are all kind of playing out simultaneously would have to be bookended with, you know, at the end of episode one when everybody goes to Jared's apartment, the party, and everyone's kind of there. So it forces these exit elements for you to kind of come out. Areas where we thought one scene might run a little bit longer because we've let the actor kind of go with it compared to another one that's shorter, Once we were actually in production, once we started bringing this into Unity and just kind of playing it out, and initially we just actually brought it into an editing software and just kind of lined up, then we would actually go back on a reshoot and come up with more subtle and less physical elements that kind of help the story, whether it's going to be phone calls, sitting at a computer, you know, doing chores around your apartment, playing on your phone, talking on your phone. These elements allowed us to then kind of make sure that the timeline for these characters all kind of fell into place. But I would say for us, and if you take a look at Firescape, it truly is the story and the characters that we wanted to focus because if that was engaging, then that actually justifies the mechanic of clicking in and out of the apartment. If it wasn't, then not only would the mechanic just seem mechanical, it would actually have no payoff. And for something that was trying to be light interactive, so not going down being a VR experience as a shooter where you're shooting a 360, we made the conscious effort recognizing the story is our mechanic, and we wanted to create the tools to be able to support that.
[00:16:31.704] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I really like that concept of you world building out each of the different apartments because I do think that in some ways that's a reflection of their personality and you get a much different flavor of them. And that I had this experience of, it's the first experience and story that I can really point to that feels like I really had this sense of architecture and space and having this really nuanced and textured story on many different dimensions that I was able to have control over what I was paying attention to. But by having this singular perspective of the architecture of the building with the course of three episodes, having the moon, which is actually an eclipse that's happening in the sky at that moment, and being able to see it in the final episode but just having this full experience of that space in that environment and be able to zoom in gave me this sense of like i have it feels like i have a memory of like being in this place and having this story of almost like a slice of life but it's actually more than just a slice of life because it's very much a drama and a whole narrative structure that you put on top of it but that the thing i guess i'd ask you about is that sense of using architecture in that way, using space in that way as a narrative construct and if you took any inspiration from anywhere or what your process was to architect the whole space of all the different dimensions and things that you were trying to take into account as you were designing this overall set that you're viewing it from.
[00:17:56.075] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, so, I mean, the larger building itself, as we were kind of simultaneously writing the story, we really started just going out and doing location scouting, as you do for films, and figuring out what's the building that's going to work, what's the construct for you to be able to kind of look into this building at like almost a 140 degree without having to crank your body to the left and right that much. So the macro building and the macro city that you experience with the New York sky in the background, the buildings and so forth, and even the audio, right? So like the audio of when you're on the fire escape before you've clicked in brings in all those elements and sounds of New York. So we're building that world in order to then take away that audio when you go in on the close-ups, and then into the sound that's over there. And if you take a look at it, some of the things that we did was, on the wide shots, you very rarely will hear any composed music. But in all the interiors, you're going to hear some kind of composed music. Again, pushing the theme of who this character is, combined with elements of their story. For example, Valerie. Her son is nowhere to be seen, but there is this almost preserved teenage room with a crow in it, you know? And it's, again, you're looking at that architecture, you're looking at that design, that production design that's there, and it's telling you so much story. It's telling you so much about the character without the character having to say anything. And I think because we also had many of the apartments have single individuals in it, You don't have the ability to give backstory on these characters because they're only by themselves. They can't have a conversation for somebody else to be able to prod that information out of them. So as a result, very much the environments, the way that we laid it out, the size of it, how New York apartments actually work. You know, how are they kind of laid out? We literally went from architecture to story demands to production design that actually helps elevate the story and define the characters that much more and also show very, very basic things like economic differentiation between the tenants that live on the top floor and the one that lives down on the bottom floor. Those who live in rent control and those who have their world that surround them is an identical reflection of them as is for Irma who has like this huge altar with all these crosses on it and then of course as you go further on you think oh she's this religious woman and she's you know very very kind of respectful and responsible and then you realize that she's actually a kleptomaniac and she's starting to steal things here and there and putting them on the altar so I think all of these allow us and I think from our experiences also being game designers with projects like 1979, we realize that audiences want to make choices, but if those choices fall flat, if those choices don't seem to have value, then it winds up actually watering down the entire experience and they're going to disengage. So we wanted to also provide you with choices into these apartments, not just to get information from that character or what they were saying, but for you to be able to just explore that environment and from that draw information that's pertinent to that character or to the other characters in the building.
