Vincent Morisset is the founder of the studio AATOAA, and has been doing interactive projects for the past 2 decades. He’s worked with folks like Arcade Fire and the National Film Board of Canada on projects spanning mediums from screens, XR headsets, as well as physical installations. One of the core features of AATOAA’s projects is interactivity. Caroline Robert’s Brain Stream premiered at IDFA DocLab 2021 and has been working with Morisset for the past 10 years. We talked about the following projects that have been featured at IDFA DocLab since 2013:
- Brain Stream (DocLab 2021)
- Motto.io (DocLab 2020)
- Vast Body (DocLab 2019)
- A Way to Go (DocLab 2015)
- Arcade Fire “Just A Reflektor” (DocLab 2013)
This was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021 as a part of a collaboration with IDFA’s DocLab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello and welcome back to another edition of this podcast series of looking at the 15th anniversary of DocLab. My name is Kent Bye. I do the Voices of VR podcast and a big fan of DocLab over the years. I really enjoyed attending since 2018, 19 and 20 and 21. Seeing a lot of different work, I feel like it's really on the cutting edge of what's next when it comes to immersive storytelling and documentary filmmaking. So today we have Vincent and Caroline. Maybe you could each introduce yourselves and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive storytelling.
[00:00:40.842] Caroline Robert: Yeah, so I'm Caroline Robert. I was at IDFA this year to present my film, Brainstream, which was premiered at IDFA. So I was really honored to be there, actually, physically. So it was great. And I work a lot with Vincent in all the projects that we did for the past 10 years. Vincent.
[00:01:00.292] Vincent Morisset: Yeah, my name is Vincent Morisset. I'm the founder of the studio Atwa. I've been doing interactive projects for the last two decades, been developing projects with Arcade Fire at the very beginning, and developing original interactive films with the National Film Board, and projects on screens, in headsets, and in physical installation. So interactivity has always been at the core of our projects.
[00:01:29.560] Kent Bye: Great. Yeah. Maybe you could each give a bit more context to your individual backgrounds and your journey into this space of immersive and interactive media.
[00:01:37.505] Caroline Robert: Yeah. So me, I studied in science when I was in high school. And then I changed it to art and more design, design school. And when I was studying in design, I was really interested in interactivity with a friend of mine. And we came to Montreal to do some kind of training. And that's how I met Vincent, actually, because he had a little studio back in the days. We'll talk about it. But they were working a lot with interactivity. And we were eager to find people who were working with this medium. So that's how I started, actually, and Vincent.
[00:02:10.672] Vincent Morisset: And at the end of the 90s, I was in the film studies, I wanted to do films. And I guess I was that year where there was this kind of shift, where we started to edit audio thing with the razor blade and tape. And then the next year, we were editing films on a computer. So I'm a product of that shift. So this idea of wanting to tell a story using moving images, continue, but I shifted in a program called multimedia back in the days. But that passion of film grammar and then the possibility of new possibilities of presenting and telling stories on a computer and using code as another layer to engage with an audience kind of came. So it's always been this tension between those two world kind of cinema and then technology interactivity.
[00:03:03.985] Kent Bye: And what was your first encounter with the IFA doc lab? Did you attend as an attendee or was your first time attending there with a piece that you had there?
[00:03:12.450] Vincent Morisset: The very first time I heard about Caspar and doc lab was if I move a bit like there's this poster of Blah Blah that was the first project and my first personal project with the National Film Board of Canada. And at the time, Caspar saw the project and convinced my producer to screen the website in a film, like in a cinema. And at that time, I've been to premiere of website and it was terrible and embarrassing. And it was like this kind of, okay, it's an intimate experience and this thing is awkward, but somehow Caspar kind of nailed this idea of live cinema and presenting these kind of participative interactive project in good condition kind of changed the way you engage with it. And this was pre-Twitch, right? So this idea of watching interactivity as a linear thing was kind of a disruptive and a bit radical. And then I started to discuss with Kaspar, the founder of a Duck Lab, and it was this kind of intellectual and artistical crush. It's like, oh my God, someone that kind of likes and is interested to these new form of storytelling and not only obsessed with the technology and innovation. So it's kind of a long love story.
