Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
I was a mentor for the UNCSA’s Media + Emerging Technology Lab’s Immersive Storytelling Residency program in 2020, which was a 6-month program featuring a technical artist, software engineer, and writer who were collaborating on an immersive story that was called BonsaiAI. I wanted to have the first cohort to come on the podcast for a retrospective, and so I invited Trent Spivey, Fernando Goyret, and Alex Moro along with METL director Ryan Schmaltz to reflect on their journey, challenges, and lessons learned from their immersive storytelling artist residency.
This was a really interesting experience for me as well in 2020 as I get more involved with providing my intuitive reactions and feedback along the way on a project that’s still within development. One of the hardest problems in experiential design is matching the top-down design with the bottom-up actual experience. Films are able to have a small gap between the representations of a pitch, idea, and overall story, relative to how it ends up on the screen. But games and immersive experiences that involve user agency are require more of a bottom-up approach with a lot of user testing, but there still needs to find a way for the overall experience to have a narrative throughline from beginning, middle, to the end. So being able to predict how the change of certain conditions within an experience effects the overall feeling of an experience is the essential an existential challenge of all experiential design. So there’s a lot of reflections upon that process within the context of bringing three strangers together for six months in the middle of a pandemic in order to figure some of that out.
If you’re interested in the 2021 residency, then January 31st, 2021 is the deadline for a six-month Immersive Storytelling Residency Program that runs from May 1st to November 1st, 2021. There are three different residency roles that will be collaborating over the six months including a game developer/programmer, 3D modeler/technical artist, as well as screenwriter/producer. There’s a monthly $3500 stipend, and a requirement to relocate to Winston-Salem, North Carolina for the duration of the 6-month residency. If you’re interested in applying, then be sure to also check this conversation with METL director Ryan Schmaltz to get more context and details for the 2021 edition.
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Music: Fatality
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 today's episode is a sponsored post from the Media and Emerging Technology Lab at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. There is an immersive storytelling residency program. The deadline for submissions for that is going to be on January 31st, 2021. So it's a six-month artist residency program taking place in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. If you're interested, check out the post for links and more details. In this podcast episode, I actually wanted to have the first cohort from the Immersive Storytelling Residency Program to come in and debrief their whole process because I was actually a mentor for this program and so I was meeting with them throughout the course of 2020, giving various feedback along the way. And I just wanted to hear more about their perspective of how their project developed and It's essentially like a six month game jam. So getting these three different people together, a technical artist, software engineer, and a screenwriter slash immersive storyteller and experiential designer, they're all coming together and they're trying to create an immersive story. For me, it was just interesting to be involved with that creative process and to be able to actually provide feedback along the way. Usually I'm seeing stuff when it's finished. And so I'm learning a lot as well, just in terms of what's it take to really flesh out the vision and the intention that you have at the beginning. And then how you design from the top down and the bottom up at the same time and all those various trade-offs and, you know, just the process of creating a VR piece in general. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Fernando, Alex, and Trent and Ryan happened on Tuesday, December 1st, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:46.907] Trent Spivey: Hi, I'm Trent Spivey. I am a VR writer, producer, mischief maker. I'm a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking. We're at the, what seemed like the beginning of bringing XR into higher ed. It was kind of a neat fusion of that with a film school at the time. And I'm a cinematographer by training, but I got a taste of VR, AR, XR, and I just couldn't let go. I think the power for storytelling and for media making is incredible. And I'm still continuing to find my place within the industry. But that's my answer today.
[00:02:22.452] Fernando Goyret: My name is Fernando William Goiret and I guess I would be the outsider because I never worked with VR previously to this project. I am a graphic designer and multimedia artist from Brazil. And I was introduced to VR and to XR in the master program that I'm doing in NC State. And they focus on new media and experimental media. And there I was exposed to 3D modeling and game engines. And that's where I learned about the residency and about Orion.
[00:02:51.502] Alex Moro: And I'm Alex Morrow. I got my start in VR about 2014 in Irvine, California. I worked for a startup out there for a couple of years and then worked with Epic Games as a engine support technician for two years out in Raleigh.
[00:03:08.343] Ryan Schmaltz: Hi, and I'm Ryan Schmalz, the director of the Media and Emerging Technology Lab, or as we like to call it, METL. I'm the host of the residency program and was fortunate enough to work with Alex, Trent, and Fernando. But at METL, what we do is we use emerging technologies for the purpose of storytelling and content creation. So that includes virtual reality, but also motion capture, game engines, and really looking for ways to innovate how stories are told, whether that's for pure entertainment, or for corporate training or professional training.
[00:03:38.230] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. Well, maybe we could just start at the beginning of this journey that you went on in creating this experience and what you were trying to do from the very beginning.
[00:03:49.365] Ryan Schmaltz: Okay, so the Immersive Storytelling Residency Program was created with the concept of bringing together three disparate but important skill sets and expertise, one of those being a screenwriter, the second one being a 3D technical artist, and the third being a game developer, to have the resources and know-how to build an immersive experience of their choosing. And the residency was really six months in length. And during that time, the residents received a stipend and a mentorship from a variety of industry leaders that included you, Kent, and also several others that were really meaningful in the Three Residents journey. We're really fortunate to have Fernando, Alex, and Trent with us. And they each brought their own vision for what is possible and their own respective skill sets to making Bonsai the amazing piece that they've created.
[00:04:43.082] Trent Spivey: Yeah, so I think when we rolled up, we realized that this was kind of an experiment in a lot of ways, at least it felt that way. And in the best possible way, like, wow, there's never been an XR artistic residency before like this. And so we were both trying to make really good decisions for ourselves, but also to set really good precedents and kind of live up to what our ideal residency could be for all of the later Trent's and Alex's and Fernando's. So I think we felt the weight of it in a healthy way from day one. And then what followed was a, a super duper wide open blue sky period of getting to know each other, throwing a ton of spaghetti at the wall and just giving everything time to breathe. And like, we took tons of walks around the beautiful building. We are housed in the center for design innovation in Winston Salem, North Carolina. And we kind of challenged each other with like exercises for different ways of thinking about design and game development and narrative and immersive creation. I think Fernando came up with the perfect tagline for the residency.
[00:05:48.493] Fernando Goyret: It's three people, one residency, six months. It's like one of those movies, what is going to happen? We don't know, but we're going to find out. So
[00:06:00.400] Alex Moro: Yeah, from the very beginning, I was really grateful just to be given the opportunity to create, which is something I've said time and time again. So just to be given this space to create was, to me, super exciting.
