I interviewed Madame Pirate: Code of Conduct co-directors Morgan Ommer & Dan-Chi Huang remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different immersive stories from Southwest, Southwest 2024, Today's episode is with Madame Pirate, Code of Conduct. So it's the second of a series of Xing Yi Xiao, which is actually the same character that is featured in a game that also just released on March 7th, 2024 called The Pirate Queen. I'll be featuring an interview that I also did with the creators of that piece in the next episode to dig more into that. So it's a bit of a synchronicity zeitgeist that this story is being told now. So it's about a woman who becomes one of the most powerful pirates in the world. And this specific episode starts to mix together different affordances like tabletop volumetric capture with spatial still life shots and paintings to be able to explore how the rules enabled one of the most powerful pirates ever to gain her power. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Morgan and Dan Qi happened on Monday, March 4th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:20.969] Morgan Ommer: My name is Morgan Omer. I'm a photographer and filmmaker based in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. With Dan Qi together, we have made now two episodes of Madden Pirate in VR. It was shot in Taiwan. The first one was during COVID, so it was kind of difficult. And the second one was with French people, so also difficult. Yeah, that's about it.
[00:01:51.497] Dan-Chi Huang: I'm Dan Qi. I come from Taiwan. I'm a filmmaker. And before VR, my experience is more about drama and documentary. So actually, Madden Pirates is my first VR experience with Morgan together. And before Madden Pirates, I was interested in VR because I watched some really good projects. And I feel like VR can record your body memory. So that's why we tried to find some opportunity to work in the VR project. And then that's how we started Madden Pirates. I'm Estella Valdivieso-Chen. I'm the producer of Mad on Pirates and I'm based in Taiwan.
[00:02:32.835] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:38.689] Morgan Ommer: So as I said, I'm a photographer. And a few years ago, I read about this pirate. I thought it was a really interesting story. And I pitched it around. Estella at Depedie Films found a way for us to make it in VR. So I had never done any VR. And that was my first experience. And then she introduced me to Danshi. And so we worked together. We actually worked very well together. And as Danqi said, this is our first VR making experience. And so here we are.
[00:03:15.125] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah. And for my background is, I have a couple of short films before. And I also have a producer and director of documentary. And for my career, I really like the history element. I like the history. Yeah. So that's why Modern Pirate is so special for me because Even though I love history, I read a lot of history, it's also not official history. I like the secret history. So when Morgan bring the project to me, I don't know there's a Madden pirate. I don't know. Even though I've come from Taiwan, I'm an Asia, I don't know there is an Asia Madden pirate. And So when more than there is a story come, I read the material and I just find out, oh, maybe we ignore such a special woman in Asia. We don't know. But in Western culture, more people know about her. So I started to do the study. And for me, what's really inspired by her experience is like how you grow up and fight with a society that didn't like you or they want to attack you. So how do you grow up and stand up for yourself? I think that's why I want to focus on this project and also based on the drama experience because I also write the script by myself. So I think I and Morgan are somehow like two different elements linked together because I have the drama experience of the script writing more and more about creating the character. But Morgan has a great visual, like how to make the world visualized. Yeah, so I think that's also how we work together and how we try to improve the script into VR. Because when the project starts, the script is really just like a word. It's like reading. It's not like visual. So how to transfer this to the visual is what we focus on. I think that's how my career combined to the VR project. And I think also because VR project is so immersed. The narration in 2D video is totally different with VR. In VR, you need to focus on very specific elements and let audience, you can guide them. Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've been producing VR productions since 2017. Some of my work that people probably have seen like Use Spiritual Tempo Socks, Mechanical Souls, and we are alumni of South by Southwest. We had also other projects like A Song Within Us that was selected by South by Madam Pirate. So, yeah, it's, It's been a great journey for my company, Serendipity, to work in the immersive field. It's very important to find story that kind of connect the East and the West and also to experiment the new medium and yeah, just bring all those interesting creatives to work with international people in the different projects that I work on. So that's kind of what we've been doing.