[00:04:37.429] Caroline Robert: And Vincent has been a lot to Itfa and I never had a chance to go because most of the times it's really limited, like the people that can fly. So it was my first time, but I've been knowing Kaspar for a long time now, but remotely or when he comes to Montreal. So I have a relationship with them, but I've never been. It was my first time. So I was really happy to be able to go with Vincent.
[00:05:00.683] Kent Bye: Nice, very cool. Yeah, and Michelle sent over a number of different pieces and links to the past work that you've shown there at DocLab. Starting in 2013, you had a piece that you mentioned, Arcade Fire. It was like this music video where you're interacting, and almost like there's a way to modulate what's happening on the screen by either using your mouse or your mobile phone. And so maybe you could talk a bit about this first piece that you had. Well, I don't know if it was maybe your first or second piece, but the piece called Just Reflector in collaboration with Arcade Fire.
[00:05:29.944] Vincent Morisset: Yes, so I was interested with this project that it was for the album Reflector as is about our perspective on life, about reality. So I was interested in this music video to play with this tension between kind of a documentary form and fiction. We went to shoot in Jacques Merle in Haiti. It's really kind of being catapulted in the middle of streets and just kind of embracing and capturing what was happening, but with the protagonist in this kind of underlying narrative. And in this project, you're holding a phone and you're becoming somehow some kind of projectionist. And at what point you're becoming your own reflection, a bit like me talking to you in, oh yeah, you're getting inside the music video and the protagonist is in your phone. So we're kind of flipping both worlds. So it was a really interesting journey where we pushed things technologically. We were collaborating with the Google Creative Lab in San Francisco with Darren Koblin and pushing the possibility of what computer vision was like pre machine learning improvement, I would say. So we're pushing the things technologically, but also revisiting form and blurring the line between what is reality, what is fiction. And DocLab was a place where like, this is a music video for a band and with the heavy load of invented story, but Gaspard has always had this kind of really embracing all kinds of realities, I would say. So I was firstly surprised to be part of that selection, but at the same time pleased and it could engage discussions. So that's.
[00:07:19.796] Kent Bye: Yeah, I appreciate it in that piece, just the ways that you have different filter effects or different things that are surprising, you know, like you see different effects, but then There's things that I see in that, it's like, oh, wow, how did they do that? Because it's a video that's already shot, then I'm used to seeing Snapchat filters or stuff like that, where you kind of have these real-time effects. But yet, because it's post-processing, you're able to experiment a little bit more, but it has that interactivity. And so, yeah, there's a lot of really interesting ways of modulating your view into this world that it feels almost like there's a portal that you're looking into the world, but you're kind of interfacing it through this. It kind of had this etheric feeling, I guess. When I watch pieces, there's things that you predict and you expect what's going to happen, but there's a sweet spot of that novelty where you don't quite know what to expect, but it's not so mundane as to just push a button and to know what to expect. I feel like you were able to hit those sweet spots of using their activity to be surprising in a way, which I think is I guess it's easier to say than actually to achieve that.
[00:08:18.456] Vincent Morisset: Yeah, I collaborated on this project with a big group of people and Karin was also involved in this project and it was a lot of trial and error and the interactivity was part of, I would say, the message in a way, in a sense that you're almost as it comes some kind of puppeteer and this kind of tension of, am I controlling what I'm seeing or not? And there's this kind of tension between this moment where you say, I'm wanting to transform what I see. I have an impact on it, but at the same time, it has its own life. So and that was also part of the message or the feeling that we wanted to So for us, it's really important that the interactivity is meaningful, that it says something, and we always challenge our use of interactivity.
