#1288: “Tales of the March” Uses Durational Takes in 360 Video to Explore Death Marches

I interviewed Tales of the March director Stefano Casertano at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.

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Music: Fatality

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. It's a podcast that looks at immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, this is episode number 18 out of 35, and the third of three of looking at the context of enemies and war. So this is a piece called Tales of March, which is a 360 video by Stefano Casertano. So this is around the different death marches that were happening in the context of the Holocaust. So it's a 360 video that shows a number of different durational takes. That's really one of the first pieces of media that's trying to dig into the death marches that were happening in the context of the Holocaust. So the contextual domain is around war and as well as the Holocaust and the World War II, but also looking at prisoners and the torture that they're going through, as well as death on these death marches, and also connections to family that ties then at the end. So this is a piece that has a center of gravity, mostly around emotional presence, where you're just watching these durational takes and just letting it sit into the cruelty of what's happening with these death marches. So overall, kind of using this sense of environmental presence to tell the story. It's actually a secondary component after you're done with 360 video where you kind of get into a little bit more interactive and pedagogical, like learning more with different videos and different infographics and whatnot. So there's kind of a secondary component where you're able to get a lot more additional context and information that is much more focused on the mental presence as well as light levels of interactivity as you're navigating around. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Stefano happened on Monday, September 4th, 2023 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:02.041] Stefano Casertano: My name is Stefano Casertano. I reside between Berlin and Rome. I am a VR creator and producer. I started working in VR in 2019 in the music industry, so creating VR music videos. And I am here at the festival with a project titled Tales of the March, developed through the Viennale College VR.

[00:02:24.390] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.

[00:02:29.548] Stefano Casertano: I am actually a filmmaker and I directed six documentaries, feature documentaries. And I also developed a career in traditional, so flat filmmaking. And next year I'm going to direct my first fiction feature. I'm already booked for the second fiction feature in 2025. At the same time, I am further expanding my presence in the VR world, so I'm planning the production of two new VR projects. And actually, the first project is a pure VR project, and the second one is a mixed VR and AR project.

[00:03:09.378] Kent Bye: Great, and maybe you could give a bit more context for how the story of Tales on March came about for you to tell.

[00:03:17.339] Stefano Casertano: It's a great question because it's actually a personal story. Tales of the Marches, first of all, is a film, a VR film about the Death Marches. The Death Marches is, I would say, not a much known episode of the Holocaust. So at the end of the Second World War, in the winter between 1944 and 1945, The SS forced 750,000 prisoners to leave the concentration camps and march towards central Germany. About one third perished along the way of exhaustion or they would be shot if they were not able to walk. I learned of this tragedy upon visiting the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. There was a map on a wall where the main tracks of the largest death marches were displayed. I asked what it was and I got this explanation. I was thinking about a way of conveying what these matches are about, together with some information to a broader audience, maybe using a new language. And I considered first, of course, doing a traditional film, and then... Actually, it was 2018, I was here in Venice, and I thought about the potential of expressing this story in VR. And that's why I started thinking about it and I developed the concept. And I met with a director, Michel Relac, in Berlin at a conference at Sohaus, Berlin. And then a couple of years later, I applied to Biennale College 2021. And together with the mentors, we developed a concept that would allow us to use this language to express this story.

[00:05:02.350] Kent Bye: So you're here at the Venice Immersive 2023 showing Tales of the March, and it's a cinematic 360 video, a lot of observational, just kind of witnessing these different scenes as they happen. So maybe take me back to what you originally told the Biennale College as to what you thought the project was going to be when you first had conceived of it.

