Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that’s produced by the teach at Flight School and executive produced by Meta’s VR for Good. The first two episodes premiered at SXSW, and focus on Depression and ADHD, while future episodes will explore themes of body shaming, coming out as LGBTQ, and challenges of cultural integration.
The series is intended to provide a first-person perspective of an archetypal experience of different mental health conditions to help break sociological taboos on the topic, start conversations, and build empathy amongst fellow students and adults for a range of different issues. It uses a hand-drawn, animated and motion graphic aesthetic, which opens up a lot more metaphoric explorations of these topics, but it’s also striving to replicated the teenager’s inner monologues with an authentic voice.
I spoke to co-director and animator Ryan Hartsell as well as consulting producer and Youth Advisor Chloe Combi at their premiere at SXSW to talk about the journey of producing this series, the target audiences, and upcoming impact campaigns to raise awareness of teenage mental health.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. In today's episode, I'm covering an episodic series that was premiering at South by Southwest called Weird Times. It's investigating aspects of teenage mental health in a way that embodies you into these different vignettes and experiences. The goal is that by the end of watching one of these pieces, you might be able to either identify that maybe you suffer from some of these different mental health conditions and you didn't know it, or to help build some overall empathy for other people who maybe have some of these different conditions, and just to build a little bit more understanding for what they might be going through. So this is a piece that came about from the VR for Good from Oculus. It was pitched by Flight School, and then they created this piece in collaboration with a creative consultant and youth expert and author, Chloe Comby, which she featured in this podcast, and also one of the developers and directors on this piece, Ryan Hartzell, who's of Flight School. So, that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voice of Saphira podcast. So, this interview with Ryan and Chloe happened on Monday, March 14th, 2022. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:16.076] Ryan Hartsell: Hi, I'm Ryan Hartzell, and I create immersive experiences that range from any medium, really. Like, whatever I could tell the most potent story, I'm going to use the best tool for that.
[00:01:29.371] Chloe Combi: Hello, I'm Chloe Comby and I was brought on, my primary area of expertise is young people and I'm an author and a podcaster and a researcher and I was initially brought on as kind of creative control to check the authenticity of the piece and that's how Gen Z speak and what they do and what they think and feel and prioritise. Great experience and ended up co-directing two episodes with Brian. So this is new to me, this XR space, but it's super exciting.
[00:01:53.269] Kent Bye: Okay, well maybe we should start with you in terms of like giving a little bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space and the work that you've been doing that kind of led to this project here that's showing at South by Southwest.
[00:02:05.045] Chloe Combi: Of course, so I actually started out my career in education. Side by side with that I was writing about teenagers, but obviously I'm based in London and I was doing these quite big social pieces about lots of technology about things like pornography and sexting and how technology was kind of interfacing with adolescent development. And that progressed into a book that did really well globally called Generations, Ed, Their Voices, Their Lives, where I did verbatim interviews with about 3,000 teenagers. And the surprising thing that came from that was how many kind of governments and brands started to really pay attention because this felt like a really live and evolving piece of research. So that was in 2015. So I've subsequently nearly finished another book. which is called How to Save the World, which sounds a bit ridiculous but it's me talking with kids about big problems and how we solve them. I actually worked on an American presidential campaign and helped them with the youth vote and I did a podcast which has just been purchased by Snapchat which is called You Don't Know Me where it's just me interviewing teenagers globally and that's actually how Amy and Flight School Crew got in touch with me and brought me on because it was this kind of creative use I guess of the teenage voice which chimed really well with the project.
[00:03:12.312] Kent Bye: Yeah, just to clarify in your background, do you have like a sociological background or what got you, when you say research, what is the context of that research and maybe just a little bit more about what contextual domain you're coming from?
[00:03:22.917] Chloe Combi: I'm actually not a sociologist. I did English at university. I kind of had a teaching background, but what I found was that my research is very qualitative as opposed to quantitative and obviously it has evolved into quantitative research as well because that's what brands need. But on one laptop I have megabytes and megabytes of interviews with teenagers and Yeah it was about 12,000 interviews and it's crossed a really broad range of subjects and now I work with some of the big tech companies who are using kind of the insights that I've developed for their own ends and I work on command with lots of different brands but fundamentally it's quite old-fashioned actually. it's me interviewing teenagers and it's amazing because they're the generation who were born online actually how transparent and open they are and how there's this really big need to talk and sometimes you steer the conversation to a specific area and sometimes not at all but because they tend to be kind of such broad and spanning conversations you can extrapolate from the research that I have anything you want to know about politics or sex or technology and that kind of I think expanded into something really creative and interesting that became really interesting to projects like this because for a decade I've been immersed in these evolving teenage voices and opinions and I think that has a real value in the real world because you have these really interesting insights and actually You can't predict the future but it's the closest thing you can have because you can see where things are going and I can give you lots of examples which you probably don't have time for now but it's also really really useful for the creative world because fundamentally everything is about stories and I've been immersed in these teenage stories and some of them are absolutely amazing and you can sort of direct them onto the work that you're doing. And obviously we work with these really great writers who have their own stories. And I think you end up sort of becoming a bit almost like a shepherd of these teenage stories, but also kind of a vessel where all these voices and ideas are flowing into you. And they end up going somewhere. So inevitably it's gone into this kind of creative work, which has been really, really fun and interesting.
