On November 26, 2016, Rosario Perazolo gave a TEDxCórdoba talk about a wide range of cultural taboos she experiences as someone in a wheelchair. She talks about the transition of ooking at the world from the perspective of someone who was 5’7″, but now sees the world from the perspective of 4’0″ in her wheelchair. It was such an inspiring talk that it catalyzed a collaboration with VR directors Maria Belén Poncio and Damián Turkieh to see if virtual reality could help to being alive many of the taboos around disability that she talks about in her TEDx talk.
Originally imagined as a documentary, they eventually decided to produce it as a cinamatic VR piece so that they could explore other taboos around sexuality and disability. The result was 4-Feet: Blind Date, which was framed as a story of woman in wheelchair going on a blind date.
They intercut the timeline throughout the piece in order to accelerate the pacing, which allows you to question what happens within the gaps and provided opportunities to show a variety of the daily invasions of her privacy she described in her TEDx talk.
I had a chance to catch up with Perazolo, Belén Poncio, and Turkieh at Sundance 2019 where we talked about the development process for this project, as well as how they’re using VR to break taboos around disability and sexuality.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So continuing on in my series of looking at the VR for Good movement, The section I'm looking at specific VR for good experiences. So four feet blind date is a cinematic VR experience that I saw at Sundance 2019. I think it might've actually premiered at Venice of 2018, but this piece was trying to look at a number of different larger issues around disability, around sexuality, and They originally started wanting to do like a documentary. This woman who's in a wheelchair, Rosaria Perezolo, she gave a TED talk about disability, humor, and sexuality. And I think it was striking for these producers, and they actually formed this team of three different co-creators, co-directors, and writers. And they produced this piece. They wanted to originally produce it as a documentary, but it ended up being this cinematic piece that was trying to explore these issues of disability and dating and sexuality. Kind of addressing a number of different taboo topics and just trying to tell the stories that we may not get to see a lot of. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wastes of VR podcast. So this interview with Maria, Rosario and Damian happened on Wednesday, January 30th, 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:28.997] Rosario Perazolo: Hi, I'm Rosario Parasolo. I am the writer and co-creator of Four Feet Plan Date.
[00:01:37.258] Damian Turkieh: Hi, my name is Damian Turquie, I am the VR director and sound director of 4 Feet.
[00:01:44.727] Maria Belen Poncio: My name is Maria Belen Poncio, I am the director and co-creator of 4 Feet Blind Date.
[00:01:51.515] Kent Bye: So maybe you can tell me a bit about how did this project come about?
[00:01:55.878] Maria Belen Poncio: This project came when Ezequiel Lenardon, the creative producer of the project, was at a TED talk in which Rosario was speaking about disability and about different perspectives of disability. And he, Ezequiel, thought this perspective was really unique and powerful. So he contacted her and proposed her to make an audiovisual project, and he was thinking about VR. Then Rosario proposed to add sexuality into the topic because it's something that is not usually told and it's like a taboo that we should talk about. So after they called me to direct and we found Damian that has like six years of experience in VR to support us in technical aspects.
[00:02:49.027] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe you can tell me a bit about your TED Talk and then your process of working on this project.
[00:02:56.270] Rosario Perazolo: a different view for disability because in the industry or in the media we always show people with disability like an inspiration or like a person who is suffering. So in my tech talk I do jokes about that and tell I can be a serial killer and you're going to think that I'm an inspiration always for being in a wheelchair. So I'm talking about that and like In a moment in my talk, I say something like, in all the mirrors, I always see my front, because I'm so under. So, it's equal for that, see the world in a different high, have something interesting to tell. So, that's like all begins.
[00:03:46.627] Maria Belen Poncio: Get involved in the project and work on the project.
[00:03:49.851] Rosario Perazolo: Belu is saying to me that for us the thing that we are always talking about is there are so many projects talking about inclusion or minorities but they're not actually working with them or there's no people with disabilities in the project. They're like just their stories but they're not working in the stories and this group and this work we do together is very different because I work in the team, I work in the piece, I write with the director, with the producer, so it's like a connection that I can show my perspective and be involved with the showing. So for me, that is the most important thing, that we have to create from a different perspective, but with a different perspective too.