[00:09:06.483] Kent Bye: And this next piece that I have on the list is a way to go.com from 2015, which It was kind of like this exploration of a space, almost like an open world, but it's very on rails, like there's a singular path that you can walk down, but yet it's also kind of using 360 photo spheres in a way that you're able to feel like you're walking on a trail on this hike. You kind of go on this adventure that goes through these different phases and chapters, but maybe you could give a little bit more context as to this piece and 2015. At that point, we've had a number of different 360 videos that are out there, but maybe the tech was still fairly nascent, but it seems like you were able to either somehow create these photospheres and stitch them together that made it feel like you're actually walking through a space. And I felt it was very compelling, but also to have this cartoon character that you're controlling within the context of that world with some agency, but not too much, because obviously it's a photo series that you're capturing as you can't go too far off the trail. But it still gave me this feeling of being immersed onto this journey, which I thought was quite something with a kind of web interactive piece.
[00:10:15.365] Vincent Morisset: Kelvin, do you want to talk about it a bit?
[00:10:18.207] Caroline Robert: For the introduction, Vincent talks about it better than me, but I can talk about it. I mean, Vincent had this idea, it was prior VR headsets. So I already had this idea of creating this 360 world that's really cinematic, to have really photographic images and to move inside this world in a path, but to have this immersive idea. So he wanted to do something that was web-based. And afterwards, there was this technology, VR came, and we had this ability to translate it into a website. So it was a great opportunity, but it was really done to be on a browser and create this immersive walk into the woods with the character. And as you said, you don't have a lot of agency, but you don't feel like you don't have agency because you can stop everything every time you want and just go into those bubbles of details and go really into like a microscopic world. We wanted to create those two moments where you just walk or run or fly and have this feeling that you're really going through something that is some kind of a flow. And then you stop and you go into those tiny moments. So that's really trying to create some kind of hyper-lucid moment in a way.
[00:11:34.763] Vincent Morisset: And play with the elasticity of time, I would say, and how we look at things. So it was this really that, and as Caro said, it was kind of a happy accident. Like, we brain-picked people from the Dome world at that time, and then we got tips from Chris Milk about the first GoPro rig, right? So we were like at the very, very beginning of that. Our project took three years to do. So it was really kind of interesting synchronicity where we barely adapted the project to fit in a headset as a web VR thing. And still to this day, I think Way2Go is still a UFO in the VR world. Yeah, that kind of back in the days WebVR browser base with this kind of 3D stitch thing on a linear 360 video. So for us, it was kind of a discovery of another canvas, but almost by accident. But the things that we wanted to achieve really resonated with what VR game afterwards, like this kind of question about presence, like the word immersive and all these things were present in the premise of that project. But my base was more kind of, OK, let's use the premise of a contemporary video game. You kind of move around, look around, move, do things. But how could I do kind of a classic video game, first person video game, but with actual footage? So that was our twist. our take on that.
[00:13:10.999] Kent Bye: Yeah well if it showed in 2015 it took three years then you're you're talking about 2012, 2013, 2014 you're working on this and the Oculus kickstarter didn't even come out until like August of 2012 and didn't ship until 2013 so yeah you're very early going into technologies that Probably didn't have a lot of commercial off-the-shelf tools for you to do something like this.
[00:13:31.162] Vincent Morisset: There was nothing, like even the thing with the GoPro, I think there was one or two person that were kind of 3D printing.
[00:13:37.548] Caroline Robert: With a gyroscope, like a big pole, we patented this pole with a gyro so it doesn't move that much. It was really an experiment.