[00:05:17.910] Kent Bye: Yeah. And going back to giving a little bit more context to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:05:23.156] Ryan Hartsell: So in the very beginning of Oculus, when it was a Kickstarter campaign, the company I worked for, RealFX, was one of the bigger investors, and we ended up getting the dev kits and the studio. And on the side, I've always been a filmmaker. I've worked on several feature films and made a ton of music videos. So my boss came to me, I was a motion designer at the time, and was like, hey, do you want to figure out live action VR for us? So I was like, sure. And I was coming up with new camera rigs. This was the early stages where it was nothing but GoPros. And for the first three years of live action VR, I was traveling the world just shooting all kinds of stuff. It really changed the way I thought about creative content because I look at everything as a different medium for a different reason. I really think that everything needs to be justified. You know, 360 to me versus cinema is the same as like sculpting versus painting, right? Some things work better as a still photograph. And what are you trying to convey and what is the medium that makes sense for that? This particular subject that we're doing now with Weird Times, it makes all the sense in the world to do a 360 piece because it's the ultimate POV medium. In my opinion, it's the most effective in that matter. And what's interesting is we have to change the way we look at narrative. So in this series, it's really a two-act structure. Because we want to just instantly put somebody into the perspective of somebody else. And if we spend a lot of time on a singular act of the first act, we're distracting from them actually being in that situation. So we're flipping it on its head and it's more of like theater in the round too. Composition is different. Composition you have to think of forced shortening and then forced perspective to gaze the eye where you want it to look. It's a lot of sleight of hand. So there's a lot of consideration to motivate the viewer to gaze instinctually where you want them, at least The way that I like to create, I want to have motivation behind every camera move, behind every placement of art asset to where you don't realize I'm holding your hand the whole time. I don't want there to be a break in the illusion because that's a break in the immersion. So it's really about trying to strategize the most effective way to get people to move through the piece and feel as much as they can.
[00:08:21.204] Kent Bye: Yeah, we both were just at the South by Southwest keynote with Celine Tricart who was explaining all of what she saw as the different affordances of the different media and she was really emphasizing how you're moving from film and radio, television, all this stuff that's mostly from a third-person perspective, but moving into that first-person perspective in that way that you get that emotional bleed. But that's the first time that I've heard anyone say that VR is really a two-act structure where you're trying to immerse people into the heart of the crisis and the conflict and then resolution. Is that, so what, you mean you don't have much setting up of this, the context or the scene, but you really would just want to embed people into that moment of crisis?
[00:08:57.995] Ryan Hartsell: Yeah, you know, and that applies for this specific series that we're doing right now, but there's also the benefit of a fly-on-the-wall perspective, which, to me, a fly-on-the-wall perspective in VR can be just as effective, it just matters what you're trying to say. But a fly-on-the-wall perspective would include a three-act structure. if you're externalizing that. But since we wanted to instantly put people into the head of a teenager in a situation immediately, the first act would only distract for what we're trying to do.
[00:09:33.457] Kent Bye: So maybe we could take a step back and talk about the origins of this project. How did it come about? I know there's VR for Good that's involved in producing it. There's Flight School that is helping to also put it together with all the technical implementation. And so where did this project begin?
[00:09:48.533] Chloe Combi: I'm not the person to ask about this because they brought me on after the fact. I mean, obviously, I think from my point of view, speaking to Amy, their needs really venn diagram with mine, because I think for the last five years, I mean, and this isn't a guess, this is an absolute, very definite observation that we have been walking quite blindly into a mental health crisis of the young that has been triggered and precipitated by all sorts of things, technology, economy, climate. education, parenting, over-parenting, social media, all those kind of bad guys and good guys that are always talked about in the news. And there's always that question of have those things always existed apart from the technological things, which the answer is yes, it's always been stressful to be teenagers. But I think that there's lots of things that have been accelerated and magnified in the last five or ten years. Partially because I think that technology and the world moves so quickly and there's so many changes that we actually didn't have the facilities to deal with the impact of those changes to help the people it impacted most. So essentially we gave four, five, ten, fifteen year olds mobile phones and never really thought about the implications and in a sense we're dealing with the implications after the event. But if you like, the negative effects, the damaging aspects of the mental health, let's call it crisis, have been accelerated and put on steroids by the pandemic. And there is a minority of young people who actually did enjoy the pandemic and they enjoy quality time with parents and spending time on themselves, but that very much tends to be those who are in economic privilege. And there's much, much larger body of teenagers who suffered for all kinds of reasons. and we are in a ferocious epidemic and it's going to get worse. I mean if you speak to doctors and teachers and hospitals, I mean they are simply not coping with the onslaught of need of support and so on. So though they brought me on after the fact of the beginning of the projects, what's very clear from working with flight school and they're very, you know, and I'm not saying this lightly, really kind of ideologically morally motivated. I think genuinely the piece Weird Times is motivated out of a real sense of needing to say to young people that we see you and we acknowledge your struggles and also as Ryan says we are putting ourselves in your position and we want to help your parents and teachers and older people experience what you're going through and that very much is a lot of what my work is motivated by, it's about conversations and empathy and all those sorts of things and I think that's why there's been such a really lovely union and why we're sort of collaborating so well because I think our aims and professional goals are very similar and it sounds really, you hear that, it sounds a bit worthy, I just want to help young people And helping young people kind of helps everybody because we are all in this together and if you have a solid younger generation it ensures a solid future for everyone so there is a real kind of sense to that but that I think is genuinely one of the big aims of the piece and it was to create something beautiful and exciting and something that people talked about and did well but also something for good.