[00:21:06.539] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that when I tried to create something that was similar in a sense that you were jumping between different rooms. And what I found was that, just in the constraints of the project I was doing, which was a lot shorter, that making a choice to go to another room doesn't make it better or worse. And often it would make it just way worse. And especially if people went to the extreme of choosing and switching rooms as fast as they could, it would be just completely incomprehensible. And so there's this trade-off between you making a choice but committing enough to get some value out of that and then hopping back out. Because as you hop out, you kind of get a sense of a situational awareness to kind of see what may be, if there's a conversation or dynamic, you can start to read the body language and then do that. There's much more benefit in this case of actually committing to that choice and seeing what narrative is unfolding and depending on your luck of choosing which room to be in to piece together this puzzle. So yeah, there is this trade-off between ensuring that you create a construct that actually rewards the user for making a choice rather than penalizing them because they've just missed all this previous context and they're lost. But given that it's a mystery, It changes the context of you trying to pick up clues rather than to pick up whatever the larger story is.
[00:22:16.135] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the idea is if you go very quickly about the experience, very randomly, like, oh, I want to check out everybody, you're actually doing yourself a disservice because what you're doing is you're just getting kind of like the cream on top. You're not able to kind of go deeply into it. At the same hand, when you do invest in a particular character to kind of watch, you get that nagging question, which is like, well, what am I missing? And so it actually allows for true, authentic replayability of the experience so you can go back to it. But also, I think for us, I mean, from what I've always enjoyed in terms of watching A TV series or binge watching like Netflix is that water cooler conversation that's taking place around the time of the release of the show. And so I think what we wanted to do was engage people exactly in that conversation to say, you know, have people come out of the experience to be like, hey, who do you think did it? Oh, I thought it was Sal. Oh, who do you think? I thought it was Valerie. And then it's like, well, why? And then as you start saying why you think it's this one person, I start realizing that there's like half the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even experienced it. I haven't seen yet. And so as a result, it brings about that curiosity to want to go back and be able to experience it. And I think that's really, really rare. And to be able to do that and have narrative driving that is a kind of a good combination to actually get people engaging in your stories in a much deeper level and repeatedly.
[00:23:36.294] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious how long it would take if you just went room by room and watched comprehensively everything that happened. How long would it be? Because it felt like it was either 30 to 45 minutes of just kind of a straight run through, but how long would it take for you to watch absolutely everything?
[00:23:51.397] Navid Khonsari: Well, I would say, so episode one, let's use that as an example, is 20 minutes long. And because we're kind of bringing you in, we probably have on a per episode basis, I'm just trying to work this out, we probably are looking at about almost two hours worth of experience per episode. if you were actually to watch every apartment, too, because there's action literally from the beginning of the episode to the end of the episode in every one of these apartments. Now, some of the apartments might have a character that kind of goes into another building, but then as the episode goes on, we're also introducing new characters. So what one abandoned apartment might have introduces two new detectives into the experience, plus this additional voice. So it kind of continues on. So I would say, yeah, you're looking at each apartment having its own story from beginning to end. Some of its book ended with the larger kind of master shots, let's say, of everybody kind of being together. But yeah, you're looking at about probably two hours per each episode if you were to watch them all one by one.
[00:24:53.337] Kent Bye: Wow, so that would probably go anywhere from four and a half to six hours for the entire series then.
[00:24:57.859] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think episode three is a little bit shorter. I think we cut that down to 15 minutes and we definitely want to kind of give you that finale. It might be more between like three to four hours with that kind of a consideration. But especially at the beginning of these episodes when you want people to kind of delve into these characters and they're becoming familiar, it's really kind of heavy in terms of all the apartments you can check out. And you've also got the exteriors too, right? There's a lot of conversation that's taking place down in the alleyway, which again plays so well off of VR because the idea of not just looking left and right, but actually kind of looking down is really interesting. We also put, as we have in New York, people playing music off radios from apartments that you can't engage with, but it's actually pushing you to the right or left. people talking on the streets, walking around, the helicopters going overhead. So we really bring in all of these other aspects so that if you're not engaging even with the apartment, you've got another story that's taking place on just a fire escape wide as you're in the city.