[00:13:48.289] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the fact that it's browser based and still, I mean, as a piece, it still holds together in terms of being a compelling piece. And so, yeah, it's I think a testament to that artistic process of tuning into where things are going. And of course, the whole 360 photo cameras and video. I mean, now, if you were to produce this piece, you'd be able to just use all sorts of software and just be able to use that. But that obviously didn't exist when you created it. But moving on to another piece that I actually had a chance to see when I was there in Amsterdam in 2019, and I didn't have a chance to run into you to chat about it, but it was called The Vast Body, where I remember there was kind of like this room that you walked into, and there was like either a camera or a connected camera that was tracking my movements of my body, and there was a television that was there that had a lot of pre-recorded photos of people in different body positions, and Each time I moved my body, I would see almost like a stop-motion flash of somebody else that was mimicking my movements. It was kind of surreal because it felt like each time I'm moving, I'm seeing this weird mirroring effect. It was activating my mirror neurons, but it's not me. And it's not only not me, but it's a whole group of different people switching so quickly. But I was really noticing in that piece in particular how I was watching what was happening on the screen and how that feedback was actually changing the way that I was moving in real time. So there's my own direct experience of the piece, which was a thing within itself. But then there was another element that actually was discussed by other people. I don't know if you've heard some of the different conversations, but there was a kind of like a hidden camera in that world that I wasn't aware of that I was being broadcast out into a TV screen on the outside. And so there's the question of How do you onboard people into this type of experience? Do they have an option to have that happen? Or if they don't know that's happening, then is that sort of a weird violation of their magic container that they're in? And so there were some people that I had talked to that saw that piece that had issues with that element of the piece, which was that there is another aspect of that where other people could see you as a performance as you were experiencing it. So there's two big aspects of that. I mean, one impact, maybe we'll start with the embodied experience and then maybe what you were trying to create with the overall framing. of that?
[00:16:01.414] Vincent Morisset: Yes. Where to start? I think at the very beginning, we were, in the last years, we made gigantic progress into computer vision and this idea of engaging with the world without anything and just kind of expressing through our own gesture and be outside expressing ourself has always been something that fascinated me. I've done Sprawl 2 also for Arcade Fire. That was also a dancing piece where we were interacting by dancing in front of your webcam. And I thought there was something compelling about engaging through your own movements. And I was interested in seeing the limit of this kind of a bit clunky AI, and then pushing also the limit of the imagination of choreographers and have this kind of deep blue Kasparov moment of the limits of a computer and the limits of the human and, and kind of... Of how you can map the movements, because both challenges, like when we ask people, and I did the exercise myself too, was to trying to break
[00:17:13.531] Caroline Robert: of the possible movement of the upper body into some kind of a choreography. And each person approached it in a different way. And it was really, really interesting seeing different brains trying to map those movements. It was amazing. So we each had those intuitions. And actually, it didn't take that much of recording to map not everything, but most of the movement that we needed to reproduce some kind of a fluid movement. And what was great is that you could never reproduce exactly the same movement as what has already been done. So it's never perfect. And that's what is beautiful. If you stop on something, it's never quite the right angle of the hand. And that is what is beautiful. It's always an interpretation of something, but not quite the same. So to me, it's like a variation, same as in music. There's a variation, a tiny variation that makes it beautiful. And this piece to me was really trying to break the linearity of a dance and just break this and it doesn't exist anymore. It's just that you recombine and because we've already been interested with non-linearity in animation and this is a great example of a linear video. We break everything apart and we have all those elements that then we recombine together to create another movement.
[00:18:34.769] Vincent Morisset: I think we have a different emotional connection since it's photographic material. If we were just dancing in front of a CG director, it wouldn't resonate the same way. So also to know that people were filmed And that's just through our own movement. And as you say, at one point meeting the other person, you kind of explore your own self differently because you're seeing the other one. But you're like, OK, if I do that, what will happen? And then and that was one of the things we wanted to do, like is to kind of revisit the potential of your own body. And you kind of zone out and become the other. And so that was something that was quite fascinating while we were doing it.