[00:06:12.756] Kent Bye: So the process, you have six months, you're staring at an empty canvas and you have the opportunity to make an immersive experience, but you're really kind of starting from scratch. And so maybe Ryan, you could give what the prompt was or what the constrictions were. And then from there, each of you elaborate on this design process of trying to ideate different aspects that you were trying to explore here in this piece.
[00:06:33.323] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, we tried to keep it as open as possible, but there's a couple of things that we knew that were important. One of those was the duration of the experience. Given that the residency was six months long, we felt that no more than an eight to 12 minute experience would be reasonable during that amount of time. So we asked them to keep it to that, but we also welcomed pushback. So if they came back to us and said, hey, We have designed the perfect 18 minute experience. What we want to hear about it, but that was one of the constraints. The other one is we wanted it to be altruistic in nature. So we wanted it to do good. We wanted a piece that would be a benefit to the community to the university and to the audiences who would be consuming the content. But we left it at that. We didn't want to go any different than that. But those were the guardrails that we laid out. And the rest was really space for them to play and design and iterate around. And one of the things that I encouraged from each of the residences to challenge anything at any time and really make it their own.
[00:07:36.000] Fernando Goyret: Yeah, I would say that it was the perfect combination of guardrails. What you said is like it was said that the only thing that we had to do is explore the use of VR for good. And that was, to me, it was like a great color in us being able to be creative each week, showing the steps to the advisors and absorbing those ideas and absorbing their advice. So yeah, it was a great format, being able to create, being able to have freedom. But the only thing that you have to do is it has to be good. So that was great.
[00:08:09.250] Trent Spivey: And props, because I feel like it would have been all too easy for us to just kind of sit under a tree and contemplate spatial computing for six months. So props to Ryan and the other residency stakeholders for saying, hey, you have to make something with these parameters. And that sparked us to look at, OK, well, what's our core motivator for what we're making? And when we walk away, what do we want to have done? The things that stand out to me the most looking back are, we knew that there was an experience that only the three of us can make during the six months. And it was kind of our job to dig and find what that was, both like the spirit of the piece we were making, but also practically, right? Like we knew we weren't going to develop Grand Theft Auto VR in six months. And then with that altruism piece, we really had to spend time with that and understand what can we do that goes in that direction of making the world a better place with VR. And I think Bonsai in a lot of ways abstracted that because you see a lot of XR that's very humanitarian focused. Like it seems to me, like, you know, what it was made for, like a person has ideas and then they go through the experience, they take off the headset and now they want to feel this way about environmentalism, about refugee crisis, about for us, I think it became like, well, okay, well, let's zoom out a bit and go to, we're living in the time of COVID. what can we give people that is a positive vision of a future? Because everyone's visions of the future kind of got thrown out the window in early 2020.
[00:09:39.983] Ryan Schmaltz: One thing that I observed with the residents early on is they all kind of came with their own ideas and vision, which was really appreciated and exciting. And I think it was no coincidence that there were three initial ideas that they presented. And I don't know the answer as to why, and maybe Fernando, Alex, or Trent can elaborate on it, but they gravitated interestingly towards mental wellness initially, at least in the beginning. And I found that to be particularly interesting because that's a really challenging space to operate in, but it's something that I think was important to all of them. And they were looking at that from a variety of different levels.
[00:10:16.653] Fernando Goyret: Yeah, what Brian just said was we all sat down and thought about what is a story that we can tell, that we have the agency, or at least that we can elaborate and we can be honest in talking about environment and mental health. And it was something that I felt that the three of us could talk about it and could do something with substance.
[00:10:37.679] Alex Moro: So yeah, I guess just to kind of get back in the timeline, So we came up with three ideas, one of which we basically chose. And then, uh, we took a left turn from there.
[00:10:49.605] Trent Spivey: Yeah. At the outset, one of the guardrails is like, come up with three ideas and then we'll kind of put them through their paces at the early stages and see what sticks. And so I think three ideas we'd come up with one was called the museum of you. And we want it to be this like introspective experience of folks going through, not unlike museum of other realities, but it's their life in front of them. And, you know, for obvious reasons, we quickly were like, I don't think we have the resources to do that in six months. And then the second one, we just called it the path. And it was going to be this like giant location based experience where like, four people are networked in their headsets, and they have to like go from one end of a football field side space to the other. And similar reason of like, I don't know if we've got the juice to do that in six months. But our third idea, we call it the bunker, because we literally felt like we were all in our bunkers, we had just kind of gone remote in the middle of COVID. And we're like, okay, this is the vibe around the world right now people are retreating into their spaces. And we also in thinking about emotional impact on like stories, we could tell like a coherent narrative arc Right. Like what can we latch onto and explore further that also the three of us could relate to. And that was a parent child relationship. Not that any of us have children, but just reflecting on our own experiences growing up. And, uh, yeah, the first draft of it was like this very somber, I think it was like an AI raising a child in a concrete box in the future, but that was the early version. And then, yeah, it took a left turn.
[00:12:30.007] Kent Bye: Well, the thing that I find interesting about this whole process is that, you know, this is really planting the seed, the intention that you're setting at the very beginning. And then what are the different practices and processes? Can you really set your deeper intention for what you're trying to accomplish? And then in film, you have storyboarding, you have the synopsis, you have ways in which linear storytelling has pretty well set ways that you're going to map out how an experience is going to unfold. But the. challenge with immersive storytelling is that the more agency and interactivity you have, the less that you can plan everything out ahead of time. And you have to iterate and create some rough implementations of those mechanics to kind of see what those mechanics are actually giving you. And observing this experience, there seemed to be, as you're trying to figure out the story, then you actually start to implement it and then see what those mechanics were. But there still seemed to be this play between how those interactions were tying into this larger story and narrative that you were trying to tell. So just curious to hear you kind of reflect on that. You know, the fact that number one, it's difficult to plan stuff out, but you do have all this design period to try to do the best you can to plan it out. But then when the rubber hits the road, you're actually building stuff and seeing how that actually feels when you go through that and then feedback back into the overall intention. And then eventually get to the point by the end, hopefully that you reach this point of having the final experience that has this alignment between the story you're trying to tell and all the interactions that are in there to try to tell that larger story. But that seems to be a challenge of at this point in the immersive storytelling industry is that gap between those initial design iterations and how the experience will actually end up by the end. What are the different ways to close that gap and try to put down on the paper this vision of where you're going?
