I interviewed Nightmara: Episode 3 director Gianpaolo Gonzalez at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s his artist’s statement:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] 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 storytelling projects from Venice Immersive 2024... Today's episode is with a piece that you can see on the MetaQuest. It's called Nightmara, and there's three episodes that have launched. It's by John Paulo Gonzalez, and this is like an independent-driven animation project in Quill, and very innovative storytelling structure with this main character named Mara who... is able to go into nightmares and find the differences between reality and nightmares and yeah just a lot of really interesting ideas behind this project but also just kind of like very innovative in the way that the stories are unfolding and continually pervert your expectations for where the story might be headed so definitely worth checking out it's available for folks to be able to see they were showing the third episode as a way of kind of highlighting this as a series And there's also just quite an amazing backstory from John Palo as well, as he talks about how he came into the virtual reality as an industry, but also how this project within itself came from some of his own dreams. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with John Palo happened on Thursday, August 29th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:36.095] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: My name is Gianpaolo Gonzalez. I'm the writer, director, animator, creator, visual effects designer for my VR animated series Nightmara. It's a Quill animated piece for the MetaQuest. It's available on the VR animation app for anybody to view if you've got a MetaQuest headset, and there's already three episodes available. Great.
[00:01:58.861] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:02.392] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Sure. Yeah, I went to USC film school, but I've been an artist ever since I can remember. I used to draw and write my own comic books when I was a little kid, and I would Xerox them and sell them on the blacktop for 25 cents. And then I remember specifically when I was really young, I wanted to be in my comic books. I wanted to be in my world. And it wasn't until 2016 when I taught myself VR animation using Quill that I designed my character Mara and I looked at her in the eyes and walked around her. Then I had that full circle moment where it brought me back to being a little kid wanting to be inside my comic book. And that moment I said I needed to stop whatever I was doing, which I was working in television development. So I was creating television shows and writing scripts and stuff like that. VR was such a monumental brain blower at that moment, and I said I had to create something for this space. And then when I was creating my own animations using Quill, and I was posting them to the MetaQuest, the VR animation app, Facebook reached out to me and said, do you have anything bigger? We love seeing your animations on there. What do you want to do next? And I had been working on Nightmara as like a 2D social media cartoon on Instagram. And I pitched them the idea. I said, well, my character Mara, she puts on a sleep mask and goes into a different realm, the nightmare realm. And we, as a viewer, put on a VR goggle to go in a different realm. It's almost like your mascot. It's like the Mickey Mouse of VR. And they love that. And they're like, okay, we love the idea to juxtapose the real world with the nightmare world. And I wanted to bring in, because Nightmare is a superhero who can save people from their nightmares, I decided, well, we've got to include some sort of version of a graphic novel to kind of give the viewer a subliminal message of superhero comic book feel. And I wanted to merge a TV animated cartoon together. So that's what I created to give the structure of Nightmare, the VR animated series.
[00:04:05.768] Kent Bye: Nice. And so maybe if we take a step back, what was your first encounter of like the modern resurgence of VR then?
[00:04:11.553] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Sure. This is a great story actually. In 2014, my dad was on a plane and he met this girl. They were drinking and having fun and they missed their flight. And they started talking and he asked her what she does and she said, I work in VR. And he's like, okay. And so when he landed, he said, Gian, call this girl right now. She works in this new thing called VR. And so I called the girl and she worked for a company called NextVR, which did all the sports and kind of big NBA, NFL, Formula One, racing, virtual reality, 360 video content. It was only the Samsung Galaxy that was inside like a plastic headset. And I watched that and it blew my head. And in that moment, in 2014, I was like, this is something. This is something. And then six months later, my dad was on another flight. and he met a producer. And he's like, oh yeah, my son's in VR now. And then when he landed, he goes, call this producer right now. And so I called the producer, I put together a meeting between him and NextVR, and I ran the show. And the owner, the CEO of NextVR was like, hey, do you need a job? You're selling our content better than we can. So that producer was mind blown himself, because he worked for reality shows, like big shiny floor game shows, like Survivor, MasterChef, like really big, big game show stuff. He went back to Sweden six months later. He called me. He said, I moved my entire family from Sweden to Los Angeles. I'm making a VR company and I want you to be my creative director. And I was like, okay. And so our first project was in 2016 and I was a VR consultant on a McDonald's commercial. And I had never done a VR project before that. So I had to really learn VR really quickly. And we shot that with the Google Jump camera, which was 12 GoPros attached into a ring. And it was just a huge project. But after that, I got Nickelodeon and Variety. And I just kept building. And I was writing, directing, animating all of our content for that. And it taught me a lot. editing, everything, stitching, you name it. I was doing everything, all of our projects by myself. And it just gave me the real good background on how to direct in the 360 space to then take that to the next level, which is animation.