[00:19:19.843] Caroline Robert: And also, I have the feeling that when you encounter those kind of pieces, you are in the mindset that you're almost like a kid that is discovering something that he never tried before. You're like, what is this thing? I don't understand. So at first, people just move an arm, then turn their head. And they just want to see what will work and what won't work. And at some point, you really are creating a discussion. I think that is the most beautiful. People are not, some are actually dancing. We don't want people to actually dance. We just want them to explore the movement and just try to touch this thing and understand it. And when you said, oh, I thought people were not so sure about having them broadcast outside and they didn't even know. In the original form, we don't want people not to know that they are broadcasted. So I think depending on the setup that it was presented, sometimes people just missed this part before entering and They felt bad afterwards. They felt that they didn't want people to see them. And it was really not our intention. So it's not supposed to happen like that. You're supposed to see that this might happen. And in some contexts, it's a really close bubble where you're just one-on-one doing things. And this is great for the experience. But for the overall, we thought that it was quite beautiful in a way and creates those kind of living portraits, moving images that were for us beautiful and that we wanted other people to be able to see and experience. And it's not everybody who likes to move and experience with their body, but when you see others doing it, you say, maybe I should try because it's... It looks really interesting and I want to try. So it was just to open a tiny door to people who are not really familiar with experiencing the interactive pieces and to open a tiny door to tell them that it's really intuitive and it's not something that is difficult to understand.
[00:21:18.778] Vincent Morisset: And the project evolved, like we're presenting the project in a big museum in January. And in that version, we have five monumental projections side by side. So it has this more kind of choral effect. So you are many people controlling many kind of alter egos at the same time. So the project lives in different form. But as Caro said, the idea was not to kind of make it as a surprise.
[00:21:46.382] Caroline Robert: And also, when you have this kind of other skin on top of you, I don't know, I had this sensory moment when I would look at this mirroring effect. I could see myself, but with this layer of someone else on top of me, I don't know, there was something sensory and I had this, there was this weird thing in my head that I was feeling that something was touching me because I was seeing this layer on top of me. So when you see the image projected, you don't see just yourself and it's really a combination. So it doesn't feel that exposing yourself, it's more of you're holding something. You're a structure and something is holding like on top of you so I don't know I don't have the feeling that I am exposing myself but it really depends on sensibility so I cannot tell for other people but it's less to me exposing myself having this layer.
[00:22:43.418] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, I definitely experienced that type of mirroring, but also the nudging behaviors, like I was seeing something that was not quite exactly what I was doing, and it was sort of giving me suggestions for how I could move my body in new ways. And yeah, when I saw it, I think I saw it in the early press preview before anybody else was even there. So I imagine if there was a lot of people seeing it, then you would maybe have more information that there was a camera there that was broadcasting out. But it came up in a couple of other conversations as well. But maybe as we start to move on and there's a couple of other experiences I want to talk about before we start to wrap up here. The motto.io last year, I know Casper had said that this is one of his favorite experiences from last year. I remember that there was a live stream of it with someone walking out, experiencing it. It was like a mobile phone app where you're getting little cards and suggestions and prompts to go be embodied out in the world and walk around. You had a live stream of someone doing a live performance of it that I watched a little bit of it, but then I was like, well, I want to experience this. But at the same time, I think I was also personally experiencing some of the COVID anxiety where I was like, well, do I really want to go outside and do these things? You're sort of really inviting people to go outside. And I think at that point I had been sheltered in place inside. And so I hadn't a chance to see the direct embodied experience. But maybe you could describe what this motto.io project was all about and what your intention was for having this kind of mobile phone way of telling this interactive story that's embedded and engaged within the world. Yeah.