[00:06:24.696] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I had a chance to rewatch the first episode that you did with Madame Pirate and then watch the episode that's going to be playing at South by Southwest. The thing that was really striking to me was the mixing and mashing of different techniques in each of them. In the first episode, you're really mixing the dual fisheye lens stereoscopic 180 video but also adding in a lot of tilt brush animation in there and then in the latest episode you have this combination of a little bit more of real-time volumetric capture with some paintings that are also added in the context in the background, but then going into what is a little bit more of like still life, like a moment in time of a spatial moment that allows you to use different lighting effects to give some dynamic movement. But it seemed to be a similar type of blending and blurring of different volumetric techniques. And so I'd love if you could maybe talk about both this story development process, but also the techniques that you're using Cause it feels like the techniques that you're using are also driving how you're telling the story. So just talk about that process of both creating how you want to tell this story about this madam pirate, and then the ways that you're using the different types of volumetric technologies to tell the story.
[00:07:41.150] Morgan Ommer: So I find VR interesting because you can, in the same space, mix media and tell a story. In episode one, the general idea was to mix the grandchild, the little girls, imagination with what grandmother remembers. So she's telling her granddaughter a bedtime story, and what is happening is grandma remembers, and this is the live action footage, and we mix that together with what the granddaughter imagines. For episode two, there's no more grandma and grandchild, but we try to keep that mixing. So they're not exactly flashbacks. Actually, some of them are flashbacks, but the mixing of two different or three different mediums in VR actually allows to tell, I think, a more interesting story. We don't have interaction, right? We don't make the viewer do anything, but we use different techniques to help immerse the viewer more, I guess.
[00:08:56.882] Dan-Chi Huang: I think in episode one, because we started a story with a grandma reading a storybook. So we use a traditional shooting, like a 2D framing in the VR. It's somehow, it's something like you cannot change the things in the story, right? It's a paper there. And reading the book, sometimes your imagination, a visual, and that's it. The ones we deliver in the VR. But we used Tilt Brush to try to let audience feel like, okay, Now the character comes out from the screen, surrounds you, and now you are in her mind. I think that's the goal we want to make. Not traditional shooting, not really traditional, 2D shooting, okay, and a tool brush. It's trying to use the gap like this. But in episode two, we use a different way to tell a story. We want to bring audience like you are a third person, you are a god, you are looking at a history. You stand high and you look at a small history. And how do you think about this history? How do you think about this character in the history? If you are the character of them in the history, what will you design? I think that's the different goal. In episode one, we try to let you go into her brain. But in episode two, we try to give you a different position. Now you can see them higher, but sometimes you link with them together. Yeah, I think that's the difference why we use 4D view and why we use traditional shooting in episode one.
[00:10:25.422] Kent Bye: Yeah, in the first episode, you have the stereoscopic 180 video that is more human scale, and then most of the animations are also human scale, whereas in the second episode, you use a lot more of the tabletop scale, both in the telling of those volumetric captures that you're seeing, like real-time actors, but then more still life equivalent of the animation sequences or the imagination or this juxtaposition, I'd say, between the more real time versus the more still life approach, but they're both the smaller tabletop scale. So it sounds like you were taking a more of an omniscient perspective, but just wondering if you, as you were developing, if you thought that there was in the first episode of matching between the human scales, between both of the different 180 video and the Tilt Brush, and keeping that parity between that tabletop scale, both as you're switching back and forth between them? Because you don't necessarily go back to the human scale in the second episode.
[00:11:25.030] Morgan Ommer: So 4D view has limitations. And so this is why also we chose to have the 4D view in a smaller scale, because it hides the mistake. This is a technical...
[00:11:41.265] Dan-Chi Huang: I can definitely share on that because I think for us, you know, working on the development of this both episode, you know, during the development phase, we do a lot of different testings with either the live action shooting. And then the second episode, we actually work on the volumetric capture modeling for a very long time. We wanted to know how those results can affect on the project. And definitely Morgan and Danqi, they did a lot like test shooting and we have models in to a game engine doing different shadings to do testing to see what's the best result that can help in the way that when they are designing the story, they can design it to go with the technology itself. Because we know that the new technology now, you can't do everything you want. And you have to also consider the fact that on the distribution end, the producer said, Hey, it has to be on Quest because, you know, that's where more people can easily watch your project. So the director gets a lot of missions, right? From the distribution request. So we spend more time in developing. in order to make it happen. That's why the first and the second actually took two years to accomplish a new one, a different one to meet the audiences.