[00:04:45.883] Kent Bye: Yeah, and maybe you could talk a bit about how you got involved in the project and what you were trying to do in terms of, you know, translate this story into a VR experience.
[00:04:54.331] Damian Turkieh: Well, I got involved in the project because they wanted me to do the VR technical aspects. Velen is a great director, but the rest of the team doesn't have experience in VR. That's why my work was how to translate the narrative to a VR experience, in fact of where to put the camera, how to work with the sound also, with 360 spatial audio. It was a great work for me, like a great challenge, because I've been working, like Belen said, almost six years in VR, but most of all with branded content. and doing narrative for me is what I most want to do because I love storytelling. So it was a nice experience. We worked with Kandao Obsidian S camera with Insta360 Pro. We worked also with Gonzalo Sierra as a creative technician and creative technologist and cameraman. And we also do all the stitching in our studio, in 360 Reality Argentina studio, all with Mystica VR.
[00:06:11.251] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, when I saw the piece, I thought it was an experience I've never had before. And it also went in a direction I wasn't expecting. And there was a lot of moving around the time, jumping around. But the question that I had after I watched it was, oh, I wonder what the backstory is to this, like how this came about. So maybe you could tell a little bit about, is this based upon personal experience? Or what were the thing that you were trying to communicate within this piece?
[00:06:37.972] Rosario Perazolo: The story is affection. but it's based in real experiences. I never went to like a blind day and don't tell the guy that I'm not in a wheelchair, but all the details in the film are real. The relationships, the talks, the dialogues, all happen in my life every day. So we put like a character and make a fiction way, but all the feelings and emotion came from something real.
[00:07:07.764] Maria Belen Poncio: Also at the beginning the story was meant to be a documentary of Rosario. Then we thought it was interesting to make this more provocative and rebel character that would be more uncomfortable for people to see and maybe something that people are not used to seeing and also it could join a lot of different experiences not only the one of Rosario but also others in one fictional character and the story we worked it a lot in Biennale College Cinema VR this is a mentorship a college that they make in the Biennale di Venezia And we have a lot of support regarding storytelling, so we worked a lot on the story to push it forward and make it a different perspective, more uncomfortable, more awkward. So the story was pushed forward mostly by Biennale that were really helpful in the process of constructing the story.
[00:08:19.012] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious what it's like for you to watch it now and see it in this spatial medium and maybe just talk a little bit about your own experiences of through the process and then being able to finally eventually see it and what your experience of that was.
[00:08:32.667] Rosario Perazolo: The process was amazing because I've been in all the shooting and we have to like find places that were accessible to me and I have to borrow my wheelchair for the shooting and all the stuff so it was so funny because the other thing was funny like four feet is the height which I see the world and when Everyone see four feet. It's like oh, I'm just like sitting in a chair for me It's like it's the same to every day. I want to see like 180 view now, but yes was amazing and I Seeing the final was like Shocking because I never see myself. I never see my moves so things the moves from another person like me was oh my god and my family and my friends comments to like they all see me or see my body or see my voice in there and yesterday we have the first person in wheelchair to see the project other than me of course and she felt so good and she said like she felt represented by the film so for me for us is we won so that's really nice
[00:10:03.151] Maria Belen Poncio: Regarding the actress, we think she did an amazing job because she's not actually a disabled person. We wanted a protagonist that was actually in a wheelchair, but it was really difficult to find. In Argentina, it seems that the acting environment is not so accessible because we didn't find an actress in a wheelchair. So we chose Delfina because she had a lot of talent. She has a different beauty, not the model beauty of Fashion Week. And then we made a process of finding the body for Juana. Rosario helped a lot with that. Also Matias Benedetti, the director of Actors. and the three together. We went out on the street with two wheelchairs. I helped them both. Then she was really observing Rosario all the time, the movements. She said, like, how did you do that? So there was a whole process of rehearsing the scenes, but also, like, finding the movements of the body. And I think she did, like, really, really amazing job.