[00:14:17.878] Fernando Goyret: I can say that I have a teacher right now in the master program that he's saying that he's preparing everybody and saying, hey, guys, your project that you have in your mind right now is not going to be the project that you're going to be in the end of the last semester. So I guess that's super true. That happened a lot. Since we were three people, of course, with the advice of others, we found ourselves a lot having to say, no, we're going to change this, or we're going to change that, or we're going to do this, or we're going to storyboard this. where are we going to apply our efforts. So it was interesting. And again, I go back to the six months, three people, it was like super interesting journey of reshaping and rediscovering and having to relearn a lot of stuff. Thankfully, it was very fluid. That was something that was great about the choices that I guess Ryan did and the others. It was super fluid. It was a very, I can say that I've learned a lot going through all these steps and retracing those steps again. But yeah, it's interesting and complicated to try to set the steps. And I know that we tried a lot. We're going to try to finish this on this date. And then when we were getting to that date, we were like, well, thankfully we tried.
[00:15:29.309] Ryan Schmaltz: One thing I think the residents did really well that was completely unprompted by me or any of the other mentors is they started prototyping on day one and They had various prototypes that were created of varying levels of fidelity, but allowed them to test some ideas and also explore using hand tracking, for example, because hand tracking had just been released on the Oculus Quest. And so they were able to get their hands dirty with that. And hand tracking plays a big role in how Bonsai turned out. And so one thing I think that was particularly influential in helping them narrow down a concept and define how the narrative art played out and what the visuals look like and what the interactivity, how that worked was this process of them building prototype after prototype after prototype. And occasionally, admittedly, I looked at some of these prototypes and thought, is that the best use of time? I'm not sure, but I will admit that they definitely proved me wrong. And I think that much of the experience that was created is credited to that prototyping that was done early on.
[00:16:33.918] Trent Spivey: I would say much of that prototyping process, we credit to Alex for like coming in early and saying like, ideas are great. Let's make something and prototype and see what it actually looks like in the headset. Because I know I would have like written on note cards and like use software like twine all day to be like, Oh, narrative experiments. But Alex was the one to be like, Hey, let's try it. Let's just do it.
[00:16:59.523] Fernando Goyret: And in the beginning, we also did like three game gems. That was extremely important for me to at least like, OK, OK, now I know where we are or what we're doing, how to use, and how to navigate. So yeah, prototyping and game gems.
[00:17:15.049] Trent Spivey: Yeah. And for me, that was, those game jams were vital because like, as I'm writing that kind of let me know, okay, what can I be tweaking up until the very end of the production cycle? And what do I need to like nail down narratively as early as possible? Because we won't be able to change certain things toward the very end.
[00:17:33.321] Alex Moro: You know, on the tech side, we got Perforce version control set up as early as possible and really just to get everyone up to speed, just collaborating via Perforce was a huge win I think early on to get that going immediately.
[00:17:47.614] Kent Bye: Does that mean that you could have the art assets be submitted into Perforce and then automatically distributed out and then maybe just talk about the mechanics of that? Because I think the other part of the creation of an experience like this is that you kind of have to set where you're headed in terms of, you know, or actually prototype anything you need something to put in there and either it's going to be a lot of gray boxes and using a lot of your imagination or kit bashing, where you're taking existing assets from the community store or from, because you're using Unreal Engine, just 3d model assets that may be generally available. But yeah, I'm just curious to hear the mechanics of how that worked, because at some point you have to start to fuse together both the story, the assets and the game engine in order to do that. Then, you know, you have to begin perhaps in the story and then pulling the assets and then being able to do the game engine, that seems to be at least some linear bottlenecks there, or at least maybe you could use a lot of your imagination. So I'm just curious how you kind of balanced those three things out.
[00:18:46.169] Alex Moro: Sure. I mean, it's like a sculpture where you have, you sort of have the general idea and then you sort of try to refine whether that's taking, you know, gray box art to final art, or, you know, maybe you get some temp dialogue in, but basically just getting it in as close to final as you can, and then sort of making decisions from there.
[00:19:05.408] Trent Spivey: I was just gonna say, Fernando, you were like the 3D asset commando. Like you were like, I've been watching tutorials for four weeks, like tell me what you need.
[00:19:12.892] Fernando Goyret: No, and I was going to say that Perforce was like crucial because in the second week we had the pandemic, so we couldn't meet. We had to work. And we had to have the assets and the materials and everything distributed in every computer. So that was like, when we finished installing Perforce and me and Trent started to understand it better, right after that, we had, guys are going to have to go home, not meet. So it was definitely a great way to connect. So Perforce was excellent. And yeah, like Alex said, it was just a matter of hitting the sculpture and trying to get to the end with the interesting shape.
[00:19:55.583] Trent Spivey: It's funny too, from a production side, because it started as just, it made really good sense for our process. So we weren't going to be stepping all over each other with just who's got what file checked out at what point. But when we saw the writing on the wall that we needed to have a like COVID remote work contingency plan, that was a 15 minute process rather than like, what are we going to do with all our assets? That would have taken like several days to figure out.
[00:20:20.080] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, I'm curious to hear as you were going through this whole process of the six month residency, it sounds like you were iterating, making these prototypes and then eventually settling on one of the three different stories that then ended up taking some left turns. So I'm just curious, like some of those turning points and you know, there was different opportunities for you to touch base with different mentors and get different feedback. And so as you're moving along. What were some of the big turning points or milestones as you start to settle in on one idea? And then as you get some feedback and then how it continued to unfold, but looking in hindsight, what were some of those turning points or milestones that you reached then?
[00:20:56.590] Trent Spivey: I remember once we had gotten our big three ideas figured out, we went through what felt like a couple of weeks of checking in with mentors and like a meeting every day and getting notes from a different person. And that pretty quickly helped us narrow down from three to two, right? We kind of threw out this giant location-based experience because people weren't connecting with the narrative bit of it. And we knew like the technical side was either going to be a massive stretch, if not impossible. And then once we had narrowed down to this artificial intelligence bunker parent-child story, it was actually meeting with you, Kent, when you advised us for the first time. And we were all like, oh my gosh, Kent, BioVoices of VR is going to talk to us. Then we pitched you the idea and, you know, you were, I think, wise in your feedback of just like, look, is this a world that people are going to want to spend time in? And like, it was this question of like dystopia or utopia. Like it felt very clear cut after talking to you. And we were like, well, we can either give this sad robot child story, but what is the positive version of this? And I think once we had gotten that feedback from you and like taking notes and reflected on it for a couple of days, At least for me, like writing the thing, I came to, man, artificial intelligence based on human intelligence, that's the core thread. Every time we base AI off humans, it has a sad ending for the most part. And then just out of like, I'm not sure what it was because COVID everyone was buying houseplants or what, but I was like, what about, and it was just a play on words. Like what about plant-based artificial intelligence? And that's what set it off. And that's, I think when bonsai really started to become bonsai.