[00:13:08.360] Kent Bye: And some of the other broader context for this piece is that there's actually Eloise Singer in the Singer Studios is coming out with the Pirate Queen on March 7th, which is a video game version of what sounds like to be the same character of this really powerful female, you call her Madam Pirate, Eloise Singer's calling her the Pirate Queen, but this real powerful woman pirate. In the first episode, you go into a lot of the origin story of Madam Pirate, a little bit more of her journey into this position of power and also really interrogating what was like for her to be a woman in power in this context of how she was still able to lead because she was able to get a lot of results. But maybe it's worth setting a little bit of the background context as who is this Madame Pirate
[00:13:56.900] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah, so Madame Heard, Madame Ching, maybe Morgan could even say it better than me because he was also the person that introduced me to this historical character. Same journey as Danqi that ironically in Asia, you don't hear about heroines that much in history. And she apparently was this fierceful pirate lady that was in South China Sea. And really, she took over her husband's legacy. And before even becoming her husband's wife, that she was actually a prostitute that's working in the brothel and was sold to the pirates. So for me, what's so charming about her character is a woman that faces difficulty, And she was able to find her own destiny. She doesn't submit to it. I think that's a very strong message that we try to portray in the very first episode. And that's why, you know, kind of wrap it around a bedtime story. It's a beautiful message to share to our youth that there's going to be difficult times in life, but then no matter a girl or boy, you can always just take charge of your own destiny. And then in the second episode for me, it's also that continuum, that voice. of her meeting some new people on the ship and Ling being so afraid and so lost in their world and how she encourages her to also take charge of her own destiny and make decisions for herself. I think that is what history can connect people. Like, you know, this is something that's very contemporary, a conversation that we are currently really having with our youth. So that's why we pick up Madame Pirate.
[00:15:57.551] Morgan Ommer: So the historical background, she's a real person. She is almost unknown in Asia. Her second husband is kind of known in Hong Kong. but not really her. So besides being a woman pirate, she is probably the greatest pirate in history. There's no other pirate that gets close to her in success rates. She started as a prostitute, took over her first husband's fleet when he died, and then built the greatest armada of pirates ever. In the West, we are familiar with Blackbeard. Blackbeard had three ships. His career lasted two years. Zheng Yisao, who doesn't actually have a name, it means the wife of Zheng Yi, commanded 60 or 70,000 pirates, defeated the British, the Portuguese, and the Qing navy, and got away with it. she retired and died of old age. She is mentioned in Pirates of the Caribbean, which means in the West we know about her, but nobody's made a film. There's a couple of books, there's some children's books, but there's no real film about her. There's podcasts, and so we kind of know. And this is what also surprised me when I talked to people both in China and in Taiwan. Nobody had ever heard of her.
[00:17:28.608] Kent Bye: Yeah, Danqing, do you have anything else you want to add about, you know, the story and your relationship?
[00:17:36.174] Dan-Chi Huang: Because you mentioned another VR project is more gaming, right? I think we start with the project of Modern Pirate. We start with a goal, like we want to try to know why and how she becomes a great pirate. It's not because how strong she is, it's how she become too strong and how she struggle in the society. Even though she joined the pirates, she is maybe the only woman on the ship. And as a woman in the male society, how do you become you have the power and everyone can convince with you? So I think that's why reading the research and also transfer some research into the story is We want to build up and create, like, if you see someone is strong, that's not the only thing you need to know. What you need to know is something behind the strong. That's probably stronger than the surface. Yeah. So that's why we try to tell a story like this. And also, when I do the research, there is still some research in Chinese talking about ZhenYiSao. Yeah. But very few And usually talk to her is about like, oh, it's a criminal and she do something bad and the emperor really want to kill her. Yeah. And for me, I'm also guessing that this kind of strong woman wasn't put in the history. Probably it's because at that time, no one want to recognize that is a woman so powerful to can fight with the emperor. Because when emperor want to say, oh, I afraid of this woman, it's impossible. It's so shame for him. Yeah. So I think that's why somehow she is not really in the history. And if you think about the location, actually for the Hong Kong now, the port of the Hong Kong probably is all in charge by Madame Paris before. So it's really a big society they built up in Hong Kong. And they protect people, but of course, like a gangster, they also abuse people at the same time. But when you think 2024, to think about, oh, how a woman build up a really great society. Now, even now, it's difficult. So how she make it at a really old time, like 100 years before. I think that's really amazing for me. And when we want to make this project, we go to Kaohsiung, there is like the Kaohsiung Film Archive. There is a pitching, and we do the pitching. The pitching is actually, it's at a port, because the Film Archive it's near the sea and there is a port, right Morgan? Yes, yes. So when I do the pitching, I was really touching because I can see the sea outside of the window and you can somehow imagine that the sea is in charge of the sea. So that's really, I think working on this project also bring me some power for me inside. Like, oh, like something you can do more than your imagination. I think that's something I learned, let's say learned, like inspired when I was working on this project. Yeah. And because go back to Taiwan's history, we have our own pirates. And at that moment, actually, the pirates is like the cross the sea between Taiwan and China. They just like fight together and work together. So what I know more is more about Taiwanese pirates, not the big Asia pirates. So that's why I say I was also like surprised. Oh, I don't know. It's like so crazy. How? Yeah.