[00:11:09.148] Kent Bye: In terms of shooting this piece, what were some of the challenges you had to solve in order to create this?
[00:11:15.472] Damian Turkieh: Well, the major challenges were the movements and the closer characters to the camera. When we first built this story, Belen wanted a lot of movements in almost all the scenes. This is a 360 stereoscopic video so it's a challenge to move the camera and manage all the stitching lines and all the characters and movements across. So that was one of the challenges and the other one we told she wanted to be very close to the main character to have the feelings and to feel the empathy with her. So every time it was like a fight between she and me because she said I wanted closer. I said if I get closer I cannot stitch it and also the 3D stereoscopic will not match. So trust me, trust me, it has to be 10 centimeters far away, please. That was every day in the SI and the same was in the shooting but we can get to an accord, to an agreement, we did it. I think we have a nice piece where we got the movements, where we got the character close to the camera and also the stitching is quite good. No, another thing about the movements. We got like four or five different movements in the movie. We used a dolly with a Shinnyshirp motor to program the dolly to get closer in the scene of the bedroom. Also we had to program this because we cannot be inside the room because it's 360 for sure. We also got a cable cam in the street. that it was like a very painful... Yeah, because it was shot like in one shot of maybe 60 meters of cable cam. The camera was like one meter down the cable cam, so when the cable cam stopped, the camera start to going forward and back, back and forth. So we have to do like one stop and then we cut it and we do the another part So we have like a very fluid movement not to get dizzy when you see the experience and we also got movements up and down in the first scene in the bathroom The camera starts at 1 meter 80, like a normal view, and it goes down and down and down slowly until 4 feet. We worked with a gripper, his name is Juan Pablo Pucheta. He managed to do all the system to move the camera up, down, back and forward in all the spaces. was a very do-it-yourself system and work it very very good. So that was another of the challenge of doing VR with movements.
[00:14:30.501] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the decision to mess with the timeline in terms of jumping around, but it wasn't sort of a linear story, but kind of moving around. So what was the thinking behind the decision to do that?
[00:14:42.906] Maria Belen Poncio: At the beginning, the script was a linear story, but I didn't like the cuts between one scene. So I wanted the whole scene to be one shot. And the bedroom had like different key moments that in total it was like 12 minute scene. So like I really wanted something that happened at the beginning, something that happened in the middle, something that happened in the end. So when we were in the editing we were thinking like how can we shorten the scene and everything. One of the time we say why don't we try just mixing everything and see what it happens. We did this trial and we thought it was great because although at the second scene you know that they will meet but in a way the tension is still there like what was the process and you all the time as the stories go further you understand all the challenges that she had to go through to reach that moment that you are seeing. and also it makes the story with more rhythm and more like dynamic and I think like the 15 minutes passed like this and maybe if it had been linear it was kind of more slow also the pace of everything.
[00:16:10.080] Kent Bye: I'm not sure if I can think of any other piece of media or film that explores the sexuality of disability in any certain way and so I'm just curious to hear your own thoughts of being able to pioneer and explore that and what it felt like for you as an artist to be able to express that part of yourself.
[00:16:28.005] Rosario Perazolo: I think that people are afraid to talk about disability. They're always kind or political, correct. They don't want to say anything too bad or too good for the person. And I think that we want to break that. It's not a taboo to talk about disability. It's not a taboo to talk about sex. Because if we don't do it, we don't think about that. And if we don't think about that, the society conceives the person with disability as unsexual. They don't have knees. They don't have a sex body or a sexy body. I don't know. There's an image around this topic. So I think it's interesting to show up and say this is what we have, this is what we are thinking of, but we are not going to tell you what you have to think. We are going to show this and you can ask yourself everything you want. That for me is the most powerful because People are asking themselves what I should do in that position, what I should do if I'm going in a blind date and a girl comes in a wheelchair. So we have to ask that things to ourselves because society is built from diversity and all the voices. So I think that we need this.