[00:22:36.917] Kent Bye: Yeah, just a quick note from my perspective is that there's a lot of value for either doing dystopic cautionary tales like Black Mirror and these other sci-fi stories that allow us to see the worst possible scenario play out. And I think that has value. But I think the real value of VR is that you're able to really actually take people into this whole world and maybe do the more utopic version that maybe harder narratives to tell. And so, yeah, just the ethics around the stories that we're telling and the intention that we're trying to create if we are trying to create these horrible, dystopic futures, then people can watch Black Mirror. And then at the end of it, they feel it can be so nihilistic that you feel hopeless. But the intention is that it creates a catalyst for you to actually shift the whole trajectory of, if we don't change anything, it's sort of like sleepwalking into this disaster. And I think there's certainly a value to be able to tell those different types of stories. But I think also, you know, for me, I think the real potential is also like, how can we create these stories and these narratives to be able to have people strive into this vision that they actually want to live into?
[00:23:42.867] Fernando Goyret: I agree. I think that one thing that is good also about the three of us, I think, is that we, we took very seriously the advice from everybody. And your advice was kind of like the one that we said, like, Oh, okay. We really need to take this guy seriously and change it. So I thank you for that.
[00:24:01.176] Trent Spivey: It was framed as an ethical thing. We were like, man, this has weight to it, whether or not we create a story that people step into with one kind of ending versus another.
[00:24:11.565] Kent Bye: In some ways, from a narrative perspective, it can be more exciting or easier to tell those stories because the drama is sort of embedded in there. And the alternative to do something else is actually the thing that is the harder problem. And I think that's a challenge that I think everybody in the industry has to kind of figure out. I'm not sure if Bonsai was able to solve that as a problem, because I think it's a significant problem. Because I think it starts to get into all these other dimensions of world building and building up an entire ecosystem of that whole culture, you're future dreaming a world that we want to live into that we're not quite there yet. And that future dreaming requires to take one step at a time. And I think that something like Black Panther and Wakanda, they start to do that a little bit where they start to really imagine if we didn't have colonization and we just let a city develop on its own right and what would that culture look like? And I think when you start to see that type of sci-fi world building that is so thought out and so robust, like people want to be there. They want to go and visit it. They want to live in that world. And that takes a lot of sophistication to achieve that. And perhaps that's beyond the scope of a six month project like this, but what I learned from that whole thing is that, yeah, it's easy to sort of like suggest that, but then to still have that dimension of the narrative and the story to still fit in that is still, it's not a solved problem in terms of how to actually do that.
[00:25:30.273] Trent Spivey: A thousand percent. And like, you know, you can't, you talk a lot about like authorship versus agency when you're creating an experience and like, coming from a film background, the narrative structure of a short film or a feature film is pretty clear cut with what buttons you need to hit at what point to accomplish like this overall narrative. But once you get into the like game and XR space, you add in participant choice as another element of it. And it becomes this whole sticky ball game of like what choices affect the narrative in what way and what direction does it go in? And what happens when it goes every direction at the same time? And we've only got four months left.
[00:26:09.649] Kent Bye: Yeah, in this piece that you're working on, I think there was a decision to go with exploring the mechanics of the hand controls, which I think that because it was so new and the API was still relatively early, and I'm sure you had to do a lot of working around of how it was a new technology, but focusing on that agency element, you do introduce this tension of The interactivity and the agency versus, you know, the story that you're telling and trying to strike that balance. I'm just curious to hear your journey on that existential tension of all immersive narrative, which is the time-based medium of the story that you're trying to tell, which is you as an author have complete control of versus surrendering that and letting people do the more game mechanic elements of it. Trying to balance those two.
[00:26:55.243] Alex Moro: A few thoughts on that. I mean, you don't want to have something that's completely just on rails. But on the other hand, we was kind of out of scope to do something, you know, more free form game experience. So that was really big on our sort of priorities is to sort of give the player some sense of agency without overextending ourselves.
[00:27:14.070] Trent Spivey: Right. Yeah. And figuring out what character archetype fit best for our experience. Right. Because we knew if we made a participant omnipotent, then that gets us into like, oh, they can do everything all the time. But looking at traditional character archetypes in literature, film, and so on, like, okay, maybe a sorcerer's apprentice character will fit for the level of agency and narrative balance that we want to hit and that we know we can hit given our limitations. Once we knew what the participant character would be, we were able to build out the narrative from there and the interactivity that goes with it.
[00:27:55.798] Ryan Schmaltz: I can say one thing too that was really a sage advice and I was glancing through my old notes. Naveed Kansari, the founder of Ink Stories, who was also a mentor, at one point in the process sat down with the residents and said something that I'm applying to even my own projects, which is bookend everything. And I think that advice of establishing the world, establishing a sense of familiarity early on, and then revisiting that familiarity and creating that sense of balance. And this is what made me think of that as Trent was just talking is I think that balance also plays in not just from an agency perspective versus narrative, keeping it on the rails versus letting someone explore, but just in terms of the mechanics of the world that somebody is entered into, and then the world that they'll eventually leave when the experience is over, and creating that sort of sense of familiarity of what are the physics and rules of that world, and how can I interface within it? And then as the story comes to a close, how am I revisiting something that is already familiar to me? And although I may be changed, or the story may have changed, there is that grounding of bookending the concepts and message that you're trying to get across.
[00:29:10.428] Fernando Goyret: I think that for me, I kind of came in almost like, I'm going to trust these guys, you know? And I remember that Alex came up with the idea of let's do hand tracking because it's new. And I thought it was very smart. And then the idea of only using this space and also thinking about the environmental issues and real situations about environment problems. And I'm from Brazil and there is the issues with the rainforests and deforestation. So that was something that we tried to bring in also and do a hybrid experience where you can be inside this realm, right? You see all through this magic window and you don't have to travel too much, but it's almost like this contained experience where you can see the different reality through this holographic world.