[00:21:12.916] Kent Bye: Yeah, in the first episode, you're getting a lot more of the biographical context of more of the Madam Pirate's journey into power. And in the second episode, it's called the Code of Conduct, where it's really focusing on some of the rules and the ethical guidelines that is really driving their community. And so maybe you could set a little bit of that broader context, and maybe was it unique to have these sets of rules or ethics or code of conduct that was maybe the glue that was allowing the boundaries for what was okay, not okay, or at least some sort of organizing principle for these 60,000 pirates that she's directing. As you start to think about how do you tell the story of her power and how she got into power, it seems like these rules and these code of conducts were a key part, but it's also a very abstract idea. So how do you start to really tell that story of how these code of conducts are really impacting an individual's life. So maybe you could talk about the broader context of those code of conducts and then your strategy for how to translate those rules down into something that is a compelling story.
[00:22:19.646] Morgan Ommer: So in the first episode, we described how she became a pirate. In the second episode, we described how she was able to manage and have power over 60,000 pirates. Pirates are not very good with authority. How did this woman, how was she able to control, manage and be respected? by all these pirates. The Code of Conduct actually describes these rules. And so they're very strict. Every time you make a mistake, you probably lose your hand or your life, or your ears, right? But there's one thing that is particular to these pirates. All pirates in the world have a Code of Conduct. You know, you're not allowed to steal from the community coffers, you're not allowed to, right? And punishment is usually very strong. The peculiar thing, the unique thing with Cheng I-sao's rules is they actually protected women. You were not allowed to rape the villagers or the captives. You were not allowed to have intercourse with anyone on board, even if they agreed, unless you had permission. And if you had permission, you were getting married and you were not allowed to cheat. These rules, the historical context, they were reported from one of the hostages these pirates captured, an Englishman called Richard Glasspool. They captured a couple, but Richard Glasspool, who was captured and kept on board for three months, waiting for the ransom, when he got back, he reported on these rules because he witnessed them. And so there's four or five of these rules that he wrote down. And the most interesting ones that we found are the ones that are proto-feminist. This is way, way before feminism. But the way she was able to have authority over these ruthless pirates is because these strict rules that protected women made for a more equal society, I guess. And all the pirates respected that.
[00:24:37.602] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah. And I think as Morgan said, we were inspired by Glassbow's book. And I think we're also inspired by the normal people living at that time. Like some of the pirates they become pirates is because they are abused or like bullied by the society on the land. So they cannot survive on the land and the soldier didn't treat them good. The soldier sometimes may be like the robber, like they just take the food and take the woman out. So this kind of people, escape on the sea becomes the pirates. So in episode two, I think we try to use the outsider's point of view to start the story. It's a captive. People think pirates are terrible, but when she gets on board and she starts to recognize maybe the barbarian feeling is not real. The pirate maybe is not a barbarian. they have their own rule and how they use the rule to fight with the society they don't want to get inside and how do you maybe the rule is really terrible yes it's terrible but that can keep the peace on the ship so is that good or no we don't know but That's the journey for Lin, our character, to discover. And also, there's some detail in Glasspole's book. He wrote about, oh, he didn't know that the woman really thin and short can also fight with the soldier and use the knife. They are strong. they are not what they see, like just outside. So I think we combine like two emotions, like one is the captive on the ship and from outside to looking at the inside, you have something, you learn something new. And also I think for audience, we are outside of history and how we look inside another history before and how we learn. Is there any experience or any problems still happened in 2024? Maybe, yes. So I think that's two angles we want to play with in episode two, different with episode one.