[00:05:24.707] Stefano Casertano: It's a story, I would say, of becoming a VR creator, because my knowledge at the time was very limited. So my first idea was to create a project somehow similar to the famous Carnei Arena by Iñárritu. volumetric capturing of 100 prisoners. And I was quite early made aware of the fact that creating a project with volumetric animation of 100 people is not that easy, not just technically, but also in terms of computing power and any other problem you might face. So we were considering different options. The point is that we needed many people to be in the project. And the best way, first of all, was that of using an immersive camera, a surround camera, the traditional InstaPro. And that's what we did. I would say, also, what is relevant about this project is that this is the first time that a death march is portrayed in fiction. This has never been done before. And so the first challenge we have to face and our first mission was to reconstruct something that was historically accurate. And there is a section of the Sachsenhausen Foundation in Germany. Sachsenhausen is a concentration camp north of Berlin. And they have an archive about the death marches in a forest between Berlin and Hamburg. I would say literally in the middle of nowhere. We went there, I met with the director Carmen Lange, and she accepted to provide us with her historical consulting. So everything you see in the film is accurate. Not just that. In terms of accuracy, I consulted, I read, I would say it was a total of 12 biographies of survivors of death marches. And then, always through Carmen Lange, I could speak with a survivor. His name was Alexander Fried. And I collected an eight-hour interview. And Alexander passed away last year. After the Holocaust, he led a very happy life until the age of 96. And I must say, I never met him in person, only over the phone, and I was supposed to meet him and go trekking with him. It's very sad that I'm not able to do this, so the work is dedicated to his memory. Anyhow, anything you hear and you see on this death march, on this film, is something that actually happened. So our protagonist is a composite character. What he says in the voiceover is mostly words of Mr. Alexander Fried or something we've taken from books. And also there is a song you hear and a woman singing as the march passes through the village. This also actually happened. So, I don't know how much I can spoil about the project, but I will spoil, so don't listen for the next 20 seconds if you want me to spoil it. So anyhow, the prisoner here is a woman singing the choir of the Jewish slaves from Verdi's Nabucco, which is basically a song that the Jewish slaves sing in Egypt before being liberated. And the actual person that heard this story thought he was imagining it, was his imagination, but then he realized that actually it was a woman singing to mock the SS, because the SS couldn't know what she was singing. So that's more or less the story I decided to portray. The guy that experienced this, his name was Judah Berkowitz. He also passed away, I guess, four or five years ago. And beside these historical elements, the point was to say, how do we, use VR to make this and also because of my sheer incompetence at the beginning my first suggestion was to say we will have the viewer impersonating a prisoner and then I spoke with some people and including Carmen Lange and they told me that's a no-go so it's not what VR should be because prisoners at the time. They were facing incredible hurdles and they were hungry and they were exhausted, they were cold, they were sick, they were everything. And you wouldn't be respectful. So to say like, you know, you wear visors and maybe we have you walking on gravel, maybe we air-con the box where the installation is and maybe you feel cold and then you impersonate a prisoner. It's nothing compared to... The conclusion was VR, it's not an imitation of life, it's a different reality and you have to play along with the still limited set of senses you have at your disposal. And so we decided to play it very subtly and dramaturgically also. First of all, the camera is fixed and is slightly above the level of the eyes of the average viewer, so to convey a sense of difference between the VR world and the real world. And then the point is we want to have the viewer becoming a digital witness of the event. And the third point is that we wanted to have the sphere of the immersive video playing a dramaturgic role. The first part is a death march and you are basically standing in the middle of a road and from far away you see this march approaching with this hundred people and then something happens and then the march disappears from the other side And there is a clear sense of direction and that is represented by the road from one end to the other end And prisoners, the prisoners are captive of course, they have no choice, and there is a clear sense of direction. When the prisoners are liberated, the SS are fled overnight, as it actually happened, they are in a forest, so the prisoners are in a forest and they wake up. And I've observed it also on the viewers of our project, so it actually seems to work, when the scene opens, they don't know what they have to watch. They just look around and they try to find an organization in the scene. And this is actually somehow the existential aspect of being liberated but not being free, that many prisoners felt after being basically freed from the control of the guards. It plays also a little bit an existential role. So our protagonist says, what could I do with so much freedom all at once after so many years in the camp? So these are basically the main elements that convinced me that VR and immersive film specifically was the way to go.