[00:06:31.668] Kent Bye: That's quite a series of synchronicities there that makes it sound like you're like, you know, fated or destined to be in this whole field.
[00:06:38.948] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: It does feel like that, because it's funny, this whole entire process of making Nightmare has been a path of coincidences. Because when I came up in 2015, right around the time that I was getting intrigued with VR, I had a nightmare that followed me for three days in a row. And the first night, I didn't think anything of it. It was like a really weird nightmare. It was daylight. I'm in my bedroom, and there's this black entity wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and it felt like it was going to kill me. And I felt this extinguishing feeling of that my soul was going to be evaporated from life. And the moment he's towering over me, he suffocates me, and I wake up. I didn't think much of it the first night, but then the next night, I had the exact same nightmare to the exact same detail. But this time it was different because right when he was hovering over me, I heard this voice say, scream. And for some reason I felt like, oh, if I scream him away, I can get rid of him. But I couldn't make a sound. I was paralyzed. And so sure enough, he puts his hand over me and I suffocate and I wake up. So this time it happened two nights in a row. I'm going, okay, that's weird. Somebody was trying to tell me something. And so I told myself, literally I said, if it happens to me again, I don't care if I get a brain aneurysm, I'm gonna scream this thing away as much as I possibly can. Sure enough, the third night, same exact nightmare, he's right over me, but this time I was ready. And I felt in the moment he's about to suffocate me, I felt this white energy come from my toes travel all the way up to my chest. And with every muscle in my body, I screamed and it shot a white laser and it vaporized him to nothing. I woke up screaming with sweat pouring down my face like a cliche movie where you're waking up like shaking. And I'm standing awake in my bed at 4 a.m. and I'm going, what just happened to me? What if somebody was trying to save me? And then that got the idea. I was like, what if there's a superhero who's going around telling people how to get out of their nightmares? So that kind of spawned the idea for Nightmara. And so from there, I really wanted to get into animation. And I was like, this is a perfect vehicle for animation. We get to deal with the nightmares. We get to deal with the real world. We get to deal with really funny characters and funny monsters. It's a perfect world to explore with animation. so i wanted to get in so i what i do is i saved up enough money and hired an animator because i never animated anything before then and i had enough money so i made some animations on instagram and then i ran out of money because animation is very expensive but people kept asking where's the next episode where's the next episode and so i had to realize and right around this time quill had come out with animation and so i was like i got to teach myself and I spent four years teaching myself animation. But in doing so, the most important thing for me was finding the voice of Mara. Because I had a very specific voice in my head who was going to voice it. And I was like, how am I going to find a needle in a haystack? I'll have to interview 1,000 actors to get that voice that I want. So one day, me and my fiance, we were having lunch at a pizza parlor. And our waitress comes up, goes, yeah, what's up, dudes? I'm going to be here every day, every night. I will sling you pizzas until the day you die. Just let me know. Holler at me. Wave your hand. I'll be right there in a second, okay? Peace. And I look at my fiance and I go, that's Mara. And she goes, yeah, that's Mara. So when she comes back and she gives us the bill, I go, this is going to sound funny, but I have an animated series I'm creating and I think you're my main actress voice of it. She goes, I'm super down for it, dude. Hell fucking yeah, I'll do whatever you want. And so from that moment on, she's been the voice actress of Mara and she's never done voice acting before. But it's those instances that have really been a part of my coincidental journey into making Nightmara. And my whole entire life, I feel like I have to be an antenna because the universe will, if you ask for something, you need something, it's going to show you something and something that you're not prepared for, but you've got to be ready for it. And so I also had a very specific