[00:12:49.831] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, that helps set a lot of context. And Brian, do you happen to know if this is a project that Flight School pitched to VR for Good, or if VR for Good came to you with this idea?
[00:12:57.697] Ryan Hartsell: Yeah, so I was involved in pitching this. So the genesis of Weird Times came from Amy Seidenworm and some of the people at Oculus that were wanting to do stuff in the realm of mental health as far as it dealt with teenagers. So they came to us and wanted our input on how this could be a series, what we would do, how would our approach be. And I spent a lot of time with Ruby Wong, who I co-directed the first couple episodes with. And we developed what is the blueprint of what you see in the pieces now. We came up with the structure of how these episodes would actually work. and the overarching concept for the series, and we put together an elaborate pitch, and we came up with a lot of the original art style that we wanted to do, and then had several discussions with Oculus, which is now Meta, and pitched it to them, and they loved it, and we're able to greenlit five episodes for season one.
[00:14:08.384] Kent Bye: Okay, so we see episode 1 and 2, which are covering the topics of depression and ADHD, and maybe you could talk about some of the aesthetic choices. After I saw it, you had mentioned that you wanted to take the feeling of the after-school special, but really make it a lot more authentic. Maybe we should start with the target audience. Is the target audience teenagers to be watching this, or is it parents, or is it both? Or maybe you could talk about who are you trying to put into these experiences of mental health?
[00:14:34.468] Ryan Hartsell: So, basically, teenagers on up to all ages. I think this has a lot of potential to help in a multiple variety of ways. From a teenage perspective, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of kids that might be going through something and feel like they're alone. But if something resonates like, oh, that's me, I feel that way, right? all of a sudden, like, I'm not alone. Like, they might actually talk to somebody about potentially getting help. And also, on the flip side, if it's something they don't experience, they might not have new empathy. They might not bully the kid next to them because they now have a first-hand knowledge of what it might be like. And from an adult perspective, there's a lot of parents that sometimes have a hard time talking to their kids. And their kid might be going through one of these issues, so for them to actually be in their kid's head and have more empathy for their child, they might be able to talk to them better and deeper.
[00:15:35.770] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering if you could speak to the voice and the authenticity that you were using a lot of your own prior research, but trying to help craft both the language and the message in a way that would hopefully land with this generation.
[00:15:47.468] Chloe Combi: Yeah, so, I mean, it was really quite simple that I obviously have this vast knowledge of young people, but the biggest experts are teenagers themselves. So I was obviously very aware, we were quite careful in selecting these five issues, which is depression, ADHD, concerns about the body, coming out, so the sexuality issue and culture issue. So it was the conflict that kids from immigrant backgrounds sometimes might feel in their newly adopted countries so big big issues that lots of kids felt but quite simply we were able to which is quite unusual able to road test on loads of young people we had to do it in a really like secret way like you're not allowed to share the content which kids are very well known for and what was really very clear is There's no lying or nuances with young people, and some are more discreet than others, but they will give you an honest appraisal. And even if they'll say to you, I like it or I didn't like it, you get that thing of like, that's it. And it's that very tonal thing of that's it, that's exactly how I felt, or that's exactly what my friend is going through, or that's exactly how my sister felt. And that to me is incredibly important and had quite a lot of young people come through here, people who are teenagers or just out of their teenage years. And they are obviously quite moved by the pieces and quite entertained. And that to me feels really special. And we've also had a lot of teachers come through saying, can we please have these in our classroom? Because they're not proselytizing pieces. It's not like a pamphlet or trying to solve depression or solve ADHD. It's the empathy. It's we see you. And as Ryan says, it's not alone. And actually trying to create a communal experience where, as you said, you might not bully someone. Or if your friend goes through it, you might feel a little bit more experienced to deal with it. running it past a teenage audience feels really important. But I think the second thing is, and this was something I'm incredibly proud of, is a lot of teenage content now, and I can say this from both observational adult point of view, but from talking to teenagers as well, even with the best intentions and some of it is really good, but some of it can be incredibly damaging. And, you know, if you think about something like 13 Reasons Why, it was very clearly triggering some really quite dark and dodgy things. And I think it was genuinely attempting to do a good thing, but I think it did it in a clumsy way. And I think it ended up triggering things in a really quite destructive way. So you can have that triggering thing or you can have basically glamorizing. dark issues, and a really good example of that at the moment is Euphoria, that you've got these young people who are going through really, really dark things, like drug addiction and eating disorders, but they still look gorgeous, and they look like they're having, essentially, in an elegantly wasted way, a really good time. And that, to me, feels like adult wish fulfilment. It's projecting a fantasy of what you'd wish your teen years looked like, and loads of them aren't even teenagers, the actors. And I think that kind of creates a whole level of inauthenticity. So these pieces feel, in a very specific way, delightful and clumsy and funny and awkward. And that was really, really intentional because that's so much more common about how teenagers feel. They're not usually gorgeous and glossy and glide through life. you know, shaking off their mental health issues. They are real and painful and messy and funny. And I think by experiencing those things in that very kind of first person narrative way, you feel that sense of empathy. And I'm really, really proud of the tone because I think we really did walk a good line that's not triggering in a damaging way, but it's not glamorizing either. And it has that kind of that awkwardness and that ridiculousness that I think is really typical of the very common teenage experience.