[00:12:06.135] Kent Bye: Yeah, so you have one of the opening shots is having this death march happening. You have like going through a village and there's like a woman or a little girl that's there at the beginning and they sort of run away and then it seems like they're going away from something and then you have this big group of like a hundred men in prisoner outfits that are walking through the scene. So there's a lot of costume design and trying to get the right look and feel and get everybody as well. So I'd love to hear about that process of recreating this moment in time and all the different associated clothing of the time to be able to represent the prisoners.

[00:12:42.852] Stefano Casertano: The costumes are the same used by Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds. So we contacted the same costume rental company and they had these costumes available. It's weird, but we've been lucky because usually they are booked out. This is a German production and as far as it seems, Nazi costumes are quite popular for German productions. So we were able to rent them for a couple of days. And we had to work on the costumes. The costume designer's name is Gregor Marvell, and he's a fantastic guy based in Berlin. We are at the end of the war, so they couldn't look pristine. We had to work on them and make them more dirty and so on. The same thing accounts for the weapons, so we ran a study on the different grades of the SS, so the officers and soldiers and what kind of weapons they were carrying, so also that is very accurate. But also we wanted to create something which was a little bit different from reality, so the prisoners, they all have complete garments, including the hats, and they're actually caps, not hats. and some sort of gown where they're wearing and other things. Because the idea was to say, in memory, things might be looking a little bit different than how they actually happened. So you feel that there is something which is a little bit off in what you're seeing. So in order to create a context where we don't know if it's a dream or a precise recollection of what happened. And I would say that for many survivors, in order to elaborate the trauma, Memories of course were altered and they became different. I'm not saying that they invented things, please. I'm not saying of course that, but I'm saying that they had to elaborate their memories because that's the only way to survive and maybe to make reality a little bit better compared to what it actually was. That's at least what research says. So also this is based on what facts have been.

[00:14:54.261] Kent Bye: Yeah, and how far on average were some of these death marches? Because they were walking for some of them a long time and some of them for a great distance.

[00:15:02.307] Stefano Casertano: Yes, 800 kilometers. It's a march involving, I guess, 12,000 women from Auschwitz to Germany. And we display this kind of information in the second part of the project, which is a virtual exhibition. In Venice, we just have the beta of this exhibition, so it's going to be refined in the coming weeks. And I would say the length of the march, of course, is an important information. but also what happened during the marches. It's a tragedy as such. In the exhibition, we show what happened in the march to the Baltic Sea. And these people were forced to walk all the way to northern Germany until the land was over. There was no land anymore. And beyond the land, there was the frozen sea. And they were forced to walk, keep on walking on the frozen sea. until night came and they had to stay there and then the SS fled and Some of these people were saved the following day and there are photos of these people being saved so I would say the main element of these death marches is their absurdity. Of course the Holocaust had no purpose as such. On top of that, these death marches were nonsensical. If you ask an expert, What was their aim? Nobody really knows. Some people say they were aimed at killing more people. Some people say they were meant to bring workforce or slaves to Germany, but nobody really knows. There is no clear answer. There is just this tragedy that we wanted to describe.

[00:16:45.265] Kent Bye: Yeah, it just seems like an act of cruelty or perhaps also showing the places where they're walking through maybe to intimidate or show some sort of power. But yeah, it doesn't sound like there's a clear answer. And I did see the second part after I had watched the 360 video, there is this opportunity to go up to each of these different screens and have different videos play. There's like a graphic with more information. And so I had a chance to go through and get a lot more context to the story. And part of the reason why I asked the length was because in terms of the VR, there's this idea and concept of a durational take, which takes a long time to unfold. And I feel like there's really long cuts in this piece that is reflecting, like the pacing of the editing is reflecting the length of the marching in some sense. So the style of these long, deliberative shots are in some ways letting you really sit in and to witness this type of cruelty that was exhibited in these death marches.