[00:25:54.025] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'm curious to hear you talk about how you're going back and forth between being able to make choices and then having essentially like a controlled narrative where it's either a phone conversation or something that you're taking away those choices. So you have this branching and then you have a consolidation down to a central point. So just how you thought about that dynamic of what it means to allow that freedom, but then create that narrative tension by having these moments where you then take over the control of their attention and to be able to push forward the story in a way.
[00:26:26.164] Navid Khonsari: Sure. So we knew that there was going to be randomization in terms of how people are going to be looking at the apartments. So then we actually started attaching external elements of story aside from just the character in that apartment to that. So the secondary person that starts communicating with you actually has certain questions that are unique to that apartment. So you'll get that information and we spaced it out too. So if you stick around for 25 seconds in an apartment and then you decide to bail and go to another one, you might only have one of the engagements with him on that. He might have gone further into that initial question that he's put forth to you. The choices that you make are very much moral choices and judgments on others. Only towards the end of episode two, and certainly in episode three, do you have story changing choices that go one way or another. And so as a result, a big portion of it is in line with what you were saying, which is like you're getting information from now a secondary source. your eyes are telling you another bit of information from what you're seeing and you're being asked questions about a combination of those two. Someone's advice and what you're kind of seeing and saying what's the call you want to make on who this person is or is this person a viable suspect or is this person a good person or a deplorable person. So all of that combined is what helps you kind of have this freedom to make choices in this linear box, but the linear storyline is a linear storyline that's taking place on seven different threads.
[00:27:56.297] Kent Bye: Wow. And so you've mentioned that as you're making these different moral judgments on people, is that only changing the context of his response to you in the moment? Or are some of these choices you're making have some sort of effect on the world as you're watching it?
[00:28:08.746] Navid Khonsari: Absolutely. So the choices that you are making have an effect on you. Because in the end, you are asked to basically name who you think is the suspect. And that level of commitment, just based on what you've seen and the interactions you've had with this secondary caller, is kind of frightening. And then you see the repercussions of that choice on a much larger kind of global scale in episode three. So I do feel that while... You might be making what you think is just moral choices. Those choices, that engagement, the path that you kind of take in the end defines that key decision you'll make and then the repercussions of that. So I feel like it's like a pebble rolling down a snowy mountain. As it just kind of goes further down, it just starts getting bigger and bigger and then just kind of taking everything to it. And you've just basically got to decide where it's going to stop and kind of implode.
[00:29:09.472] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like that one of the things that happens at immersive theater is like something like Sleep No More. It's pretty impossible. It's literally impossible to see everything that happens over the course of the evening, especially in just one playthrough. But if you go with a bunch of friends, then you go to a bar afterwards and you start to swap stories and seeing what you saw. And so this seems like a really great experience that's so rich in depth in terms of being able to explore all these different dimensions that you could watch it with a bunch of friends and then afterwards be able to share these different stories of what you experienced to be able to kind of mix and match and maybe come to if you made a decision and maybe your decision might be made based upon some of the other events that other people saw.
[00:29:47.130] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, look, we have to take a look at some of the commentary that's made about VR. Many say it's isolating. So you've got some of our colleagues that are out there then saying, all right, if it's isolating, then let's create an experience that's going to be multiplayer or social so that four people are kind of doing it. I think we're still at such the early stages of kind of defining not what the medium is, but how audiences can engage with it, that I think Viruscape is a really interesting and viable path where people you can have people doing the experience and then actually engage in a conversation about what they experienced. So you're bringing the social element of a VR experience outside of the VR headset in conversation, which is actually much more in line with conversations that take place around like a Game of Thrones season finale. And I think that that's something that attracted to us and something that we thought would also attract a larger audience. We want to make sure that these experiences that we do are being seen by as many people. So we're moving forward right now. We're going out and we're kind of doing a theatrical approach, which is we got 30 headsets. We're going to Chromecast it from one of the headsets onto a larger screen. So those who don't even have headsets can kind of engage with the experience through one particular person's view. And then at the end of it, when everybody takes their headsets off after watching all three episodes back to back, we as the creators don't stand up there and be like, you know, so that they can ask us what the motivation was. We actually turn around and ask them, who do you think did it and why? And we actually take a step back and see this audience start engaging in this conversation. And I think we're just starting to plant the seeds for that and see how it will turn out. Have you been able to do that yet? Be able to show it to a group of people? So we've done a couple of tests, but we're actually kicking it off in a couple of weeks at the New York Film Festival with four screenings that we're doing, which actually have all been sold out. So it's really, really, really exciting. From there, we're taking it to Denver and going to do the same thing at the Denver Film Festival, the same thing at the Nouveau Cinema Festival in Montreal. And then while we won't be able to do it at that scale, we'll be doing a small iteration of it as the project is a finalist at IndieCade.