[00:26:43.886] Morgan Ommer: To establish, to share with the audience the way we've done it is exactly what Danqi just described. We used an outsider to come and witness what this society is like. This is our character, Lin. Who's then stuck between are these people barbarians or is the normal society from where I come from, you know, which one? And so this allows us to demonstrate to the audience.
[00:27:16.847] Dan-Chi Huang: And I think there is another emotion we still keep putting in the episode too, it's like, it's something like confused or wondering, because for outsiders, of course, they are confused and wondering what's happening. But I think for Zheng Yisao, it's the same. Like when she becomes a captain, I think she's not like really 100% like, I just do that. I think there's many things going through her mind. Does I do this right or wrong? Can I keep my power? How do I lead the people? So I think we bring this wandering feeling in episode two. on both sides, they are both thinking. It's not like, we don't want to give a 100% answer, like say, pirate is right, or pirate is what, so it's a question for everyone.
[00:28:00.248] Kent Bye: So you had mentioned before that in the first episode, the switch between the live action footage was the direct memories of the grandmother, who's the narrator telling the story, and the Tilt Brush is like the imagination of the child who's listening to the story. In this episode, you don't have that omniscient narrator, but you do have this character who breaks the fourth wall, who looks at the camera, who then starts narrating in a way that she's this outside character who is then also able to help tell the story. And the same function that the grandmother served in the first episode, now you have, rather than having a lot of voiceover with the grandmother, you have one of the characters who's on screen. And I actually watched different clips of both of them and to see the differences between the Mandarin Chinese version and the English version, because there were certain moments that were happening. And I was like, I wonder in the Chinese version, if they're just letting the scene play out, and they're not narrating it, because you know, you can understand what the dialogue was. And so I did notice that in the first episode, you did have a little bit more of like scenes that were playing out that if you were a native Chinese speaker, you'd be able to understand it. But in the English version, it was dubbed over with the narrator explaining what was happening because, you know, there's no subtitles and not translated. But in the second version, I noticed that because of the characters, you had more of a explicit dubbing where there was a lot more of the, translation was being dubbed, and it was such a small resolution that you couldn't necessarily see the unsynchronized lips or anything. It still felt like it was happening in English. But there's still that character who is breaking the fourth wall and describing things to the audience. So I'd love to hear a little bit more elaboration on that decision to take that different approach than what you did in the first episode.
[00:29:51.842] Morgan Ommer: So the Breaking the Fourth Wall, I think, works in 2D films, right? It's an old... It works in theater. It actually comes from theater. In VR, it works even more because the character directly talks to the viewer. So we thought we'd do that. The difference in the Chinese version and the English version is actually there's only, I think, one passage where in Chinese, we just listen to the dialogue. And in English, we add a voice because they're talking in Chinese. The idea was to bring the audience along. And so this is why we are using that. Actually, both Lin and Jenny Tsao break the fourth wall. And Jenny Tsao is a little more unclear. She might be or she might not be right. But the reason why we did that is for immersion. It's to address the viewer directly and get them involved. Also, it's kind of cool to do.
[00:30:52.799] Dan-Chi Huang: I think it's also like a reminder that usually when we read a story, we think that we are outsiders. These tragedies or these terrible things don't happen to us. But it's like the small characters in the story say, like, hey, you, you are with us. think about a problem with those. So that's why we want to play with that.