[00:19:16.332] Ryan Hartsell: One thing that I think is super helpful as far as putting this type of content in VR, in this medium, is there's privacy in a headset. People allow themselves to feel emotion. They allow themselves to be in it. Whereas if you're in a movie theater, if you're in a social environment, those emotions will be suppressed. And that's why this is the only way we really want to tell this.
[00:19:44.308] Kent Bye: Yeah, the first episode of depression was quite evocative in terms of the amplification of really putting people in a spot that was kind of demolishing your self-esteem in some ways or trying to mimic what that would feel like and having the metaphor of falling into this deep hole in this pit and not being able to get out. I've certainly experienced aspects of depression but never reached what I saw in the VR experience, but I think it was useful to be able to have those embodied metaphors in a way to think about, like, going on that game show and having this weird conceit to, like, have it go the most wrong you could possibly imagine it go wrong, like, failing at the thing that you are supposedly not even supposed to fail at, you know, just to really amplify that. And I thought that that was kind of an interesting way of using that storytelling technique, but also the embodied context within VR to be able to put you into these situations that are trying to mimic the vibe of what some of these mental health conditions were like. And I'm just wondering how you kind of arrived at the story or structure or conceit of that within the first episode.
[00:20:46.120] Ryan Hartsell: Well, that's a huge reason and a point to why this is animated. We're allowed to work in metaphor in a way that you can't really with live-action VR. And we're also able to dissolve any kind of distinction of skin color, race, ethnicity in a lot of ways of stylizing even the people that you see within these pieces. and being in the POV as well to help people embody and to really go more into an emotional space. Color has been a big part of these pieces as well. Color as far as emotions. tonality and like in the first episode it's real drab and gray and dark on purpose and the game show is this bright vivid casino-esque distraction which is the whole point. In the state of depression Netflix and chill has been a big deal you know with people just trying to like watch their way out of the feeling that they're doing and having that turn on its head that way but like at the end we have it bright and sunny and hopeful and we want to make sure that each one of these episodes has an element of hope to it. It's not just a single tonality. And even within the subject matter themselves for each of these episodes, there's a lot of crossover with anxiety and other things. It's not just like one specific aspect of mental health.
[00:22:26.330] Kent Bye: Yeah. I'm wondering from your experience of talking to teenagers, if you've dove into each of these mental health conditions and try to get firsthand experiences and try to create a composite of those things or what your process was to help guide the writing or production of this piece in that context.
[00:22:42.205] Chloe Combi: I think what Ryan says, for me, it has to feel like there is hope because I think it would be disingenuous to do this super positive, happy, clappy, everything's going to be okay and everything's resolved at the end because life doesn't work like that, particularly when you're a teenager. but at the same time I think there's far too much of this not just in creativity and drama but in actual real life that everything is dark and everything is destructive and the world is horrible and the world is terrible and actually there is a lot of hope and there are solutions and there are all sorts of people you know upswing and the pendulum going the right way and people doing wonderful things and young people doing lots of wonderful things and as a generation they do lots of wonderful things so it absolutely felt that there was two things really for me that it had to have realism but it had to kind of have hope because I don't think there is ever a kind of solutions particularly to something as complex as mental health and the other thing is I felt like I really wanted to take both the viewer and the story kind of on a journey because I do think life is a journey particularly when you're young And I think particularly young people, they tend to think in very static terms. And when they're experiencing something, they think it's going to be that way forever. And they think that they're going to be stuck in it. And that's so common with almost every mental health issue. That's almost universal to mental health issues. you never think you're going to escape it and I think that's why the hole is such a useful metaphor and I think the facility and the use of the journey which is a really I think a wonderful thing to use in creative mediums and I think that's why some of the greatest films are about the journey you know whether it's the hero or a group of people going on a journey and in a small way within those kind of stories they absolutely do go on a journey and the journey is an enlightenment because again I don't think there is an enlightenment in mental health. You do sometimes see the light and that happens all the time but I don't think it's a binary, you go from one state to another because sometimes you can go from one state to another and then go back and that's very typical of being young as well because you chop and you change. But within each of the stories there is a kind of a journey and there is a kind of in a non-cringy way, a kind of a growth and a learning process. And I think that that's a really hopeful message for young people in a non-sort of proselytising, everything's going to be fine way, because life isn't static. And that's one of the things that really, really, really bothers me. When I talk to young people, and particularly when you deal with the really big mental health issues, like suicidal ideation, and we're talking about exploring those perhaps in the next series, is that it's very hard to say to a young person, any young person, any person experiencing mental health, it's not a question of things will be better, but it's not going to be this way forever. And I think controlled within each of the stories and the pieces that we've done, there is that kind of journey where there is a moving of the pieces. And I think that is hopeful in a realistic way, which I think is quite cool.