idea in terms of what the music was going to be. And this is like, okay, how am I going to find this? So I asked the universe, I'm going, okay, I got to find this. I want this feel. And sure enough, my mom had moved to Los Angeles because there was fires up in Northern California. So she moved down to Los Angeles where I lived for two years. And she had met a musician, a rock star musician who was kind of floating from couch to couch. And she's like a lover of music and a lover of art. She's an artist herself. and she was kind of driving him around to different gigs and concerts, and she's like, Gian, you gotta hear his music. I'm like, no, mom, no, I don't wanna hear some homeless guy's fucking music, you know? And so she was like, no, please, just listen to this. So she played some of his music, and it blew me away. It was exactly the tone I was looking for. And so I asked him, I said, hey, would you be willing to do my theme song for Nightmare? He's like, oh yeah and so that's how I got my theme music and my soundtrack to Nightmare and so it's just been a bunch of those types of scenarios where it's just I ask in my head this is what I need and then the universe goes in some funny weird way it presents it to me and I have to be willing to accept it and then it actually becomes better than I imagined so what you're saying is Nightmare is actually a documentary about your secret life as a nightmare superhero That's right. It's exactly how I connect with people. I find it more interesting when somebody shares their most embarrassing story or their most hideous fear. You end up knowing more about that person. And it's not until you hear that specific fear or specific embarrassing moment that you go, oh. They're relatable. It sheds them down to their really core individual person. I was like, that's who I am. I love sharing myself with people. I love hearing other people's really crazy, absurd stories. And so I felt like if I can create a superhero like that, it's speaking for me.
[00:12:38.874] Kent Bye: Nice. And so you teach yourself Quill over four years. You said that you were teaching yourself animation. Were you just looking at Quill tutorials? Were you looking at traditional 2D animation best practices? Talk about your process of upskilling yourself to become an animator.
[00:12:56.454] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Yeah, sure. So as a kid, I was always drawing and I wanted to be a cartoonist, but then I realized I had to make 24 images for one second. And I remember telling myself when I was around eight years old, I was like, I'm not going to be an animator. No way. And so I actually did not want to become an animator, and I wanted to be a filmmaker. But my sensibilities of my own stories that I have in my head really fit well with animation, the absurdities, the worlds that I want to build. And so it wasn't until after USC, after film school, and I was doing television development, I got my hands on it and doing the whole VR and finding virtual reality and finding Quill and realizing, OK, if I can do this myself, if I can create Nightmare myself, then I will be able to hold my own in front of meetings and be able to actually go to the next level and make movies and television shows. And people will give me that trust. So I forced myself to watch tutorials from Goro Fujita, Nick Ladd, Funi, like all the guys who are working with Quill. I decided to just study all their art, watch YouTube videos, tutorials, read all the books that I could and just constantly immerse myself and just get all the images out of my head and unclog it because they've been building up for so long that now I had this talent with Quill, which is amazing software that you can actually virtually paint everything in the moment and feel it. that gave me the opportunity to create Nightmara, first of all, but it was a lot of studying for four years, creating my own work.
[00:14:36.830] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you mentioned that you had worked in television and potentially done some previous writing, script writing, so talk about your process of designing the story, because it's an episodic series. I know that you've released, at this point, three episodes. You're showing episode number three here at Venice Immersive in 2024. And when you design a television series, sometimes you have like an idea of like the first season and then a full arc. And so I'm just wondering if you're taking more of an episodic approach of just doing one offs and kind of slowly building it out or if you have an idea of where the story is going wrong.