[00:31:15.607] Kent Bye: In the first episode, you talk about the different media representing different things, like the direct memories of the grandmother, and then the imagination of the child who's listening to the fairy tale story. And the second one, was there a similar rubric? Because there are some scenes where, you know, it's the live action volumetric, and then it goes into the more of the still life. And then you have more of the paintings that allow you to talk about like the villages. And so when I think about the live action, you're really able to have characters developed and have people speaking and more of a performance in a theatrical sense. And then with the still life, you're able to maybe set the context of the community of the pirates and what it was like on the ships without having to develop other characters or to do too much volumetric capture. You're able to still get a spatial architecture of the context of what it was like on these ships. But then when the pirates are going out into the world in the community, then it becomes even more abstracted into the paintings that it's even more of a distance and not even volumetric, but more of a 2d abstraction. So love to hear you maybe elaborate on the ways that you're representing these different contexts with the different media in the second episode.
[00:32:31.564] Dan-Chi Huang: I think for episode one, we try to make you believe the story we are telling is real. So we shoot it in real, like the clothes, everything is real, real, right? But I think in episode two, we use the opposite way. It's like people are telling the story. It looks like real people tell you the story, but what they say, probably it's not real. It's not real, it means like what Ling says is based on her experience. If today is another people get on the pirate ship, probably he won't or she won't feel like that. So that's why in episode two, we choose animation to compare with 4D view. That's one reason. and another reason of course is we also discussed about probably we do the real shooting for the deck and under the deck we just do the whole real shooting and for the technical problems I think we cannot make it like so immersed so we give up the idea because we want audience can feel like you really can get close to them and not like you are looking something still outside. So I think that for me that's a true big reason why we choose that and how maybe Morgan can add more.
[00:33:46.968] Morgan Ommer: And so the 2D paintings allow for flashbacks or for better context. They are, I think all of them, are what Lynn pictures. As she's talking, you can also see the image she has in her mind. That's the general idea. We also did that because of time and money constraints. But basically, this is how we made it.
[00:34:18.099] Kent Bye: One other follow on question. So there was another like shader effects where it felt like you had lightning. Just wondering if you can elaborate on some of those lightning effects and if it was pure animation, if it was 2d or if it was projecting on like AI style transfer onto it.
[00:34:37.055] Morgan Ommer: No, we didn't use AI. The lightning effect was actually quite difficult to get. The sound probably helps a lot, but to get the lightning effect, both in the opening scene and when they're fighting in the dark, was technically very challenging. So was the rain. The rain was also really hard to make. The constraint that we have is we're using only the headset, right? It's not a PC VR. So not that much memory or not enough. I'm actually quite glad that you noticed that. It took us a long time to get that working. We didn't use AI for that.
[00:35:19.937] Kent Bye: Yeah, especially because lighting and lighting effects are the thing that when you're on a mobile computer, you don't see as much of that. And I really appreciated the ways that you were playing with the lighting effects to give this almost like a film noir shadow effects that had a really nice effect to it.
[00:35:36.494] Morgan Ommer: Yeah. We spend a lot of time on lighting.
[00:35:41.827] Kent Bye: So you have the first episode, the second episode. Is there a planned series for like a number of episodes to really dig in and tell a much broader stories? And maybe you can talk about like what the future plans are to continue to tell this story and expand it out.
[00:35:55.060] Morgan Ommer: So originally, when I came to Estella, I had an idea for three interesting parts of Tengi Tsao's life. One, how she became a pirate. Two, how she was able to grow, maintain power over 70,000 pirates. And the third part is how she retired. Because unlike most other pirates anywhere, really, she then negotiated amnesty with the authorities, was allowed to keep everything she stole, retired and died of old age. And so how she retired in itself is an amazing story. Are we going to be able to make it? I'm not sure. Are we trying? Yes, we are. I would really like to do that third story.
[00:36:48.888] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah, I think if we can make episode three, that would be amazing because we do two VR. And as what Morgan say, I think the Retire was amazing. So if we can build up the set that you can really go inside the set, I think that will be really great. Like you watch two episode and then you go inside a real set or maybe a MR set, then that will be cool. Yeah. And also, I think if There's episode three, the whole story is more like there's an ending that we know where she goes. Because how she makes the decision was really interesting. She didn't choose to still become a pirate. She chose to go back to the land. And that combined many reasons. Also like how she takes care of a bunch of women and children for a long time. So I think episode three, that would be really cool. And also, for me, I would want to, if there's an opportunity to make a film, I mean like a really like shooting film for the pirates would be cool too. Yeah, but depends on the budget.