[00:25:28.059] Kent Bye: Aesthetically, in the first and second episode, there's spelling out the words that are being said in a way that reminds me of a little bit of, like, Dear Angelica, where there's words that are being spoken, but then you're kind of seeing it animated out. And so, just curious to hear a little bit more about the decision-making about that as an aesthetic choice.
[00:25:44.832] Ryan Hartsell: So a lot of it has to do we wanted this whole series to have a human touch to it and also for some of the words to resonate beyond just hearing them because then they stick more and sometimes those words can be triggering directed at you and they feel like daggers and then some of them can be healing And the way that the words themselves are designed are resembling who's it coming from and how's it coming to you, whether it's from ourselves or from somebody else. So it's another articulation of the emotions in the pieces. and also part of that human touch, like I was saying with the art style, which Ruby Wong did the first couple episodes, and then she really wanted to keep a simple style, but have a 2D hand-drawn aesthetic, because like I said, we wanted to create something in VR that has an aesthetic that's not really seen a whole lot, and to be human, really.
[00:26:46.059] Kent Bye: What was the software that you used to be able to create this?
[00:26:49.240] Ryan Hartsell: So, all of this is done in a combination of After Effects and Cinema 4D.
[00:26:55.164] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, so that motion graphics background, it seems to be playing in there for you.
[00:26:59.427] Ryan Hartsell: Yeah, I mean, that definitely comes into play quite a bit. I'm doing a lot of the animation. I work with a couple other animators on this, Byron Slabaugh and James Tobias, and currently right now, James and I are doing the last three episodes all by ourselves.
[00:27:16.885] Kent Bye: OK, so in the second episode, covering the issues of ADHD, I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate on trying to convey the sense of lack of focus or confusion or what's being teleported around in a way. So where did you start and how did you decide to kind of translate that within the immersive experience and try to tell that story?
[00:27:37.042] Chloe Combi: Well, I think the thing with ADHD was a couple of things. Number one, I think it's, for want of a better phrase, one of the less sexy mental health issues. So you see a lot about anxiety and depression and eating disorders, but it's not to say they're sexy at all. But they are, again, in lots of teenage content, glamorised somewhat. And I don't think they're depicted in a very responsible way. But learning difficulties are a bit difficult to kind of really extrapolate drama from. And there are so many young people who deal with learning difficulties, like millions and millions. And so to touch upon it in such a kind of an overt way felt really, really important. And it's been so fantastic. I mean, the response from that, from people of huge age ranges, was like, that was my school experience. It was really powerful and I think the fact that it's being acknowledged now but there's people who are going back in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and older who will watch the piece and they say, like, my school years were ruined because people said I was badly behaved or I was stupid or I couldn't keep up and those kind of problems were fixable if they'd been acknowledged. So I think acknowledging that felt hugely important. As soon as I read that script, I was like, this is so cool we're doing this. But I also think Ryan will tell you more about the wizardry of it. But I think the sort of teleportation for me tonally and thematically felt really really important because number one I think ADHD and learning difficulties are on a huge spectrum and you can be mildly affected or absolutely hugely and cripplingly affected and I think that he experienced his degrees throughout the piece which I think you can be for example in fact I know you can be more effective depending on the day of the week and your mood and what you've eaten and all kinds of backgrounds and stress but I also think what's really important and I love the fact that it's not just contained in one classroom and he has this one traumatic lesson it happens over again and again and again and again and it builds and it builds and there's this really emotional bit where he finally breaks and says it's because I'm stupid which really broke me when you listen to it and again I think that if you imagine from someone who is suffering from and experiencing learning difficulties the trauma of the school day that you go from one traumatic experience to the next to the next it must just feel so often if I know because I've spoken to so many kids it just feels like a hellish ride and get to the point where you know and it's why so many kids with ADHD for example behave badly because it's just an explosion or it's an expression of somebody noticed me or a way to distract from the fact that you're deeply embarrassed or ashamed or completely anxious about this so I think the teleporting from different backgrounds and different classes I think it really replicated the experience of the sufferer
[00:30:10.911] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I was going through the piece, I was imagining what this would have been like to watch as a teenager. There was a moment that I flagged where there's the use of curse words in this piece that I felt like there's this trade-off between trying to connect to the audience that's watching it and have that level of authenticity, but at the same time, Having my own experience of being a teenager and using curse words within the context of my friends, but in the context of my parents or within school, you can get in trouble. And so what's it mean to potentially show an immersive experience like this in a school context where it's coming down on authorities that's in some ways normalizing the language? So there seems to be like a potential blocker for some schools that, no, we're not going to show this because, you know, it's not appropriate for the kids or being able to unconditionally recommend it to parents and not knowing where they stand on that issue. And for whatever reason, our culture has decided this. And I know George Carlin has done whole bits on the seven dirty words and whatnot, but I'm just curious how this discussion played out in the context of this piece and what some of those trade-offs that you're exploring are.
