Epic Games’ Nick Whiting paired up with Nick Donaldson again before Oculus Connect 2 to build the Bullet Train demo over the course of 10 weeks. They wanted to dogfood the Unreal Engine to optimize the rendering for VR, but also experiment with Oculus’ motion-tracked Touch controllers. They had the Toybox demo to use for inspiration, and so they set out to maximize the interaction fidelity for a game that had a lot of guns and explosions. I had a chance to catch up with Nick at the Seattle VR Expo where he told me about their design process as well as some of the technical limitations that drove some of their design decisions.
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John Gaeta first got into virtual reality when he was approached by the Wachowski siblings to be the visual effects supervisor on The Matrix. Now he’s Executive Creative Director of Industrial Light & Magic’s Experience LAB (ILMxLAB) where he’s designing and enabling platforms that will lead to the Matrix — “minus the machine dominance” of course. ILMxLAB has a decade of story to explore within the Star Wars Universe using the latest virtual and augmented reality technologies. I had a chance to catch up with John at Sundance where he talked about collaborating with a dream team of storytellers, technologists, and theme park designers to create immersive entertainment experiences. We talk about the evolution of passive and interactive storytelling, crafting tribal social VR experiences, and the importance of including humanity and emotion within a medium that can otherwise feel isolating.
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Andrew Stern doesn’t enjoy most AAA video games because he wants to be able to say anything at any moment within a social simulation and participate in an interesting story. About once week, he’d like to engage with a high agency, interactive drama with artificially intelligent NPCs. Rather than long and extended play sessions, he’d prefer a short 20-30 minute experience that he can play over and over again trying different strategies with characters who feel real and plausible.
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For the past year, Devon Dolan has been trying to make sense of the interactive storytelling landscape that’s possible within virtual reality. He comes from a world of story where he’s currently an associate at Cinetic Media, which is a well-known and very respected strategic advisory company within the world of independent film. Cinetic has brokered distribution deals for Sundance hits ranging from Little Miss Sunshine to Napoleon Dynamite. Devon recently collaborated with Michael Parets on an essay that proposes a framework to categorize VR stories into four distinct categories. Their original Medium piece was recently expanded upon in Techcrunch, and I had a chance to catch up with Devon at Sundance where we further elucidated and simplified their 4-quadrant framework for VR storytelling.
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Jessica Brillhart is the principle VR filmmaker at Google working with the Cardboard team to field test the latest 360-degree Jump camera technology. She was working at Google’s Creative Lab as a filmmaker when she was invited to start doing test shoots in VR. She quickly saw the power of the VR medium, and has continued to do experiments to learn the language of VR storytelling. She’s been sharing her insights through a series of essays on Medium, and I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance to talk more about the language of cinematic VR & her thoughts on storytelling in VR.
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Eric Darnell got into animation in the 1980s and eventually landed at Dreamworks Animation where he co-directed Antz, and then co-directed and co-write four Madagascar movies. He’s a storyteller at heart, and now he’s diving deep into writing and creating short VR animated experiences in a start-up venture that he co-founded with Maureen Fan called Baobab Studios. I had a chance to catch up with Eric at Sundance to talk about his process of crafting a story, and why he’s so excited about the narrative potential of the medium of virtual reality.
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The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at Sundance last year at the New Frontier program where there were only about a dozen different experiences. For Bechir, going through all of VR experiences at Sundance was like a kid getting to experience Disney World for the first time, and I had a chance to capture his reactions and enthusiasm as he got his second big exposure to VR.
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Samsung had a huge presence at Sundance this year as the mobile sponsor of the festival. They were evangelizing Gear VR to independent filmmakers with their Gear VR theater as well as collaborating with Sundance’s New Frontier program to provide Gear VR headsets for the mobile VR selection of cinematic VR experiences. I had a chance to catch up with Jim Wilson, who is the director of immersive products & VR for Samsung. He’s in charge of making sure the Milk VR has plenty of new 360-degree video experiences through various collaborations with professional and independent producers. Jim and I talked about the consumer launch of Gear VR, their plans for supporting cinematic VR experiences through their Indie Challenge Program, as well as the challenges of marketing VR through 2D mediums.
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One of the best narrative VR experiences that I had at Sundance New Frontier was 6×9, an immersive experience of solitary confinement. You might ask, “Why would you ever want to do that?” Well, it was less about having a direct experience of solitary confinement, and more of a polished immersive journalism piece that explores the psychological damage of solitary confinement using a number of interesting VR storytelling techniques. I had a chance to unpack a lot of these techniques with Francesca Panetta, who has a strong background in audio production and audio narrative journalism.
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Rose Troche knows that the first-person perspective is flawed, and she wanted to show people just how vulnerable it can by telling a single story between four different points of view. Continue reading →