[00:17:43.719] Stefano Casertano: That's exactly the point. So if we think about immersive film cinematography, there is still a lot to develop in the language. Traditional cinema had three great innovators, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, and Godard, I would say. So the first one invented editing, the second one invented shots, reinvented shots, and the third one reinvented editing and shots together, so jump cuts and everything. So everything we see in contemporary flat cinema derives from the innovations of these guys. In terms of immersive films, you have to improvise and tailor the cinematography on the story you're writing and vice versa. We experimented at the beginning with trying to position the camera in different positions during the first shot until we realized that having one shot with the march approaching and leaving would be much more strong than moving the camera around. This is why you also have to create a scene that is actually prone to be shot in one shot. We were considering also inserting cats with somehow a crossfade. I felt that in terms of representing a reality, we wanted to introduce the least distance possible between the viewer and the scene. So somehow you become the editor of the scene. In terms of deciding where you want to watch, there is a guard shooting a prisoner in the scene, and people react differently. So you have the option of looking somewhere else, as you would do in real life. And some people look at the scene and some people just really turn their head, because we gave a moment between the moment when the guard aims and when the guard shoots. So if the tension becomes too high and you feel uncomfortable with that, you can look somewhere else. And this was also a discussion we had with a Jewish foundation that was interested at funding us. And they told us, your aim is to create something to have the viewer becoming a digital witness. How do you know the viewer will actually look where you want the viewer to look? And my first reaction was to say, maybe they don't look at it because it's too strong, but this is something you will do also with a flat screen. If you watch a horror movie and somehow the scene becomes too strong for you, you close your eyes. At least I close my eyes because I don't have a good relationship with horror films, but you can look somewhere else. So that's more or less also part of being or feeling at least an innovator in this field.

[00:20:38.592] Kent Bye: Yeah, and do you know how many different scenes there are in Tales of the March? Like how many different moments there are throughout the course of the piece?

[00:20:45.895] Stefano Casertano: There's mostly three moments. There is three moments, so the march, the liberation, and the aftermath. The aftermath being the prisoner 40 years later, so it's in the 80s, and so we had to reconstruct the place in the 80s. We found an incredible place. And what actually is also a connection scene between the liberation and the 80s has been shot in a theater, in a concert theater, in a concert house in Berlin, where we realized that the protagonist before the war was a conductor. And there is a circularity in the narration. So at the end of the story, we understand that the voiceover we've been hearing along all the story is actually the old guy recalling his life and his experience. So I would say three and a half.

[00:21:32.868] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I remember through the piece, it's around 13 minutes, but not a lot of cuts or action, but like these long durational takes. And one of the scenes is the prisoners in a forest waking up. And is that at the point where they've already been liberated and they're free and they just don't quite know what to do? Is that what is happening in that scene?

[00:21:53.424] Stefano Casertano: The prisoner wakes up and he understands that his companion is dead and he spots a corpse, a naked corpse on the ground with an SS uniform to his side. And then he looks around and the voiceover says that the SS were gone. So this is actually how it happened. Overnight the SS fled and some exchanged their uniform with that of the dead prisoners or even alive ones, giving them bread or anything. In our case, a guard exchanged his uniform with that of a dead prisoner. And we didn't want to make it too clear, because this is actually what happened. You know, if after maybe five years in a concentration camp, and after a death march, you're finally liberated, you don't really believe it's possible. So it becomes clear that the prisoner survived only at the end of the story, more or less. So we didn't want to explain too much.

[00:22:52.549] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's like a poetic visual storytelling language that's doing a show not tell. So you're showing it, but not necessarily explicating it at that point. And part of my experience of the piece was that I saw a bunch of videos and other things right after that. So some of my memory of the piece is from the other extras that were afterwards, like the photographs that were taken from the house and different Scenes and trees and the graphs and so there's also an additional component to add more context, but it's interesting how my memory is sort of also Blurring some of those scenes that I saw in the video into the main thing and trying to like sort out the main thrust That's part of the reason I'm asking to recount it plus You know being here Venice and seeing a lot of work very quickly and trying to recount what I saw a few days ago But yeah, maybe you could talk about this difference between mimesis and showing versus the diegetic and telling and how do you balance as a filmmaker understanding the show versus tell and how you feel like there's room to grow this grammar so that you can do more showing than telling.