[00:29:59.426] Trent Spivey: I think an inspiration for me after a lot of conversation with Alex and Fernando was in the middle of making Bonsai. you know, a lot of people in the world were stuck in their eight by 10 home offices longing for like some kind of control over the direction the world was going. And so the story that we were telling in Bonsai was drawing from that of like, what experience can we make that gives people this feeling of saving the world from their like eight by 10 box. And then, and then from there, we kind of tied in themes that we wanted to see explored that were future focused. So then you get like environmentalism, corporate responsibility, artificial intelligence, all wrapped in in different degrees to that core.
[00:30:46.617] Kent Bye: Alex, what about you in terms of just any reflections of trying to strike this balance between those interactivity and the narrative, or if there's any inspirations that you were taking?
[00:30:56.082] Alex Moro: Yeah, I'm kind of with Fernando in the large part, I gave Trent the keys. and let him drive. He definitely filled the role of a producer. And I was going home about hand tracking. So I was saying, hey, there's this new cool thing, hand tracking. Let's see what this new tech's all about. And I'm really happy we were able to spend some time with that tech.
[00:31:17.618] Kent Bye: So as you were starting to come to the end of the residency program, there's certainly some decisions that you have to make in terms of the clock is running out and you have to finish the project and bring it to a close. And so I'm just curious to hear about, you know, the last phase here, which is, you know, typically in the industry, the crunch time where you're really trying to like put in a lot of the extra hours and reach that point of culmination where you're able to really finalize it into its final form. So I'm just curious to hear like the last phases as you're sprinting here to the finish line and what that was like to take in all the feedback that you're able to get. But then, you know, at some point you have to kind of like cut off any additional feedback and just sort of commit to the final version and to get it to the point of completion.
[00:32:01.682] Fernando Goyret: Crunch is a new word in my dictionary. I learned with these guys, crunch time. And the last moments, I think it was the most interesting to me. We had this huge wall in CDI where we wrote like literally every step, like a huge wall. We wrote every step from the beginning to the end. And then we just went down, we took an idea from Bob, one of the advisors, which was great, like try to do in layers, do one time in a week and then redo it in another week and then redo it in another week. So we were taking that and we were doing that. And it was cool. In the end, we were very excited about finishing. And because of the pandemic, we stayed two or almost three months separated. So the ending was actually the moment where we reunited. So it was, each of us came back, we're together again now and we're going to finish this so it was exciting it was it was great to reunite and then all of that constricted energy that we had we could let it out and then inside cdi we we had this great space where we could walk around we could meditate and we could talk and then in the crunch time it was like i said it was uh the wall we were looking at this wall all the time and then going back So, so yeah, it was, it was an interesting experience.
[00:33:18.025] Trent Spivey: Yeah. From a, from a writing perspective, definitely had a good sense of like, what was the world we were trying to build and kind of the circumstances and the characters within that, you know, what made this like artificially intelligent plant special and how was it made and so on. But the telling of that story spatially, I came to understand that like, there were a lot of things that were not working and that people were not getting. as we got towards the very end. And like, props again to Alex for being the one to say like, we need to do play tests. We need to do play tests very soon because we had just been looking at it for several months at that point. And yeah, after those play tests, that to me was the indicator of like, Ooh, yeah, the way that we're telling the story right now is not coming across. And so that led to this idea of bringing in voice acting to like further flesh out characters and the scenario in general. And It's kind of this joke in the filmmaking community, right? It's like, if you have to bring in voiceover during the edit, that means your film's not working. But for our purposes, right, like we were able to connect people to characters and story, like almost instantly using actors' voices, rather than like trying to get them to like look all the way around and explore an environment to like slowly uncover the story. Because we knew we only had 15 minutes to set things up. And so voice acting was a really effective tool to set up, you know, this AI botanist character who you are their assistant, but they're out of the lab and this is what they need you to do in 15 minutes to save the world.
[00:34:47.962] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, I think that there was a lot of things that happened in 11th Hour. As Trent alluded to, obviously, there is the voice actors happened very late in the process to the point where it created, I'll admit a little bit of anxiety for me personally, but I do think it was the right call to take. Do I wish we or they would have came to that conclusion earlier? Absolutely. But I think, you know, ultimately it came together in the end and they were able to produce something that was really interesting. Also, a lot of the feedback, it was interesting trying to ship the experience as well. I know that the residents did have some heartburn in terms of trying to make sure that the mentors were able to actually give it a try. And in some cases, they had to send screenshots and almost storyboard it out for some of the mentors because of technical issues. And so, you know, I think that's, you know, more of a comment based upon how we still have some places to go with the tech in general of headsets and the accessibility, shipping experiences to each other that aren't in the store. But overall, once we were able to start gathering feedback from the variety of mentors who have distinctly different backgrounds and experiences, it really, yeah, it really showed them what was working and what wasn't. The other thing too, which came together very nicely in the end, which was sort of, at least from my perspective as an outsider looking in, is the score. And so the residents decided to engage with a composer to create a new score for the experience that was going to be played throughout, and they were working across different how to embed that music within narrative mechanics. And so there was a lot of uncertainty, at least from my perspective, in Middley, because the composer was working on it extensively, and he did a phenomenal job. But I didn't actually get to see it with the score until at the 11th hour. And with the help of the advice they got early on from Jim Fairchild, who's the guitarist for Modest Mouse, in terms of working with composers to begin with, to the ability to leverage the composer, but give them a long leash to be able to be creative and do what they do best, but to make it work within a construct of an immersive experience, or thinking about if somebody has agency to complete a task, it may take them 10 seconds to complete that task, or it might take them a half an hour And how do you maintain that environment, both visually, but also from an audio standpoint to make it seem seamless, regardless of whatever time schedule people are on. And so these are some reservations and concerns I had going into the 11th hour, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see everything really come together at the end there. And it showed that, you know, the homework that Fernando, Alex, and Trent did up front really paid off in the end, even as they were continuing to tweak up until the last day.
[00:37:39.777] Fernando Goyret: Yeah. Cheers to Leo, the composer. Leonardo Aquino.