[00:31:51.557] Kent Bye: It's kind of like taking aspects of immersive theater, but being able to scale it out in a way that people have the headsets. I mean, I think ideally would be like everybody has the ability to make all the choices because you have the situation where if somebody chooses to just focus on one apartment the whole time, that's not going to be necessarily a great viewing experience for everybody. And so you kind of want a little bit of diversity, but yet there's going to be different characters that are striking to each of them. So then to give that agency over to someone else who may have completely different values or interests is going to maybe, I don't know, it would be interesting to see how people react to having the interactive story being driven by somebody who is kind of random in that way.
[00:32:29.264] Navid Khonsari: I think we're talking about a very unique possible outcome. So I don't know if we could turn out this, but you could have a very unique possible outcome where you've got non-VR participants after watching somebody else's single experience actually say, you know what? I've got to put this headset back on and do this whole thing again because I want to go through it on my terms. And I've got a sprinkle of who I think these guys were. I've already seen it through this one other person's kind of choice and perspective. Now I want to kind of go back in and see if the path that they took was the best path. the path that I correspond and correlate with. So these are things, I mean, and hopefully we're going to kind of find that out in the next month.
[00:33:11.268] Kent Bye: Oh, that's really interesting because you have this phenomenon within Twitch streaming where if you have a narrative game and you Twitch stream it, you could watch it and it could kind of burn the game in a way. But this is a type of interactive narrative that you can get a sense of the overall characters, but yet there's so much more to explore that it's maybe going to inspire people to go in and have their own experience of it.
[00:33:30.560] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, I mean, you've got such interesting characters, you know, that's what's drawing you to this experience is these characters and they're diverse and they're not perfect. They're imperfect. And so as a result, that imperfection allows you to kind of connect with them, make judgments on them, but also hold back certain judgments because you've also got this other person who's very much in your ear kind of giving you their opinions on it. So a combination of all of this is what's going to be driving you to kind of define your own particular kind of story. So I think as we kind of push forward on this, this is an approach and a design that we actually want to continue with other stories and see how we can kind of refine it. So we've been talking actually about other subject matter, other stories that we could use this same kind of design approach to bring about which is gonna be more inclusive. And I agree, the issue with when this stuff is being seen on Twitch, especially having done 1979 and seeing that it's just all up on the screen and the choices are there and people can kind of see what they're gonna do, it becomes a bit of a spoiler. So having this aspect of it, it's more of like it kind of like wets your appetite, but you don't feel like you've got the full meal. So you actually could go back and be like, all right, now I'm going to take this path because while there is definitely like a linear golden path, the characters are so rich that the ones that you actually start really liking or really, really suspecting are the ones that you're going to stick to for a much longer period.
[00:34:58.188] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a metaphor that I've been using to kind of make sense of immersive storytelling in VR, which is that there's the Yang archetypal journey, which is like the hero's journey, which is a very, you know, you're going outward and you're going through different obstacles and going through different dimensions of overcoming those, and it's like this cycle of you growing and evolving as an individual, but yet... I feel like there's this competing yin archetypal journey, which is much more about looking at an ecosystem and looking at how things all connected to each other, how people are related to each other, or how you can look at one individual and see how it's a part of a larger system. And I think that you're able to address things like gentrification or rent control or these topics that are much more about the overarching ecosystem, but it's also relational in the sense of how people are connected to each other. You can start to see there's these different relationships and dynamics between different people. But because it's spatial in the way that you're seeing it from a distant point but able to see the whole ecosystem kind of evolve, that you kind of have these different dynamics of drama or story that I think is more about how things kind of are connected to everything else. But you still on this particular context, you have a narrative that is still have that kind of traditional kind of narrative structure, but you're doing in some ways a little bit of both. I'm just curious to hear your perspective on that kind of more yin archetypal journey or this new affordance of being able to look at things from an ecosystem perspective that you couldn't do before.