[00:23:55.237] Stefano Casertano: Most touching and impressive thing about being here in Venice with this project for me has been that many people cried upon watching the film. You know what's absurd? Crying wearing the visors. You don't normally cry when you do VR. I completed the immersive film, I would say, three months ago, so I had time to forget it somehow. And as soon as the installation here, the physical installation was completed, I tried it again. And also my eyes became a little wet and the lenses of the Oculus became foggy. So it is strange because then I thought, are you supposed to cry when you do VR? So it was a first for me as well. And there were a couple of colleagues that, I mean, I removed their glasses after the screening, after the immersive film. And they had so many tears. And we hugged, and they said, thank you. This was very touching. I mean, not saying that it's like it happened a couple of times, OK? So much more often than I expected. So I'm not proud of it. It's not like I feel any pride at making people cry. But for me, it's evidence of a fact that the film touched the souls of some people. And so, you know, normally VR films are more in the realm of surrealism or conceptual poetry. And every something with, at the end of the story, a traditional dramaturgic concept might basically leverage elements from both the traditional and the VR filmic language. Developing it, I think that we are still in such an experimental phase that every story is a new one. So I don't think that anybody can sit down and say, so now we have to write a book about the concept of cinematography and editing in VR. Maybe some people do, but I don't know. It's like as Eisenstein did with his analogic editing and so on. I'm just saying that the definition of a language will come through experience and through the coming together of an audience. It is reaching that level. I must say, somehow, the point is that Personally, I'm a little bit less of a fan of those stories that are shot in 3D or 6D and where you're not supposed to watch is basically blacked out or blurred away and then you're forced to watch in a certain direction because then I miss the dramaturgical purpose of shooting with this system. So, when people say, because, you know, when we have some, like, people new to the scene that come to the island, this island, we are on Lazzaretto Vecchio in Venice, and they go like, they ask, is this the future of cinema? And how often have we heard this question? Is this the future of cinema? And you're like, this is not cinema. It's like, is the television the future of radio? It's a different story. And maybe there will be different languages within the concept of VR, of course.

[00:27:15.273] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely think that for some projects, it's totally okay to, you know, sit back and just watch and have your attention directed. But I think it's almost like a different genre of 180 films versus 360 films. And so with this genre, there's new affordances and different grammar that can emerge with the expectations that the audience have. I think one of the challenges with 360 video is that learning how to direct your own attention and what to pay attention to is a bit of following the signs of where to look. But I think the other part is that, as you're starting to explore in this piece, is that there's a bit of ambiguity that you have to Use and if you're not using narration or other elements to sort of help explain things there's a bit of symbolic logic that you have to understand either the symbolism of actions or kind of piece together what is happening by maybe not having every specific detail spelled out for you, but that you kind of have to understand more of a poetic associations and links based upon these actions to piece together the narrative. There's been a number of different pieces here that do that. Just talked to Steya about the Imaginary Friend, which has a narrative arc that leaves a lot of gaps as to what's actually happening in that you have to kind of pay very close attention to the little clues to understand the arc of the film. in your piece you're also leaving a level of ambiguity there but also calling back it by the end you kind of understand that there's this trauma that's still rippling through this man's life as he's recalling these moments of these songs and having his own family that he's been able to create since that point so you understand that this is later in time and that he's he's still sort of haunted by this experience to some extent so But yeah, I feel like that it's going to take a lot of different perspectives and creators and honestly stories because the story you're telling is very much like a certain genre within itself of trying to tell a story that hasn't been told before and and see how the spatial context of a hundred prisoners walking by sort of deserves a sense of being in the place to observe that witness that where if you try to frame it in a 2d frame Changes the whole experience of walking from one point to the next point in this durational experience that gives you the sense of time and gives you the sense of scale and the sense of the cruelty of that act where I think the VR is a medium is specifically suited to be able to capture a lot of those elements and