[00:31:13.939] Ryan Hartsell: Well, one thing I just say is like, and Chloe could definitely talk about this, but like we wanted to not adults playing the children and the teens to resonate with teens like we want it to be real and real talk. And this is how teens talk. You know, fuck, shit, damn, whatever. I mean, that's how kids talk. And if we're going to be real with kids and we're going to be in the head of a kid, you don't censor yourself in your thoughts. And a lot of these pieces are internal dialogue from a teen's perspective. So for authenticity's sake, it doesn't make sense at all to censor this.
[00:31:56.245] Chloe Combi: Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of things. I mean, now the F-bomb, you can hear it in a PG-13 film legally. So, I mean, right or wrong, there's almost this acceptance that by the time you're 13, you're legally allowed to hear the F-bomb. I think the only one, the C-bomb, is the last one that is kept in this country, rated R films. And I think absolutely what Ryan said about it's an internal monologue and we don't self-censor. But also this is actually both medically and psychologically true that I think swearing is expressions of pain. That you actually, it's been medically proven that when you swear you release pain. And that's why we often curse when we drop something on our foot or slam our finger in the door. It's the thing that comes out and that's that kind of release of literal physical pain. And so those kind of verbal expressions felt like almost expressions of physical pain and psychological pain that these kids are going through. And I think the third thing for me personally, I think in America, I don't know, it's a push and a pull, there might be more of a conservatism around cursing and language. But I think certainly, I mean, and this conversation happens a lot in America, this whole prohibition of language and what we are allowed to say and what we're not allowed to say. And that's really, really interesting conversation in the teen sphere. And I've talked to kids so many times about this kind of control of language and do you think schools should be able to control cursing and control certain words and it's a really really controversial subject but ultimately unfortunately whether you like it or dislike it or whether you think we should be moving against it or encouraging it that is the language of teenagers and absolutely it would it felt like almost like absolutely that after-school special and it's that kind of inversion of that so yeah I get completely what you're saying but also the content that I do contains a lot of very controversial and adult themes and quite a lot of controversial adult languages and generally speaking if you pre-warn the schools particularly with younger years and you say maybe because not all of the episodes have cursing in them say look maybe this particular episode might not be appropriate for the 11 and 12 year olds, but these two really are. But there definitely feels like a spectrum of appropriateness. And there's a couple that feel a bit older leaning and a couple that feel a bit younger leaning. And I entirely take your point, but I think for this particular one, it felt really fitting with the character and the content.
[00:34:10.978] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm wondering if you could expand on what it was like to come in as more of a consulting producer but then have an opportunity to direct your own episodes on body shaming and coming out and other issues of the cultural integration. And so, what it was like for you to start to take that role of having more of a direction of where you wanted to take some of these stories?
[00:34:31.633] Chloe Combi: It was amazing, I mean it genuinely felt like a completely natural evolution and I was thrilled because I mean they brought me in initially and I was commenting on scripts and I'd only met one person on the team, Julia, and then I was getting more and more involved with the scripts and some needed more work than others and then they evolved into conversations. What it felt like to me was it felt like listening to sort of dialogue and conversations and I have directed theatre before and obviously talking to young people so it kind of felt like a really interesting extension of those things but by that time there was such a kind of synchronicity between the team and we all bring something very different. that I think, I mean you'd have to ask someone else what I brought to the team, but I think it was kind of a good ear, I think that I brought a good sense of pace and emotions. I think there was points when I was directing, and maybe it's my perspective on teenagers, maybe it's my femaleness, where we're experimenting with, for example there's a comedy in one bit, and I said I actually feel like this would be much more resonant if we really ramped up the emotion in this. and really like particularly I think with the male characters which you don't see often of him breaking down or suddenly realising that he couldn't hide behind his comedic mask and we experimented with lots of things but for the most part I think it was a really good collaboration because there was things that I bought from my perspective spending time with teenagers that I think brought kind of emotional texture to the piece that maybe required spending a lot of time with teenagers and knowing that I was able to bring that but it was it was brilliant it was a real genuine thrill.