[00:15:11.280] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Yes, I definitely have a story. I know where I want to end it. I thought it was going to be around 100 episodes that I was going. I knew that if I had characters, they had their own motivation. So my main thing about writing is each character needs to be their own protagonist, but their own antagonist to another character. So each character, so for Mara, she wants to get to school on time, but the bus driver is too afraid to cross the bridge, so she's always late to school. And so each is an antagonist to each other. And then her teacher has a crippling obsession with the mayor, but Mara is a loudmouth and makes her embarrassed in front of the mayor. And so Ms. Maureen, her teacher, gets really upset and actually actively wants Mara expelled from school. So I knew that if I created characters that had their own motivations that were in conflict with everybody else's motivation, that that will take me a long way. So I have an idea where I want to take Nightmare. I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it's a long saga that I have planned. And I'm currently, I'm writing a feature film right now to expand on those ideas. But the writing comes from me. I read scripts all the time. I'm obsessed. I collect scripts. I've been reading scripts. I remember in high school, someone told me, or I read or saw a video or something that If you have not seen a movie yet and you want to see that, read the script first, imagine how you would direct it, and then watch the movie. So I did that maybe a hundred times before I really understood what was said in between the lines of a script. So now that's been an obsession with mine, and I think that's probably the most important thing in my journey right now is reading scripts all the time that I have never seen the movie to, imagining how I would direct it, and then seeing how that director directed the movie. And so that teaches me a lot in writing. And then working in television, I started in reality television. So you are still writing in reality, but you have to be very quick. You've got to create more character drama conflict than more plot-driven drama. So I'm much more interested in character than I am plot. But from that experience, I actually became a producer with Robert Rodriguez on his show, the director's chair. So I got to sit in on meetings and interviews with Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Jon Favreau, Robert Zemeckis, Sylvester Stallone. like all these amazing, amazing filmmakers that I was sitting in these, I was at Tarantino's house. I was stepping on his scripts in his living room and hearing him say, no, I just did it myself. And that was before I even got into like real heavy animation or any VR stuff. And it just kept in my head. No, I just did it myself. And so I, and doing, reading the scripts, writing scripts and doing animations, it really formed everything together because when you're a writer, you should be also a production designer a little bit. You should understand what the set means, what the characters are wearing, all those maisons saines, how much of that as the details to the viewer. And so that's been my process is just making sure each character has a conflict with every other character in the story, because that's what we're after. When you're a viewer, everything's interesting with conflict.
[00:18:31.047] Kent Bye: And one of the interesting things about virtual reality is that you're able to replicate what's happening in physical reality, but also incept yourself and go within the transcendent realm of ideal forms or this dream space or kind of like this non-spatial temporal realm where you're able to do all sorts of playing with boundless limits of potentiality for what canon cannot exist within this alternative world. And so what were some of the rules that you tried to set up between the interface between the physical reality and this nightmare dreamscape reality where there's some tethers between characters who are kind of living between each of these different realms?
[00:19:07.790] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: That's a good question. So I knew I had to study my own dreams. I dream a lot. My poor fiance, every morning I tell her a new dream. So I learned a lot by studying my own dreams. And I really realized that there are perspective shifts for me. And there's either the first point of view, there's the third person point of view, and then there are actually rules to nightmares, like you have to wake up. So for me, I had to make sure that there is a correlation between people who have dreams and that they watch my series, they should feel like, oh, this is kind of what I feel. Because you can't just do anything happenstance. I needed to make sure that there are some rules. So thankfully with Mara's character, she's a heavy sleeper. So that's kind of an inside joke with the cartoon is the fact that she can literally fall from the sky and then splat on the ground but still be awake and she's in pieces and she's snoring in the real world. And so there are just rules like that and the big rule for me was fears can never be destroyed. They can only be negotiated with. And so for me and Mara, she knew that she could only protect you so long because the fear's gonna keep coming back if that person doesn't face it, right? So she can protect you, she can shoot them away, she can blast them away, but sure enough, the next night, it's gonna come back and haunt you, and if you don't face it, you're gonna continue to live with that. And so for me, it was really important that Mara just doesn't, shoot a fear or a monster and it's gone. No, she helps you in that moment, but it comes back either scarier or more deformed. And it's up to the character she's trying to help to face that fear, whatever it is. And for instance, with Nightmara, she's trying to help a six-year-old boy named Ned who's just been adopted, but he's getting confused with the word adopted and abducted. And so it becomes this alien abduction nightmare where they're trying to force him to eat peas, which is his worst food that he hates. And I knew that in order for him to escape, he actually had to trust Mara and actually take a bite out of a pea maggot, which, because in him, in his nightmare, these peas are in the form of little pea maggots that are pulsing and disgusting. So he's got to take the trust. And trust Mara when she says, just eat it, eat it, and you'll wake up. And so he takes a bite, and the moment he takes a bite, the alien head explodes. And he sees that correlation in the moment. Oh, if I go through with the thing that I don't want to do at all, it actually is a benefit. It'll save me. So I play on some rules. There are some things where you get to play with in nightmare worlds, which is really fun, is the chaos and the craziness of it. But there needs to be a grounded element that people can follow.