[00:29:39.496] Stefano Casertano: You see a march appearing from far, far away and it feels like situationism. It's absurd. What is this? People walking in strange uniforms with stripes and other people. forcing one to walk by pointing guns at them. It's absurd as such. And so with this medium, we have the chance of expressing how nonsensical the whole story is. That's very important, I guess. That's why I think that we can be even more expressive with an immersive camera compared to traditional camera. On top of that, I would say we cannot part any concept, any camera concept we developed in this area with the work on sound. Our audio designer, Nirto Karsten Fischer from Ensoniqs, paid close attention to creating an audio system, an audio structure fully integrated with a scene. For example, at the beginning the road is empty. We do have a woman looking into a certain direction so that we more or less can understand that something is going to happen there. Then we have two gunshots coming from there, so with special sound. Then we have two yells, so we make clear that something is going to appear over there. Then We have shot in 8K, but of course the pixel density is not particularly high still, the new model is going to be higher, but when the match appears far, far away, we only see some pixels changing, they seem black and white. They change position and so on, and we have to wait a couple of seconds until we understand these are human figures. So it's a whole system that must integrate camera and audio in order to define a concept which is organized. I think it takes some brain work to have something where you know where you have to watch without a clear indication about this. might be a little bit more subtle. And if it works, I cannot say about my project if it works. So it's a question I leave to the viewers. But if it works, it's very sophisticated.

[00:32:01.497] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to ask about this integration between the emotional potency of the story, and then juxtaposing it to what is sort of like informational exploration for additional context, but has a different center of gravity that seems more like getting additional information on context to the story that is a very emotional story that you could just watch and sort of be left with a heart space versus you know getting a lot more information where you are kind of left in a mind space and I sort of went from the emotions and then mental exploration But I felt like as I was coming out more in a mental space than a heart space. So I'm just wondering as you Think about like a museum context. The museum often has information that you learn about something and maybe there's a movie that you watched and then you go back and get additional context. But yeah, if you've thought about how to balance these two modes of exploration of the story through both the emotions of the story and the information of the history.

[00:33:00.643] Stefano Casertano: I guess that it's customary whenever we watch a film based on or inspired by through events to after the film to Google the facts so Hollywood versus reality and so on so this is basically the concept okay and I wanted also to provide a one-stop shop or museum whatever gathering the basic relevant information about the Death Marches and some specific aspects that might be of interest for the viewer. Also taking care of the accuracy of what we have been presenting and trying to satisfy the basic curiosities about the Death Marches. In order to do so, we have been working with the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, with the Sachsenhausen Foundation, with a museum in Poland, and with the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum. They were more than happy to open their archives for us and so we have interviews collected mostly in the 90s with survivors. An incredible story of a German family, the Seidenberger, where there was this lady, she was 16 at the time, and from her house she secretly took photos of a death march. and this photo surfed for the first time not many years ago. And the story of a painter whom he moved to the US after the war, he became a very successful commercial painter, like for advertising. And then, at a certain age, he started painting the death marches in order to elaborate the trauma. So, different stories that are presented in this way. And, of course, the story doesn't end there. The big decision was how to face the question of showcasing also graphical content. So, corpses and this kind of thing. So, what's the point? We decided to do so. These specific photos are taken from the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Because you can always look somewhere else, because we really wanted to set the difference between fiction and reality. And of course the story is strong, it's tragic, I'm talking about the fiction story, but reality has been much worse. And this is also something we wanted to represent.

[00:35:25.866] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm glad that I went through all of that because I actually am that type of person that wants to get that more information. But I know that maybe in a festival context or maybe in a context where there might be time pressures, because I know that there was a certain amount of throughput if this is shown in a museum, like I was able to get through half of the different extra clips, but then had to kind of go through it again because it was like resetting and It's a type of thing where you can let people explore for hours and hours, but then if they're in there for hours and hours, then you get less people through. So there's this challenge of having a throughput in a museum context and also a festival context versus allowing them to really dive deep into learning a bunch of information. So I also felt that additional pressure to want to see everything, but then my time had run out, and I was like, OK, I want to see this other half of it. And so I went through it again and saw it. And there's also this little volumetric capture of, is that you that's setting the context,