[00:37:55.168] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the fact that there's probably not a lot of other pirates that get to the point of being able to retire and keep all their money and all their exploits is pretty amazing. So, and each of these episodes, you continue to push forward the latest technologies and play around with what's possible for how to tell the story. So I would love to see that third episode too. So highly recommend any funders that may be listening to this to go this project through. Cause I think it's a very compelling story. So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'm curious to hear from each of you what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:38:34.282] Morgan Ommer: ultimate potential of virtual reality. Well, it's a really interesting tool to tell stories with. The problem, of course, is there's not enough or no real distribution. You mentioned the other project, the Pirate Queen, which is a game which actually may be a very good way forward. Most of the people using VR do it for gaming, right? For just storytelling, we are not there yet. I mean, episode one went to, I think, six or seven festivals. And then that's it. Distribution is still a big problem. If it could go into museums, it might help, but it's still not going to be accessible by mainstream public. So I'm hoping, but it doesn't entirely depend on us. We had the stories, we just need a place to determine.
[00:39:37.113] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah, for me, I think there's one point in VR that was really special for me, is VR interacts with your body. Maybe not your brain first, but your body first. Like, sometimes you watch the VR, they will recall your body feeling or your still will be moving by the VR project. So, I will say, like, For now, maybe humans use the brain too much. I mean, the body has no limit for the storytelling. So when we go into VR, I think I will try to not just focus on the narration, the visual, because there is something more like you can work with your body. And that will be a space I think we can try to do another project to work with this. So that's my feeling. Not brain, go back to the body.
[00:40:31.506] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just a quick comment on the distribution front is that it does seem like with the Apple Vision Pro that there are more options for Apple TV as well as with Disney, you know, at least from 3D movies and Apple Immersive Video. And I think the paying for and buying of apps and having it make sense for a financial perspective is still not there yet, even in the new platforms. And so there has been a very big focus on games and not so much to have a home for some of these projects that show at these film festivals, like South by Southwest Immersive, Kaohsiung Film Festival, Sundance New Frontier, Tribeca Immersive, Venice Immersive, Ifadak Lab, all these places where all these amazing stories are being told. But yeah, there isn't necessarily a home for them to be distributed out to the wide audience yet. Although there were a couple of like battle scar and gloomy eyes were on the festival circuit. And those are applications that are tape put out on the Apple vision pro. So yeah, it's at least a little bit more encouraging than meta, which has been very closed in terms of what they allow and what they don't allow on the main store. So yeah, I guess the final question is if there's anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community, I mean, see us at South by Southwest.
[00:41:44.467] Dan-Chi Huang: Yeah, I hope I can go to South by Southwest or I think also welcome other projects, VR projects come to Taiwan. The Kaohsiung Film Festival was a quite good society for VR exhibition.
[00:41:57.527] Kent Bye: Dante and Morgan, thanks so much for creating these two episodes of Man and Pirate. I think you're really blending and blurring a lot of the techniques of VR in a really provocative and interesting way and starting to tell a much broader story. And, you know, hopefully you'll be able to finish it out with this third episode and see how the story ends because we're at the point where we learn about who Madame Pirate is, how she's been able to maintain and gain this power, but now what happens at the end. I definitely want to know the last part of the story. So thanks again for taking the time to talk a little bit more about your journey into the space and your process of telling the story. So thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:42:33.858] Dan-Chi Huang: Thank you very much.
[00:42:35.740] Kent Bye: So thanks again for listening to this interview. This is usually where I would share some additional takeaways, but I've started to do a little bit more real-time takeaways at the end of my conversations with folks to give some of my impressions. And I think as time goes on, I'm going to figure out how to use XR technologies within the context of the VoicesOfVR.com website itself to do these type of spatial visualizations. So I'm putting a lot of my energy on thinking about that a lot more right now. But if you do want a little bit more in-depth conversations around some of these different ideas around immersive storytelling, I highly recommend a talk that I gave on YouTube. You can search for StoryCon Keynote, Kent Bye. I did a whole primer on presence, immersive storytelling, and experiential design. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just want to thank you all for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And 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 to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