[00:18:01.252] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear from each of you in terms of the differences between a 2D and VR and what shooting this in VR gave you that you wouldn't have if you tried to shoot it as a 2D film.
[00:18:14.219] Maria Belen Poncio: I think that one thing that we definitely achieved with this project is the intimacy you get with the character and also living the world at this height. It's not just watching it, but experiencing it. So if you can turn around and you're still in this world and things happen to you all around, you really feel that you are there and that you are experiencing this and not only seeing it from outside. And I think this is why I really wanted the movements because moving through the reality at 1 minute 20 is the same sensation as being in a wheelchair. So the idea was to really put the audience in this perspective and go around the world and transit the world at this height and also you are like a witness of the character all the time. So you are with her and you get to feel what she feels because you are there, you are with her and you are experiencing the same things. And I think the story could have been told in 2D too, but it would be a different experience. I mean, of course you can connect with the character in the 2D, but it's not that you feel that you're inside the movie. It's like you're watching the movie. but you are not really experiencing the world. I don't know if you want to say.
[00:19:39.990] Damian Turkieh: Yeah, it's the same as Belen has told you. In flat film, we don't have that immersion that we get in VR. It's like you watch a film in a frame and you are outside. And this experience, in VR experience, you are inside the movie. And, you know, when we started building this experience, we thought about constructing a POV. So yeah, it's a subjective point of view. but we lost the feelings of the character, we lost her face, we lost what she wanted to express and that's why doing a lot of different trials to put the camera in his eyes 20 centimeters far away forward her on his back or whatever we arrived to this point of view that is very close to her always at four feet and for us was the best experience to feel what she feels.
[00:20:46.729] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there was a number of different scenes where the character in the wheelchair is interfacing with the public and the public will come up and either make an assumption or ask a question of what happened or there's a number of interactions that I get the sense of this happens all the time and that there's a certain amount of just frustration and snarky joke or sniping back at the question or not really answering the direct question to kind of reveal that maybe that's inappropriate to be asking that or to be engaging in that way. So I'm just curious to hear your experiences of that and then what you were trying to show in the film and what you would love for people to get from maybe seeing the film and change the way that they relate to you.
[00:21:28.758] Rosario Perazolo: For me, and all my friends in wheelchairs, too, or people I talk to, they're always the same. People stop in the middle of the street, asking you questions, and offering you, like, salvations or something, like, to not be in a wheelchair. And that's happened all the time. And for me, it's not a bad thing. I don't get sad or angry for that, because I think that ignorance is like Not from a bad feeling. It's like they don't know Nobody tell the people that it's not cool to ask somebody How do you go to the bathroom if you don't know them? So that's like a very strange situation for me and that's happened all the time but for me it's like more funny to tell that When we make the story, we think that it has to ridicule that situation and de-dramatize that situation. Because when the people ask that stuff, they are not really thinking what they are asking. So, like, show up the situation and the people can feel represented or not, I don't know, but showing is the first step, I think.
[00:22:48.447] Kent Bye: What's been some of the reaction that you've received so far from the piece?
[00:22:53.210] Maria Belen Poncio: One fun reaction that we have a lot is that they say like they feel uncomfortable because why am I here in this bedroom watching this? We find that this is really interesting and this is definitely what we wanted to do to make people uncomfortable and make people question that why are you uncomfortable with this? Why is this happening? And also the intimacy with the character is something that everyone says after watching it. And that they end up loving her in some way. And they laugh a lot in the bath scene with the woman. It's a very fun part. when she answers to the woman. Yeah, people feel really touched and really emotional. And also, sometimes they say they have never thought about this, or they have never thought about if someone in a wheelchair goes on a date or have sex or whatever. They never imagine or even question these things.
[00:23:57.233] Kent Bye: So I'm wondering what each of you want to experience in virtual reality. What type of experiences do you want to have?