[00:35:59.574] Ryan Hartsell: Getting to mold the clay together, I mean, it's so valuable having Chloe to collaborate with because, as any director knows, like, your mind only takes you so far and, like, whenever you're hitting a wall with a performance or trying to figure out a solution to the situation, having somebody else to be able to bounce off of and to really shape the clay together is just unbelievable.
[00:36:24.813] Chloe Combi: We were really lucky with the actors because a lot of them were very young, because I'm obviously very experienced with dealing with young people and you have to have this quite light touch and everything. I'm sure you might know this, but it's really important with teenagers. It doesn't feel like a criticism. It feels like a critique. and it feels like a kind of, it's just a sort of very sensitive, light touch, which Ryan absolutely does have. I think we were like the mum and the dad of the project. And it was, it was really, really special because I think we had these voice performers and they were obviously very talented actors and they really took it somewhere and we kind of really pushed them and pushed them and pushed them because this is a representation of something that's deeply important. It's something that's very real and it's going to be, you know, hopefully watched and listened to by all these young people. so in a sense they had the weight of like depression or body shame or culture issues on their shoulders which a lot to put on young shoulders but we really really got there and I think again it's because I'm really lucky that I get to hear all these stories from young people and I understand these are very weighty stories but then equally I think we were really good at knowing when to take the brakes off and bringing kind of like a real humour or something like that and actually really interestingly some of the adults bought the real comedy because obviously there's adult characters and there was some very comedic performances so it was just it felt like you know real alchemy at times it was quite a special experience.
[00:37:44.140] Ryan Hartsell: Yeah and I like that you put like we're more of a mother father kind of instead of a good cop bad cop because it really wasn't playing like that it was really like when I was coming up with something that weren't quite getting there, then Chloe could come in and explain it in a different way. And that was so valuable and so fun. Yeah.
[00:38:05.334] Kent Bye: From a process question, did you end up writing the script and then start to prototype what it would look like spatially and then have some iterative back and forth between evolving the script based upon what the spatial experience was? Or what was the process there of ending up with what you have here at South by Southwest?
[00:38:21.044] Ryan Hartsell: So we went through a lot of different riders and we wanted to have different voices and across the board on every aspect of this project to have as wide of a cloth of a quilt of people of different perspectives to contribute to this project. So we read a bunch of scripts and then found people from all over the country that have different voices that really wrote in a way that sounded like kids and had emotion to them. And then what we did is Chloe and I, as well as Ruby, we all came up with what topics we thought would be important, what would make good episodes, and we shared those with these writers. and allowed them to say, we asked them, well, what resonates with you? What have you gone through? Because we want authenticity throughout all these. So the writers came back and some of them like, well, there's nothing on this list, but I felt this and I really am passionate about writing this. We went with that. because we want it from that place. So we got drafts with the writers and we went through the first drafts and second drafts and third drafts and we helped shape the story. Me from a visual direction standpoint, Chloe from more of her perspective. to make sure that we all molded the clay together. And we worked hand-in-hand with the writers to make sure that these stories walk the line in the right way. Just like Chloe was saying, there's a fine line between triggering and being able to tell the story the way it needs to be with authenticity. so we don't want to shy away from the darkness, but also like we were saying we want these to be hopeful and We want to make sure that the language is correct Yeah, and if you have anything else to add there
[00:40:12.980] Chloe Combi: No, absolutely. It definitely at times felt like a kind of refining process, a birthing process. But it was really, really collaborative. And it was, for me, I mean, I've never worked so visually. And as I think we said earlier on, I've always worked massively in mediums that are real. So you have realism. You can't have rainbow fish and falling into holes and stuff like that or all the kids would be dead. So it was really nice to be able to work in these metaphors and run riot. But yeah. It never felt like an arduous or long process like, for example, a book edit does. It was quite different to that. And it just felt like that alchemical turning base metal into something much shinier and prettier. So it was a good experience.
[00:40:52.920] Kent Bye: Great. And what's next in terms of the distribution? I understand that Oculus and VR for Good helped produce this. There's going to be five episodes. Two of them have shown already. So where can people start to see this project?
[00:41:04.870] Ryan Hartsell: So we're still working out the details because we want this to be more of an advocacy of awareness to get people to get engaged in the conversation. So we're working out what the release looks like. It will live on Oculus headsets. but we're still developing that and we're coming up with a campaign to try to raise awareness using a hashtag what's your fail and we want to encourage everybody to let the world know what their mental issue is that they deal with because we all deal with something. in the effort of coming out and owning it. And if we could all do that collectively, I think it's really cool because it's not just one mental health aspect. It encompasses everybody's issue and all collectively together.
[00:41:54.209] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just give you an opportunity if you want to say anything about the upcoming episodes in terms of body shaming or coming out or the cultural integrations.