[00:36:26.843] Navid Khonsari: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's kind of one of the benefits of when you're working within virtual reality in particular is to approach storytelling in two different directions. The larger ecosystem, which in a very kind of simple brick and mortar kind of way is building on top of each other to establish tone, to establish... not necessarily momentum, but how quickly you're digesting the kind of material and how it's all kind of playing simultaneously. So that's key in being able to do that. Combine that with then that internal ability to kind of jump into something that's far more intimate, then you're actually adding a secondary layer to this ecosystem in terms of how you're kind of designing it. And I think then making sure that there's a bridge. between the two of those worlds. And I think the fact that we actually are doing it physically with punching in close and then kind of coming wider is exactly a very subtle kind of approach to kind of doing that. So I always, very much I'm talking about macro and micro in terms of our experiences. and then how we kind of prioritize how it kind of falls into place on our design document. So I'm not necessarily sure if I answered specifically what you were looking, but that's kind of the approach in terms of the larger ecosystem. And when it comes to elements of gentrification, sometimes you don't necessarily need to have choices or responses in the narrative. Some of that is just coming through the context of other sounds that are kind of around you. off-the-cuff comments from certain kind of characters, or very much on-the-nose kind of comments, when the landlord's like, this is a renaissance period in Brooklyn, and I don't see a lot of you guys gonna be here. And combine that with just the aesthetic ability to see the difference between the rich and poor within the same building, all of this kind of builds onto itself.
[00:38:17.796] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what are some of the either biggest open problems that you're trying to solve or open questions that you're trying to answer when it comes to storytelling in VR?
[00:38:27.807] Navid Khonsari: I mean, I think for us, storytelling in VR has to fit the medium. So as a result, the challenge is actually making sure that we're finding the right stories to fit that medium. I think if you take a look at our other project, like Hero, that became a VR project that we wanted to do, not only to be able to push the boundaries of the technology and haptics and fully kind of immerse you in it, but that we were seeing people being almost exhausted with the amount of imagery that was coming from Syria and within the press and so as a result it was like they were becoming indifferent to it so the ability to go to VR to fully engage you to actually have you physically walk away with a memory that's going to stay with you is going to go a lot further than what we're seeing in other mediums so that's what kind of drives that story with fire escape and what we're doing moving forward We're actually grasping onto a key element was the intimacy of VR and what does that actually mean in terms of storytelling and that the intimacy of VR needs to reflect the intimacy of that narrative that's pertaining to that particular area. So I think that's what's getting us excited because it's actually allowing us to do a much deeper dive on the characters and on the world that we have than you would in a television show that's kind of locked off and you're seeing what the writers and the creators are putting on screen. Now we're allowing you to kind of almost be the director, but as a result we have to kind of create this. So those are kind of all the key elements. I think the challenge that it does exist though is that if these are becoming key themes in terms of storytelling, you have to be careful and the holes and what we try to solve is like, how do we not overly exhaust using the same tools so that by our second iteration or third iteration, it doesn't feel like it's just a reskinned experience of something else that we've kind of created. And I think that's definitely kind of a challenge that we look at in terms of creatively. But I think, you know, drawing from a lot of the tools that we use, which is, you know, everybody on our team is a writer. So we work as a writer's room. And then we all have our own disciplines that we kind of focus on within the production pipeline and within the design pipeline. That's how we kind of work. Writing is kind of key. And then as we kind of move forward, we let that dictate what that engagement is going to be and having people who are on the tech side, who are on the coding side, and on the design side, who actually recognize that our game mechanic is actually storytelling, rather than being what a traditional game mechanic is, which is like, you know, navigation, shooting, you know, stealth, survival, all that. Like, that's what we're kind of focusing on. That's what's pulling us through it. But in terms of, you know, holes that we see. We feel like we've created something that actually can reach a pretty large demographic in terms of audiences without feeling that they're going to feel foolish because they might not necessarily know how to fully engage with the technology. It's pretty simple with a click and play. I think that's a key pillar to keep pushing on, especially, I think obviously the narrative is key. I think the traps of repeating yourself is definitely an issue. And quite honestly, I think as the hardware in general, is starting to kind of evolve we are excited about also getting this across multiple platforms and start thinking about can you create vr content that is incredible in vr but actually work it reversed can it then actually live on 2d screens and how does that kind of work out so that we can actually monetize this so that we can go on to kind of create more and more projects
[00:42:05.629] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that was most striking about Firescape is that it is a very compelling story. The characters are believable. They're real situations. It's really like an orchestration just to kind of piece it all together. It's just an amazing kind of orchestration that way. being a character-driven narrative in that way, I felt like, you know, a lot of VR, the characters aren't as flawed or make mistakes in the same type of way where they're more identifiable or they're just diversity there in the different characters. And so because you're writers, I'm just really curious what the model you used or the process that you used to be able to actually cultivate and develop those characters and, like, if you base it upon both sort of all the demographic information but then the underlying, like, intentions and obstacles and what is it that's the underlying pattern that you're using to be able to architect this character arc over the course of an experience like this?