[00:24:04.139] Damian Turkieh: For me the best experiences I want to have is not virtual reality, it's mixed reality. I think that is the future where we are going to. Mixing real life with augmented reality and also virtual. I really love experience that have also real actors in the performance and also physical objects you can interact. I think it's much more real experiences, also mixes different technologies to build up a story in a different way. I'm now working also with photogrammetry and volumetric capture, video capture, that is also for building this kind of stories that makes much more sense for storytelling with new technologies and also doing art.
[00:25:00.458] Maria Belen Poncio: For me, we have seen a lot of things in Venice and here also. What I find more interesting is when you have actually a story to follow. There are a lot of experiences that you can do things but there is no storytelling there. So I really like the ones that have stories and that if these stories are unique and are powerful and make you questions or make you think something, feel something. And also what I find very interesting is when you can interact with other multiplayer experiences. So you can interact with other people, like make collaborative things or talk with the other one. And also I think the animation. in VR, it's amazing. I mean, you can make amazing things with animation. Live video, like our piece, it has a lot of limitations. You can, like, go over it, but when you have an animation, you can find, like, a perfect, perfect aesthetic, and I really like that also.
[00:26:06.643] Rosario Perazolo: The same. I think something that people say to us is really nice. There's the first piece like cinema piece not like we are gaming no we are like only experience so a story in in that so for me like the same see more stories and caption voices
[00:26:29.010] Damian Turkieh: One more thing for me in for cinematic VR is what we are doing I think the worst limitation we have now it's on the headsets because you cannot put now a 8k stereoscopic video with good quality in a headset that can play back this, or if it can play back this quality, it doesn't have the DPI resolution on the display to really appreciate it. So I expect in the future of VR with much better headsets like, I don't know, PMAX or whatever come after. So we can have also the same happen with the cameras. The live-action cameras for 360 are not so good as quality as we got like a Red Cinema or cameras we got for cinema. So I think when these two things improve in the future, cinematic VR will be much more powerful medium to storytelling.
[00:27:39.522] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:27:49.528] Maria Belen Poncio: more or less this thing of the immersion how can you immerse people to another reality and now I think that every time they are like evolving a lot of things so for example having these sensors or these things that make you vibrations or they support the image and with the sound and everything you actually make people go to other realities that they cannot go or because they don't exist or because it's like another reality different from what they live. So I think this is the interesting part of taking people everywhere and yeah this experience is a crazy world also. that we are trying to understand. I think it's incredible all the things that you can do all the time more and more.
[00:28:47.704] Damian Turkieh: I think the power of VR is not only in the entertainment, it's also in VR for good, it's VR for social change, it's VR for education, it's VR for science. There are a lot of things and subjects and things we can do with VR, very far away of just doing entertainment. I think that's the most powerful, amazing stuff we could do, people is doing now with VR.
[00:29:23.448] Rosario Perazolo: Yeah, for me the same. I think that in VR, in the terms like you are building something, you are building or creating a new world, a new reality. And sometimes for the artists, people say like, oh, your mind is in another world, come back, or something like that. And you can create that world today. So for me, like the limits are in your mind. So it's very powerful to see what is happening right now. I want to be a witness in this part of the story.
[00:29:57.600] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:30:04.322] Maria Belen Poncio: Maybe something of the experience that we shared is that VR is more like a collective experience, much more than cinema 2D. We had a really great, great team in all the areas, all the departments. We have really talented people. And it's not so vertical as shooting, at least our experience. And we think that this was really powerful. Also, we are like three creators. Rosario Ezequiel and me, and we worked hardly in finding one voice, although we are really different, but finding the things in common, finding what we wanted to tell. And then I worked a lot with him, with the art director. It's like really a collective experience, all the process. Yeah, so we are really thankful with all the team. They are all like great talented artists and also with Biennale. The process of mentorship of Biennale is great so I empowered every VR creator to apply because you learn a lot and all the mentors are really generous and are crazy amazing people.
[00:31:19.798] Damian Turkieh: Yeah, Four Feet Blind Date is the first chapter of the series. The series is now under development, so we want to do not only VR, also mix with flat short pieces and also social media content. We also want to experiment with another type of technologies where you can also move in the space in VR, you can be closer to the characters or change the point of view always at four feet because it's a person in a wheelchair point of view.