[00:37:44.263] Kent Bye: Took out his SoundCloud. Yeah. And so I guess I'm somebody who goes to a lot of these events and I see these different pieces. I think a big challenge of evaluating and looking at these immersive stories is to watch the piece and see whether or not it stands on its own in terms of the communication intent is clear in terms of like you watch it and you're like, it's a piece of sublime art where it kind of transcends the artist's intention as it gets out there and you kind of watch it and you just get it and you don't need it to have it explained. And then there's another dimension there, which is to then talk to the creators to get the artist's intention and to match that artist's intention with the experience and to see the degree to which that people's experiences match what you're intending. And I think that starts to be revealed as you start to do the playtesting. And then one of two things happened, either me as an individual experiencing it is not sort of getting the essence of what you're trying to communicate, or there's something that has to be tweaked and changed within the experiential design. And I think that process of playtesting and coming into an alignment between any piece that you're creating versus reducing that gap between your intention and what people are experiencing is at the heart of all of this in terms of how you do this type of immersive storytelling. So I think we're at the very beginning of that. And I think we're still learning how to minimize those gaps and what type of frameworks and the design process. And so as you're on that journey yourself of exploring this process, I'm just curious to hear any of your lessons learned in terms of ways that you could either minimize that gap and then As you move forward in the future, what type of things you're going to take away from this to be able to make sure that the intention that you have is kind of aligning with people's experience?
[00:39:25.320] Alex Moro: I think the thing that is most revealing about playtesting is you have something in your head and you know how it works, you know exactly how to do it. And then you get someone else who's just totally. unfamiliar with it and something that's totally obvious to you that you would never ever think to second guess, they have confusion on or they look at one thing you created and they think it's something that you're actually trying to create something else. So I think just having that fresh pair of eyes can really reveal just so much.
[00:39:54.181] Fernando Goyret: Yeah, I think that key takeaways would be the play test, testing, testing, testing. But I think that my takeaway would be that Working honestly and letting everyone do their jobs, I guess, like trusting, trust, I guess, that was very helpful between the three of us. Like each one of us was very honest and was very understanding with the other's work. And like Alex said, give the keys. I gave the keys to Trent and I gave the keys to Alex and to Ryan. So that was something that I learned a lot is like, let people do their work. And in the end, if we are honest and if we work hard, the result will be pleasant.
[00:40:33.747] Trent Spivey: Yeah, it's funny for me how like more and more lessons learned from a project are less these like brand new novel discoveries of process, but more like a nuanced way of understanding kind of a long held rule or recommendation. So like obviously play test as much as possible as early as possible. Like I have so much more appreciation for that now after seeing like once we did get into heavy play testing later in the residency and really firsthand appreciating how much perspective that offered for understanding the way people were moving through the experience, but that's a big takeaway for me. And the second, right, is just the three words, show, don't tell, and like applying that, moving that knowledge from making a film into making an experience. So like, what is the equivalent of experience, don't tell, you know, I'm still meditating on that now, but yeah, those are the two biggest things that come to mind.
[00:41:32.797] Ryan Schmaltz: One thing I observed and it might be worth for you guys to mention is the lessons learned of working with each other, because you each are have very distinctly different styles and very distinctly different roles. And I know there was some challenges along the way, not necessarily fireworks, but challenges of learning to work together. So can you guys talk about that?
[00:41:54.595] Fernando Goyret: Yeah, I can say that it's a concrete proof that these types of residency, these types of work are possible if the right people are working together, I guess. And so I think that Ryan and the people that are participating in METL did a great job in finding those people because I guess that it's also a luck factor, right? Like the three of us worked very well and I think that we didn't have any fireworks or or tension or anything. So it is possible to do this kind of project. So this is what I guess what I'm trying to say is the takeaway for Mattel is that it's possible. It's possible to do a VR residency with three people that are never met, never in their lives, and that have such different characteristics and personalities.
[00:42:39.570] Trent Spivey: Yeah, I would say like, it wasn't that there was never any tension, but like we always maintained a core of like mutual respect. And for me, looking back on that, when the residency was working best, it was because, you know, we were keeping very, like a lot of curiosity about each other's process because, you know, I don't, I didn't know anything about what Alex or what Fernando were doing because I didn't have their background. And I think the reverse is true. So just that constant curiosity of like, Oh, tell me more about like that decision you made. And I think like understanding how to give each other notes, like there was kind of a period of clunkiness where we didn't really know how to give notes to each other beyond like, that's cool. Like, what is that? So like beginning to introduce questions and understanding why we made certain choices along the way, and then talking about if those choices were effective or not and serving the experience we were trying to make. That was pretty key. And then the classic, like improv comedy thing, right? Yes. And. rather than like shutting down a little baby sprout of an idea. It's like, okay, thinking inwardly, right? Like, that's weird, but you know, I don't want to shut you down. Like, keep going with that. And we'll see where it goes and then discuss whether or not it's effective.
[00:43:50.511] Ryan Schmaltz: One thing that was interesting too, and maybe you guys can talk about it is how You're differing skill sets, you know, a developer with a technical artist and a screenwriter or a storyteller. You came into the residency with one mindset of how you were going to work within that residency. But then during the process, you changed the way you were working. to work better with each other. So you modify your typical working habits to work within the pipeline or work within the way in which you had to produce content. And I found that particularly interesting of one, you guys learning how to work together with these different sort of extrovert versus introvert, different approaches, looking at it from a story perspective versus an art perspective versus a technical perspective, but also how your behaviors had to change along the way to be able to support each other more effectively.
[00:44:45.036] Fernando Goyret: I think that we did a good job in like becoming one, I guess, like we molded very well. I can remember times where Alex was giving ideas of the story and Trent was giving ideas of the art and I was giving, you know, so I was like chipping in interaction. So I guess that we did a good job doing our work, but at the same time trying to do the other's part or try to catalyze or to try to help in the other parts of the project. So I guess that's very unique in each work environment. But in this case, in our case, it was a really interesting dynamic. I think we did a good job in assuming the other's role and putting ourselves in the other's position and trying to do this very holistic way. Because I was a tech artist, but I I felt like joy in sitting down with Trent and giving him ideas. And I'm sure that they felt the same way in the other way.
[00:45:42.116] Alex Moro: And I think it's important to say that each of us committed to this residency without knowing who the other two people were. And from day one, there was great camaraderie throughout the entire residency. There was really great collaboration.