[00:24:06.308] Vincent Morisset: Again, there was this idea of bridging real and fiction, kind of a scavenger hunt project. It's a ghost story. So it's a bit like an ebook in the sense that you're flipping pages with texts and sometimes with short videos. And the idea was to revisit the way we interact instead of controlling stuff. The interactivity is more editorial. We were asking people to kind of record little moments, like a three second moment, like find something soft. Can you look outside the window, et cetera. And these little videos are uploaded and then you later in the story, you kind of re-see these vignettes in another context or seeing vignettes of other people doing the same thing in another country or in the city next to you. So it's something that is really personal, but at the same time has this kind of collective power to it. And again, it was this kind of interesting synchronicity. It also took three years to do and pre-COVID, but add this kind of a resonance into the world we're living in. And to reassure you, this project was designed to be lived anywhere. So for each chapter, you can do it inside. So you can do it in your living room or like inside of your apartment or for one chapter, you can just open the door and go walk in your neighborhood. So that was one of the challenge to kind of ask people to do stuff that would work like in Tokyo, Cairo or New York. And we worked with a novelist, Shawn Michaels. So it was like Caroline who did the editing, Edouard, the wizard that coded all of our project and Shawn and I. And the live version of that was an interesting thing for us also, was a kind of different way to engage into that one hour and a half thing. And having someone else reading it just kind of resonated differently, but it was just different, like not necessarily better or worse, like just kind of a different way to engage with it.
[00:26:12.985] Caroline Robert: And I feel this project, what it did good was to create intimacy with the character because it's just text, but When you start, you really have this feeling that you have some kind of a conversation, even if your agency is really You can't just post videos, it's the only thing you can do, but you have the feeling that there's a conversation that is happening and you are building the mythology of the memories of the character that is missing. So you really feel that there's something deeply personal about this piece and what you do is part of this story that is really personal. So I think it creates some kind of proximity I don't know, people who did it were really touched by this ability to choose the tiny things that he wanted to share.
[00:26:59.670] Vincent Morisset: And the other interesting thing is that it's kind of an unfinished film, right? Like shots are being uploaded every day, right? So it will become somehow some kind of a time capsule in a way. It's like, oh, like some of the clips are like you can see people with masks, but in five years you'll have other clips if people still do it that are like, I don't know.
[00:27:23.098] Caroline Robert: I haven't looked at the, because we're moderating the videos, but I haven't looked at the server for, I don't know, like two years. So I don't know what I'll find, but we add new things when, again, sometimes I do a batch and I'm like, okay, I'm going to add this, this, this, and that.
[00:27:40.471] Kent Bye: The last project we'll talk about here is the project you had this year called Brainstream. Maybe you could give a bit more context for what you were trying to do with this piece.
[00:27:47.524] Caroline Robert: Yeah, so this is my first project that I've written and directed and animated. So I had two envies. The first one was, I read a lot about the brain when I had my kid, like before pandemic. And then during pandemic, I was really fascinated about how we experience different things, anxiety, fear, joy. I wanted to do a project that would show a little bit of that, but also that would tell us about the plasticity of the brain, the way it changes by learning, and how when you try to do something several times, it changes you. And at the same time, the interactive part was already present at the very beginning because I was wondering if we could do something with all the tiny gestures that we do on our phones or tablets or with our cursors on the desktop. And I wanted to use those tiny movements and actually use it for something that is useful and maybe that could help someone. So those two fields collide together. And I did this brain massage, which is really tacky when you say that. But I wanted to create this image in people's minds. Oh, what is a brain massage? And I just wanted to be able to go into someone's thoughts. and as if it was a journey. So actually, it's a mix of a way to go as you're roaming into something, and moto, where you have this intimacy and the feeling that you create proximity with someone, but with a collective effort, in a way. So that was my intention, and I wanted to create a character that was really approachable and you could relate really easily. So I talk about anxiety and family relations, but with humor. and levity because I wanted something that would make people feel good. That was really important to me. And I wanted also the project to feel, it could soothe people in a way that after you watch the film, It actually made you feel good. You were here to help someone. But at the end, you're like, ah, this was kind of nice. That was my intention. So I created this, some kind of ASMR visual and audio. because I was using a lot of podcasts during pandemic like everybody in the world and just having this voice inside your head that is just taking the room of your own voice inside your head I thought was really relaxing and calming and just listening to her talking to you with this lower voice because we altered the voice I thought that was something that would make people in this kind of open mindset to try something that is not usual, something unusual. Sorry, I talk too much.