[00:36:16.347] Stefano Casertano: That's me with a terrible hairdo, because I didn't have time to go to the barber, but yeah, that's an experiment. So, we are very thankful to everybody who supported us. So, Michel Relac, Liz Rosenthal from Venice Immersive, and also the Median Board from Berlin that supported us. Still, the budget was a little limited, and we didn't have that many funds to go to the actual, like, high-level volumetric capture studio. So, we did it in-house with a fantastic volumetric artist, Martin Demmer, and he set up his studio with, I guess, it's eight cameras, if I'm not mistaken, and we did it indie. So, this indie volumetric capturing is something which We are very happy with and it's a way of opening this technology also to indie productions. So that's it and I am explaining the basic information about the Death Marches. As you can hear my accent, it's an indication that I was born in Italy. So we didn't want to have my strong Italian accent for all the exhibitions, so I'm just introducing. Then we have a voiceover artist who is presenting all the elements. Of the exhibition and I would say it's a mid-atlantic accent.

[00:37:30.946] Kent Bye: So it's okay for Europe and the US And in terms of exhibition, are you planning on including this additional like museum, you know sort of the DVD extra clips and videos and charts and a way that you're exhibiting this and a perhaps a museum context

[00:37:49.302] Stefano Casertano: We will have two distribution channels, Rai Cinema, so the Italian state broadcaster has bought the rights for Italy and they were going to showcase only the immersive film, but for museum context, we will show the full experience.

[00:38:07.229] Kent Bye: It sounds like the second part is the museum exploration is something that you're still working out.

[00:38:12.223] Stefano Casertano: Yes, we would like to refine the UX especially, and we've been collecting a lot of feedback from viewers here, you know, that was something which might represent also a standard for other things we will do in the future.

[00:38:26.050] Kent Bye: Great, and finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be, and what it might be able to enable?

[00:38:36.185] Stefano Casertano: I think it's a developed market, there is a lot of potential and I believe that there is a culture of VR that is being developed. The best thing that could happen to VR is if we basically give up on trying to compare VR to traditional media and accept VR as a separate and adult technology with a potential of its own. I am not very happy. It makes me a little sad when people say it's a niche. We're not a niche anymore. We are a fantastic market with fantastic people. And I think that in terms of if I do something in VR, which is well done, stays in my memory, in my emotions, as deep as a very good film. So we are there, I would say.

[00:39:25.157] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:39:31.558] Stefano Casertano: I would be very happy if transnational cooperations move forth because especially VR has the potential of bringing together people from different countries and different cultures. So I think that the experience of countries like the Netherlands of Germany or Germany at introducing financing plans aimed at working with other countries or even Europe with creative media are the way to go.

[00:39:59.936] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Stefano, I really appreciated being introduced to a lot more context of this aspect of the Holocaust that I was not as familiar with and to be able to experience it and the Talisman March. Yeah, just that there's going to be some images in this piece that I think are going to really stick with me. And I think that sort of speaks to the power of the medium. Yeah, as I digest and remember the series, there'll be certain moments and scenes that I think are in my body in a new way. And I think it sort of speaks to the power of the medium as well. And very much appreciate your pushing forward and exploring what the potentials of this medium are. So thanks again for joining me today and helping to break it all down.

[00:40:40.735] Stefano Casertano: Thank you very much for having me on your show.

[00:40:43.464] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this interview from Fitness Immersive 2023. You can go check out the Critics' Roundtable in episode 1305 to get more breakdown in each of these different experiences. And I hope to be posting more information on my Patreon at some point. There's a lot to digest here. I'm going to be giving some presentations here over the next couple of months and tune into my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR, since there's certainly a lot of digest about the structures and patterns of immersive storytelling, some of the different emerging grammar that we're starting to develop, as well as the underlying patterns of experiential design. So that's all I have for today, and thanks for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And again, if you enjoyed 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 to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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