[00:45:54.503] Trent Spivey: Yeah, I think being a storyteller, writer, producer, person for the residency made me a much more efficient storyteller. getting maximum narrative impact per second in the experience or however you would want to measure it. Because, you know, working with Alex and Fernando and seeing the hours and hours and hours it took to implement a story idea as like a fixed asset or interactivity or mechanic, right? Like that made me really pay attention to like, okay, what are people actually spending time on in this story? And is it important and does it contribute to this larger thing we're trying to convey? Or is that just going to be like Fernando modeling something for three hours that ends up getting thrown out the window. So like being with them every day made me shift into a state of always thinking like, is this the best way to communicate this particular element of the story at a given time?
[00:46:49.851] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. As we start to wrap up here, I'm just curious if each of you could share what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:47:04.955] Alex Moro: I think it'll ultimately enable brain to brain communication.
[00:47:11.801] Fernando Goyret: All right. I think that VR is on this steadily increase up. It's going to be, in my opinion, after meeting Trent and Alex and learning a lot from them and even listening to the podcasts and researching it. I think that it's going to be the future of storytelling, of connection. Once computers and GR gear gets better, I think it's going to be the super tool of connection and empathy.
[00:47:42.810] Trent Spivey: Yeah, I think my vision of it, right, is kind of, I think it's already a book title, but experience on demand, this idea of like, consciousness and matter flowing back and forth, right? Like thought manipulating matter in front of you to have this impact of creating an experience, whether that's for your training to do something, but you have this like perfect copy of what it would be in reality, or you want to feel a very specific emotion in a very specific way, whatever that is, right? Like I'm a very nostalgic person, so I can't wait for VR to like help me go back to my grandma's house a long time ago. But yeah, that like, I guess it's cliche by now, but that image of a holodeck, right? But just a really souped up one where if you think it, virtual atoms are morphing to make the thing, whether that's your grandma or the car you're learning to drive, or this historical event that happened a long time ago, or just this crazy thing you made up just now, but in perfect fidelity of how it is in your mind's eye.
[00:48:39.739] Kent Bye: Ryan, did you want to add anything?
[00:48:41.755] Ryan Schmaltz: Well, I answered in the last session, and it's such a loaded question. And my favorite question that you asked, Kent, when we did a podcast together a year ago, I talked about computing being like electricity in the wall and being able to harness it at your whim and at your will. And today we were talking about the psychological aspects of VRX. But I think before any of that happens, I think the immediate potential of virtual reality is posture. We're all sitting there holding our phones and looking down and all of a sudden, Now we can look up and we can engage with the digital world in an upright position instead of returning to almost this caveman state. And being able to look up is both psychologically and physically an improvement. And it's amazing what that ultimately, and such a minor thing, but it's amazing what that ultimately enables. And just the ability to use the space around you. You're no longer confined to a square. And we've somehow taken our lives and turned them into squares. Everywhere you look, there's squares. The computer monitor, the laptop, the phone. And now we're in this place where we can all of a sudden think about the user experience of the physical space around you. And whether that's AR or VR, it's almost irrelevant. But just being able to use that space and integrate it within the physical world and that seamlessness, I think, has so much potential in a way of sort of integrating the digital world into our regular lives, but in a way that's a lot more healthy. Potentially unhealthy as well, but I think that looking at this optimistically, I think there's a healthy ability to be able to integrate digital information and make it contextual when you need it. And at the time you need it and being able to customize this to suit your needs, regardless of what those needs might be.
[00:50:27.429] Kent Bye: Hmm. Great. Is there anything else that's left and said that any of you would like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:50:36.160] Trent Spivey: I'll just give a quick shout out to Bob Keane, who was one of our advisors, and he had a really significant role, I think, in like, we would check in with him weekly. He has this very extensive background in visual effects and filmmaking, and also kind of the production processes behind those. He has a really unique mind to be going back and forth with on a weekly basis about the choices we were making as we were creating Bonsai. I think he brought so much to the table and was much more than just like a minor part of the residency. I think we owe a fair amount to Bob.
[00:51:09.572] Fernando Goyret: Yeah, also shout out to Jackie and Navid and Zara which were very fundamental and to you also, Kent. Fundamental too. For the left turns, the big left turns.
[00:51:23.136] Ryan Schmaltz: One thing too that might be worth mentioning because I'm sure you by this point in the podcast you've stirred up a lot of intrigue is What is the synopsis of Bonsai? And are you willing to share it with some of the voices of VR audiences? And if so, how might you share it with them?
[00:51:44.124] Trent Spivey: Cool. Yeah. So Bonsai is a virtual reality experience where a novel plan virus threatens the world's vegetation. And as the new assistant to a top botanist, you step up to save the day while avoiding the clutches of an evil agribusiness. And our current distribution plan, We're humbly trying to run the festival circuit, even though we're still figuring out what that is in 2020 and 2021, and then hoping to release it onto the upcoming Oculus distribution platform in the new year.
[00:52:15.453] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you know, for my role of being able to see and be involved with this artist residency program, it was interesting for me because like I said, I'm usually watching experiences that are been finished and I'm being able to talk to the creators and to do this calibration process to see what my experience was versus what the artist's intention was. And this I'd say it was the first time that I've been involved in a process where that dialogue was going to be actively driving into the creation process. And I'd say for my part, it's still unknown for me in terms of how to reduce those gaps between artists intention and the experience that's being created. And so the most I can say is sort of, this is my experience. This is maybe some potential directions that you can go in, but still surrendering my own agency to see where they end up taking it. I think this was interesting to be involved in a process where there was quite a huge evolution over the course of this project of each of these different moments of checking in to see feedback you're getting from lots of different sources as well, and see how that ends up at the end and. I think that as somebody who is trying to really figure out the elements of experiential design, it's still so much of a mystery and there's still so many different trade-offs that creators have to choose from. I think of it as cooks in a kitchen trying to mash together all these different elements of modulating human consciousness and experience and interaction and story and music and architecture and embodiment identity. I mean, there's so many things to start to manipulate and what are going to be the ways in which that you're kind of adding a little bit more of that or less of that to be able to achieve your artist intention and what you're trying to do. So yeah, it was interesting just to be involved in that process.
[00:53:49.403] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, and thanks Ken for your willingness to join us in the second iteration of the residency. I think it's worth mentioning that we're continuing the program and applications are open now by going to www.metl.org. And we're looking forward to doubling down on this past residency. And thanks to receiving a few grants, one from the Small Business Technology Development Center, part of the SBA, and also the Epic Games Mega Grant, we're able to continue this program for a second year. And we're hoping that we can do it for subsequent years thereafter. But really excited to see the pool of applicants that will be coming down the pike in time for our January 31st deadline.