[00:22:00.270] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I was watching, I watched all three episodes because I missed it coming out, which, by the way, is a separate issue, which is how Meta is advertising and promoting this. I'm just curious to maybe, before we dive into that other part, what's your experience of... My impression is that Meta had gotten a lot of money to produce a lot of these kind of cool pieces, but that once the Horizon Worlds had come about, that a lot of the producers were kind of pulled off into focusing on Horizon Worlds, and so all of this sort of independent... storytelling and art and animation of pushing forward the grammar of the medium, which I think is amazing, which I documented a lot of what was happening at Venice last year, but it feels like less attention and resources put onto promoting different elements of the medium aside from their own meta horizon worlds. That's my theory, at least as to what happened, but just curious to hear some of your experience of producing this piece and then what some of the frictions might've been for getting the word out about it.
[00:22:57.051] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Yeah, great question, because that's a frustration with all of us, all of us Quill artists, is the fact that there is this abandonment of this medium. It's just this kind of push away to the side. We want to focus on the metaverse. There's a different medium for sure. But the problem with that is these types of experiences is what separates meta from the Apple Vision Pro. Because Apple Vision Pro doesn't have this six DOF, fully immersive, animated type series that you can just click a button and you're in. And not just that, but there's thousands of little animated experiences that you can walk in. So for me and many other artists, Quill artists, we're very frustrated with the fact that Meta kind of doesn't see the potential and there are people like you who are keeping this alive like you're interviewing other people and other Quill artists and keeping that alive for us and so it's people like you and people like us that are doing these projects to keep this going and hopefully one day and Meta will realize what this is and because this, in my opinion, is the next step of television and animated experiences that I think the new generation of kids, because they're living on TikTok, they are so used to instant gratification. They're so used to having a hundred videos in their pocket at one given time. So how do you get their attention? And with virtual reality and animated series, your attention is completely in that moment. So you've got to keep it and So I really hope that Meta kind of gets their head out of their butt and realizes that this is the future. And I think there's, from people here at Venice, I saw a girl just an hour ago who came over to me and just said, this is what I've been looking for. I'm a manga reader. I've been reading manga since I was 10 years old and I've always wanted to be inside a manga. This is what it is. And so it's going to take a lot of more experiences like Nightmara to get people cheering for it. I think it's going to take a little bit of time, but Meta should realize what they have now because it separates them from the Apple Vision Pro.
[00:25:03.703] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think, and from my perspective, I rely upon the festival curators like Liz and Michelle of Venice to highlight some of the best of selection of stuff that the industry may have missed. And I think Liz had said that This is a series that even didn't come across their radar in terms of something that they had discovered. So I feel grateful that I had a chance to see it in the program and then went back and watched through all of it. And I guess what I was originally going to say is that the narrative architecture ends up having a lot of twists and turns that are surprising or things that I don't quite expect. And so it's like one of those stories where I don't quite know exactly where it's going to go, but it's interesting because it's stimulating all those parts of my mind of like, trying to predict what's going to happen and being wrong and then getting this kind of double meaning. I got to be a little bit more on top of it to see where this is going because it's kind of unpredictable. So it's kind of chaotic in that sense in the best type of way where you're able to really lean into the freedom that you get for doing a project like this in animation where you can have that type of freedom to do that type of creative narrative exploration. So I'd love to hear a little bit reflections on that.
[00:26:10.325] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: No, another great question. For me, my favorite writer is Charlie Kaufman. He is somebody who, when I read his scripts, I can never predict the next page. And for me, that is more rewarding for me to actually experience experience a movie or a television series that I think I know where it's going, but it takes me into a different area. So I've always been really cognizant about that. When I wrote Nightmara, I wanted to have people think that they were going somewhere, and then it takes a left turn. And that's always what nightmares are. You never know where a nightmare is leading you. So I had to use that as a structure. And if I made it predictable, if I made it very plot heavy and plot driven, then it would become predictable, then it wouldn't become a nightmare anymore. And so I had to focus on that structure. And that was a key element for my writing, was making sure that it felt like a dream, even when she's in the real world. It needed to feel like, for instance, Mara in the real world, it's her nightmare. She's a much more comfortable character when she's in the nightmare world than when she is in the real world. And that's kind of how I feel. I live in my imagination 24-7. It's kind of a curse, but I needed to make sure that that kind of perspective on life was the structure of Nightmara.