[00:30:39.014] Kent Bye: No, that's great. Vincent, do you have anything else you want to add on that piece of the brain stream?
[00:30:45.873] Vincent Morisset: But I think I already explained it really well. I don't have it.
[00:30:49.834] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And there's some links that are available for people to go check out some of these experiences as well. So folks can have their own experience of these. But yeah, just as we start to wrap up and reflect on the 15 year anniversary of the doc lab at IFA, but also all these emerging technologies that you've been on the forefront of really experimenting with and helping shape the form as it has unfolded. I'm curious what each of you think the ultimate potential of all of these immersive technologies and the process of immersive storytelling, what the ultimate potential of all those things might be and what they might be able to enable.
[00:31:24.540] Vincent Morisset: I think like as Gaspard said in his open, his 15 years were like in between or kind of getting out of the infancy. But I think that the medium, the way we use this digital vocabulary matures, we're better and better at using and engaging people and generating emotion. And for me, it's mainly that. And that's what I've really appreciated about .Lab is to be really open-minded and to kind of really focus on subjects, on ways, on the quality of the approach. instead of focusing on technology itself. And I think the club is really important to kind of distill the way that we together as a community, we kind of figure out how this vocabulary can evolve beyond the platforms or devices.
[00:32:22.607] Caroline Robert: To me, we've always done a project that were online accessible and that could take a form in festival too. I think we'll continue doing that, and hopefully we'll be able to continue to do that. And what I really like about IDFA this year too, because it was my first time too, but the pieces that touched me the most were not necessarily the ones that were super documentary, but those who, through fiction, through different things, ask a lot of questions. And when you finish looking at those pieces, They can use as little as technology or as a lot of technology, but where the pieces would change the way you look at things. So I guess the vocation of ITFAB will continue to be that. You engage in a piece that has a form that is different from what you're used to. So it tasks you to be in a certain mindset of being open. to attract the people who want to experience those things but hopefully we'll try ways to communicate about this project that will become more and more accessible in a way and less driven by technology so people will be able to just feel that it doesn't ask them an effort to go there and to try. And that was really difficult for my project. So I tried each time to streamline it to it's a story about someone and it's a gesture that you do every day. So I feel that if we can bring everybody to watch the pieces that we do, it will show people that it's not something that is close to people who are interested in technology, but actually that can talk to anybody because it talks about subjects that touches us, so that could touch people, too.
[00:34:05.777] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, is there anything else that Celeste and Sandy would like to say to the broader DocLab or Emersive Storyteller community? Thank you.
[00:34:12.822] Vincent Morisset: Thank you, DocLab. Happy birthday. Thank you. We love you.
[00:34:17.306] Caroline Robert: Yeah, and it was a strange addition for them, and it must have been really difficult with the organization and everything, but we felt really privileged and lucky to be there and We're so happy that we have this time with them and happy to share today with you.
[00:34:33.075] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today on this podcast to be able to journey your own work into this whole field and also reflecting on the 15 years of DocLab. So thanks again. Thank you.
[00:34:44.966] Caroline Robert: Thank you. Thanks Ken.
[00:34:46.935] Kent Bye: So that was Vincent Morisset. He's the founder of the studio Ottawa, doing interactive projects for the past two decades, including with Arcade Fire, the National Film Board of Canada, both on screens and on headsets and physical installations and interactivities always at the core of their projects, as well as Carolina Robert, which premiered a piece called Brainstream at the IFFA DocLab 2021 and has been working with Vincent for the past 10 years. This conversation was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021, as part of a collaboration with IFAS DocLab in order to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