[00:42:05.945] Chloe Combi: So, two episodes we had the opportunity to premiere at SXSW, a bit of depression and ADHD. and the three coming episodes are sexy fail so it's about body anxiety and what's quite interesting is through the male lens because it happens a lot that that's examined through the female lens and the assumption that girls and women have more body anxiety but I don't think that's true I think young men and boys have as many and older men and that's a very very funny piece it's like it's very emotional but it's laugh out loud funny and it's about a boy at a pool party who's basically completely anxious about taking his shirt off in front of the cool kids We've got culture fail which is about an Israeli kid who's kind of pulled between his American friends and his more traditional Israeli family and I think that will really speak to lots of immigrant kids who find that push and pull between two different cultures and then we've got a straight fail which is about a girl coming out to both her parents with really unexpected results and that one's incredibly spooky and old-timey and they're all thematically really unusual and they evolved in ways that we didn't expect but to Ryan's point about this watch your fail because they're all a hashtag so happy fail culture fail this watch your fail campaign is really really important because it's basically what we're trying to do both with these pieces and with this campaign is de-stigmatize mental health and getting people to own it and talk about it whether it's with their friends or their parents or even with themselves and this notion that we don't get through life and particularly our adolescence without some sort of affliction and there's nothing to be ashamed of.
[00:43:33.667] Kent Bye: It seems like this as a piece will start to be able to give people a shared experience and be able to potentially create a context for people to talk about these things and break some of that mental health taboo. And I don't know if you've been able to see any early indications of what kind of best outcomes are for, as you start to put this out in the world, how to measure that this is working or successful.
[00:43:55.407] Chloe Combi: I think with everything obviously the metrics often tend to be social media and that you can measure things actually quite accurately with the literal metrics across social media and I think from a more analogue traditional point of view it's really important to me that we engage lots of schools and universities and we're figuring out how we can do that and really bring in schools and universities so that they can use it as a kind of an educational tool to bring in as many kids and students and teachers as we can and obviously we're going to do a media campaign but I think in anything I think the kind of the proof is in it working and I mean within my own work what's extraordinary and I'm just one person you know this is a much bigger project is the reaction and it's people across social media writing to schools saying that this really really made a difference this really changed things and I think you can't change the world all at once you do it in increments but also I think Having spoken to people at the big tech companies, for example, like Meta, they're massively, massively invested in mental health, and particularly mental health of young people, because I think there's some really good reasons, and maybe some reasons that are, you know, fairly obvious that there's discussions that they are sometimes a source of those things. And I think it's really good that they're actually flipping that and sort of saying, well, if we've caused some of these problems, we're going to be invested in solving them. So I think we're also going to look to, you know, discuss with some of these bigger platforms about how we can turn this into a really, really wide campaign. Because I think genuinely, I think that there is a sense that they really want to sort of reinvest in the kind of health and well-being of the future. So I think this potentially, I think, could end up being something that's quite global. But we're talking about the map at the moment, but there's lots of really good ideas we're kind of bringing together.
[00:45:33.511] Ryan Hartsell: And also the campaign with encouraging people to tell us what their fail is. From that alone we're going to get a lot of intel into like what commonalities people are going through that maybe topics that we didn't even think of and hopefully down the road potentially for a season two to be able to pick from actual kids themselves of what we should make next.
[00:45:59.376] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling and what it might be able to enable?
[00:46:07.381] Ryan Hartsell: I would say understanding. The more we understand, the less we fear, the more we love.
[00:46:17.528] Chloe Combi: I think it's being able to break out of yourself. What's extraordinary is that you can literally experience other worlds, other people, other lives. And I think, essentially, we're in a bit of a myopic phase at the moment, where people tend to, you know, be in thought bubbles and information bubbles and be very attracted to people who think and act and look like them. And I think this is one of the mediums, I think, that has that potential to kind of break that, you know, myopia and prejudice, because it allows you to experience things that are very, very different to your own experience. to use Ryan's expression, without kind of losing it and holding on in a kind of a safe environment. And I think, you know, looking down the road, I think it has enormous teaching potential as well. But I think breaking out of your own bubble, which at the moment feels like something we really need.
[00:47:05.666] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:47:09.168] Ryan Hartsell: I would just say keep experiencing, keep pushing, and keep sharing.
[00:47:16.486] Chloe Combi: Thank you for having me. I'm actually really new to this world and I'm definitely a convert and it's been a really, really inclusive, lovely experience, so I'm definitely an enthusiastic convert, so thank you very much.
[00:47:27.114] Kent Bye: Well, Chloe and Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast to help break down a little bit about this piece, Weird Times, and the episodic series. I look forward to seeing the other episodes that are coming out here at some point here in the future. And yeah, really interesting topic, trying to address this. And I'm looking forward to seeing the reaction and hearing more from kids and what their direct experiences are with this and how this could be a tool to help address a lot of these issues of mental health. So yeah, thanks again for joining me today on the podcast.
[00:47:52.402] Chloe Combi: Thank you, Ken. It's been really nice to meet you. Thank you.
[00:47:54.903] Ryan Hartsell: Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much.
[00:47:57.360] Kent Bye: So that's Ryan Hartzell. He creates immersive experiences at Flight School, as well as Chloe Comby. She's a creative consultant and youth expert and author and podcaster. So thanks for joining me here on the podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate at patreon.com. Thanks for listening.