[00:42:59.278] Navid Khonsari: So when we initially come up with the idea and we know we have like a criteria that the world or the experience that we're kind of trying to create has like a diverse cast, we started kind of putting up our suggestions of who we think could be this interesting group. Immediately in that process, we start realizing which characters were drawn to as writers. So then we start taking ownership of that and we start laying that down as the kind of the initial foundation. Once we get to that point, we actually then try to justify that character being in that particular story to everybody else in the writer's room. And as a result, we get two kind of elements that come out of that. One is basically what's not working, but then the secondary part of how it's working, but not necessarily as just what you've written in that individual space, but then how we can actually get... my characters that I'm writing to work with, let's say Bessie's characters and Andreas' characters and Sam's characters. And so as a result, we are very much driving each of us different elements of the story, but then coming together and one of us is taking the leads on the more kind of like the larger parts where everybody kind of comes together, And then we're continually, in terms of choices, that's something that we all do because we recognize that if you're committed to one character or two characters within the story, you might lose sight of actually where the value could exist in choices because we might love them too much and we might try to be soft on them. So it's important for us to do that. So I think it's very much a lot of elements that we draw from classic writer's rooms for TV and for movies, and we're just bringing it to this model.
[00:44:36.169] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:44:44.755] Navid Khonsari: Well, I mean, I think, look, I mean, the potential of virtual reality is very much in existence right now as we're seeing the impact it's having on medicine, as the impact it's having on education, the ability to kind of train people. And obviously, we're going to see even a more hyper version of that in certain extents when it comes to augmented reality and how it's going to be able to kind of show people to do certain tasks at hand. So I think while that continues on, that's going to be robust. I think the entertainment sector is much different. And I think the challenges that exist there is that we're very much in our infancy and we're trying to compare ourselves to 100 years of a film legacy and over 55, 60 years of television. These are not just technologies that have continually been able to grow and thrive off of mistakes that they've made in the past. They've been also able to define what storytelling is within that medium. So I think the potential of VR, especially as a narrative tool, is very strong as a narrative tool. I actually feel that the initial low-hanging fruits of first-person shooters and classic game mechanics, when you can't actually traverse across long areas, does a disservice to those games, which are fun, but part of that fun is also exploration and going from A to B while you're trying to stay in cover or while you're trying to take out certain folks. So I feel like that's actually becoming unbelievably tired because... You're not moving anywhere. There's nothing fresh for you to kind of see. You're not advancing. You're here, everything fades down, and then you're up in another part of the world. You're taking out as many enemies, and you kind of move on in that way. For narrative, because of the fact that you go into a movie theater and the lights go dark, and even though you're in a room with 600 people, it becomes an intimate relationship between you and the story. We're jacking that up by 100 times within VR, so I feel the potential of VR narrative in that way is... is key, it's just a matter of making sure that those experiences are going beyond a 360 film experience where I am viewing an intimate experience but not actually engaging with it. And I think engagement, and I think if you take a look at immersive theater, immersive theater is more engaging for a younger generation of audiences and storytellers because they get to participate in it rather than sitting in a Broadway show and looking. Not that you don't go do that, But what we're doing is we're getting more options out there for audiences to engage with. And I think VR is a great option for narrative kind of storytelling that you can engage with as you do in Firescape.
[00:47:22.639] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR community?
[00:47:26.722] Navid Khonsari: No, I think, you know, I'm happy that Firescape's out. All three episodes are out back to back. If you happen to be, you know, definitely check out Ink Stories and Firescape. And if we happen to be in your neighborhood doing these kind of larger screenings, we definitely want to have people come out. We think it's an interesting way of kind of also building community. So, yeah, that's pretty much it.
[00:47:46.038] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you. Thanks for having me. 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.