[00:54:29.997] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for joining me here on the podcast and for participating in this whole journey. So thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Good.
[00:54:36.843] Ryan Schmaltz: Thanks again.
[00:54:38.464] Kent Bye: So that was the first cohort of the immersive storytelling residency program at the university of North Carolina school of the arts with the director, Ryan Schmaltz. There is a technical artist of Fernando Garrett, the software engineer, Alex Mauro, and the screenwriter Trent Spivey. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, this project was interesting just because I think that the vision of what the project was, was kind of shifting throughout. And also I've been involved in different game jams before in that process of having three different people with different perspectives. And then as you're coming together, how do you get on the same page and creating something? So, for me, I think it's like, what are the steps to be able to do that? Because you want to be able to get in there and see what it feels like, but you also have to do this top-down design of the vision and intention that you're trying to do, plus the bottom-up iterative design. In a piece like this, the central part they were designing around were these various different interactions, starting with the hand tracking, which was a new affordance. They wanted to explore what that would feel like. Which, if you look at the spectrum between a game and a story, some of the experience felt more along the game side because of this focus on those different interactions that they were doing. And when I think about immersive stories that do a really good job of having the interactions really feed into the story, I think of the line where you're turning your hands but there's an aspect of repetition within that story and then your actions have a repetitive quality to them or think of the key which does a really good job of getting you immersed into the story in terms of trying to save a couple of different of these orbs you can't save all of them and then you know the story goes on and you know i won't spoil it for folks who haven't seen it but definitely go check it out because i think that the interactions actually kind of play into the sense of loss that they're trying to express And then I also think of the book A Distance, which does a really good job of doing two things. One is to really ground you into these different contexts of someone's journey of a Japanese who's immigrating into Canada and then suffers through being put into an internment camp. As you go through different different experiences, they have you do these variety of different actions that really grounds you deeper into the context. I feel like the book A Distance really emotionally immersed me into the experience more. And so I think that's the challenge is like how do you do your interactions to really create a deeper immersive context for the story that you're trying to tell and really separating out what those contexts are and to see how the overall arc of the story is unfolding as well. I think the playtesting iteration is a good approach in terms of really doing a sanity check to see the direction that you're going is working and, you know, once you create different puzzle elements, then once you start people who are not familiar with how to solve the puzzle, then they have to kind of suffer through that mental friction. Yeah. So I think some of the takeaways for me was just to see different ways of being able to do different storyboarding or in film you have storyboarding and you're able to do pitches and you're able to really write it out and you're able to give a good sense and have a translation of what the story is going to be. And there's not a lot of variation in terms of how the user agency is going to modulate or change that story. And so my deeper question, I guess, is whether or not that pitch process and going through the formalization of that story. is worth doing or if it becomes an emergent process where you kind of figure that out as you go along based upon what you find really compelling from the direct embodied experiences. It's like that blending of the bottom up and the top down I think is the fundamental challenge of experiential design and really giving the user true agency in different ways. This is the existential challenge for anybody within the immersive industry. And I think as time goes on, we'll get more and more of a better sense of how the different various interactions starts to modulate our consciousness and create these contrasts between these different moments as the stories unfolding. And I guess the other point that I would say is that there is this deep challenge of, say, world building, creating a world that's super compelling to be in. I think Half-Life, Alex, they do a certain amount of that just from the environmental design. But I'm thinking of more of speculative design futures. I know there's been a number of different pieces that were about indigenous futurism that really projecting out 150 years in the future from pieces that were produced out of Canada. And then there's Afrofuturism and different ways in which that you really start to use the conceit of science fiction and world building I watched a video recently of Alex McDowell and he was talking about world building and part of the world building process is actually just bringing in a lot of experts from within their domain and then have them talk to each other about their vision about what the street corners of the future look like, what type of things are happening. given where the technological trends or the sociological trends or whatever trends that there are people who are looking at where things have been in the past and where they're going in the future and getting a group of those experts together and then just Ideating in terms of what this future world could be like that's a lot of what happened in the minority report which is what Alex Madow worked on but he's in a number of different videos on YouTube where he talks about this process and so I I think that's an interesting idea is to try to do that type of world building. I think it's actually harder than what a typical immersive story is with really focusing on a character as the primary mode of telling the story rather than designing the world and embedding different aspects of culture and having a real model of where the culture is at and where it could go in the future. And then just giving people a way to be able to strive towards where we could be going. And I think that's what all good science fiction can do in terms of Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and to a certain extent Ready Player One. And I think there's going to be a certain role for that for the future of virtual reality storytelling. But it doesn't mean that every single storytelling experience within virtual reality has to take that route. The other thing is that if there's a certain part of the story that's really reflecting one of your own direct experiences, I think that is also where I've found a lot of the stories that really resonate, like Book of Distance as an example, is a real personal story. And it's something that is deeply connected to something that is impacting Randall Okada's life. I mean, it's about his grandfather. And so it's part of his own lineage. And so to see how the stories that has a real personal connection to it and how you could see the most deeply intimate and personal aspects of a story, to be able to really focusing on that in order to really touch into the macrocosmic element. There's this fractal geometric element of, stories that are able to really dial down into the deeply personal experience and really focus on the emotions and Modulating the emotions and from that being able to tap into this larger experience. So easier said than done for sure and Yeah, it's kind of a unique program as well and they do have their immersive storytelling residency that's coming up here in 2021 I'm planning on continuing to be a mentor for them for this next coming year for the second cohort. So if you are interested in participating in that, like I said, at the top submissions are due on January 31st, 2021. And, uh, yeah, we'll see how it goes along this time. And, uh, still this challenge, I think of, you know, getting three people together and getting them on to the same page and this deeper vision of what the story is and how to really explore that and to map it out. I mean, balancing that top down and the bottom up and the ways to really give a sense of. in the early phases of trying to map up with whatever it's tilt brush or gray box unity or Unreal Engine experiences or cinematic storyboards, a pitch deck, you know, I'm not sure what the exact combination of all those things are to be able to have some sense of what the story is and where it's going and to be able to have some sort of experience with it. And then obviously we have to sort of project a lot of imagination into that, but to be able to close the gap between those early phases and where the project ends up going. And yeah, I think it's sort of an open question still within the overall design processes as people are figuring all this stuff out. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the WususVR podcast, and if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. 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