[00:32:02.076] Rosario Perazolo: I want more different people working in different projects and the industry open the doors for anyone and give them the same possibilities that anyone else. For me, it's like the only real experience we are living now here in this group and anyone can live that. So that's my message.
[00:32:27.055] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:32:29.397] Maria Belen Poncio: Thank you.
[00:32:30.397] Damian Turkieh: Thank you so much.
[00:32:31.564] Maria Belen Poncio: Thank you for your time.
[00:32:33.685] Kent Bye: So that was Rosario Perezolo. She's the writer and co-creator. Damien Turquet, he's the VR director and sound director. And Maria Belen Pannoncio, she's the director and co-creator of Four Feet Blind Date. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, this is a really sweet cinematic VR experience and they were talking later about whether or not different scenes in the experience make you uncomfortable and why do they make you uncomfortable. I think they're exploring different aspects of sexuality and disability and just things that we don't necessarily see a lot of. And so they're trying to address different aspects of taboo topics around disability, which is within itself has its own taboos. And then sexuality on top of that which is a whole other realm of taboos and then they're combining them and then just talking about different aspects of the human experience that people go through but they may not necessarily talk about or even acknowledge. So I thought this was a great piece that gives you a little bit of an insight into disability in people's lives and You know, it's not a documentary. And with that, they have a little bit more leverage to be able to symbolically reflect different aspects that may be difficult to capture on camera. So in this piece, they have people come up to the protagonist in a wheelchair and asking her all sorts of inappropriate questions. And then she's at the point of just kind of like snarkily dismissing them. But you get the sense that like this is just like a regular thing that people are asking them inappropriate questions all the time. just the fact that the camera is actually at four feet, they're trying to give you this sense of that perspective of as you go through experience, you're seeing it from the height and the perspective of Rosario, uh, who is in a wheelchair and sees the world from the perspective of four feet. And so they did a number of different camera movements to try to emphasize this aspect of that perspective of that world. And I think. you know, talking about like, what is the VR give you versus not, I think that's one of the things is that you can actually like start to encapsulate the worldview of perspective. If you know, if you're taller than four feet, then you see the world at anywhere on average, probably around five feet to greater than six feet. And so just lower that down a couple of feet. They are able to wrap that all into the narrative and start to, I think, use the virtual reality medium in a very effective way in that way. It was also interesting the way that they were kind of chopping up the experience. I mean, it wasn't a linear film in the sense that you just watch the story unfold. They were kind of hopping from the end and the middle and the beginning and kind of like chopping it up. And they were talking about like the process of cutting in virtual reality actually becomes problematic because, you know, you don't want to intercut in between scenes too much. And they just found that it wasn't moving forward very quickly it was like too slow and that perceptually it just wasn't moving quickly enough and by hopping around you're giving these little puzzle pieces as to what's happening so you it's dismissing parts of the narrative tension because you're already seeing what's coming out of the outcome as you're jumping back and forth but you're also you are curious about how it came to be to get to that point because it's essentially this blind date and the guy shows up and I don't necessarily know if he knows or not that the person that he's on a blind date with is actually in a wheelchair. And so how does he actually handle that situation? And how does that relationship continue to evolve and grow and expand out into what it ends up with at the end? And so, and I think, you know, in the broader context of the VR for good, I think there's, there's stories like this that, you know, when they start to address certain taboo topics, that they're able to at least give you this entry point, this deeper context. So once you see the story, You watch it, and you're like, oh, yeah, this is totally inappropriate if you do this different type of behavior. Or you may have these things that you never really actually think about. And then as they explore it, you're able to understand the different dynamics of someone's life. And I think that's just a powerful thing about virtual reality in general, is that you can start to explore all these different contexts of the human experience. And then at the end, hopefully, people will just have a broader awareness and willingness to understand the full complexity and diversity of these different life experiences. 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 of supporter podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