[00:27:29.779] Kent Bye: In terms of dreams and dream interpretation, have you looked into any traditions of dream interpretation, like a Jungian or Freudian theories of the different symbols and the ways of core traumas that are encoded into these symbolic experiences? So yeah, I'd just love to hear about your process of digging into the existing scholarship or research or lineages and traditions about dreams.
[00:27:53.095] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Oh, definitely. I read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and I've read a bunch of Carl Jung, and so that's all a part of Nightmara. Because if you watch Nightmara, you realize in each episode she has a repressed trauma trying to get her attention. So in episode one, it starts with the laundry monster, which is her fear of doing laundry, which is just picking up after herself. But then the next episode, she gets a little bit deeper into her nightmare and realizes she's being haunted by these tombstones, the cemetery of her mom and dad. And so we kind of we don't really understand what those are, but they're just repressed traumas that keep popping up. And then in episode three, we see when she's deep down in the deepest part of her subconscious that these really disfigured students are calling her murder baby. And so the story is that Mara's mother was murdered when she was pregnant. and so there's this repressed trauma that she's never faced yet and she's too scared to and she just keeps fighting it off fighting it off like you'll see there's this moment where she she yells shut up and this big sonic boom vaporizes those students away but she's never faced them yet she's never understood where that comes from so the repressed trauma that's something that haunts mara And it's something that she's going to be dealing with. And that's going to be her character arc is you can never help clean somebody else's room if your room is messy. And that's kind of a theory that I live by. If you know, if I'm trying to help people, I can't be messed up in my own head. I got to make sure that I'm level headed and I'm taking care of my own business before I help somebody else. It's kind of like that idea in an airplane. You should put on the oxygen mask first and then help somebody else put on their oxygen mask.
[00:29:44.332] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so now that you've got three episodes out of the aspirations of around 100 of the episode series, and so it sounds like you're writing a film. Is the film also in Quill?
[00:29:55.017] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Yes, the film will be in Quill because right now Meta has paused on doing any future Quill pieces. I'm not sure when they pick that back up. I don't know kind of what's happening. But in that meantime, since I'm not contracted to do any more episodes for Quill yet... I'm still using Quill, but now I want to do a new added version of kind of the style I've already set up. In Quill, you have to paint the light to make it sure that it looks lit. Like a set, if I want it to look like it's neon, I got to paint it to look neon. If I want it to look like it's daylight, I got to paint it to look like it's daylight. There's no lighting, there's no rendering, nothing like that. But what's really cool is once I have that set lit that way and I bring it into Blender and I add lighting on top of that already established painted light, it adds this HDR really cool effect. And so I've been doing some new design and rendering techniques to find a new look, a much more mature, much more professional look to create an animated feature film for this. And so I've been writing a feature film. I'm about 90 pages in and probably end up being about 130 pages, 140. And then my next step is to get out there and pitch this. But my lawyer, actually, he's a big comic book, TV and film lawyer. And he saw Nightmare and he flipped. He's like, dude. you gotta write a script. You gotta get this going. And so, taking that kind of confidence, I've been going, okay, I gotta do this. So, I've been writing it for the past couple of months and thankfully I got to start with Quill first and learn, okay, there's aspects that I want to make sure that are a little bit more clear or I need to establish those little bits of information ahead of time so that I can kind of weave in the story and make it a much broader story. But Thankfully I started with Quill to kind of teach myself that and now that I've got like a little bit of a background and a little bit of story to kind of work from I can adapt that and extrapolate all the best pieces of it.
[00:31:55.783] Kent Bye: And so are you going to be like rendering it out in like Cinema 4D or what's your pipeline to go from Quill and then to Blender then where?
[00:32:03.280] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: It would be actually just from Quill to Blender. And because a buddy who's been in the VR space, he's done a lot of great work for plugins from Quill and Blender. He created a plugin that you can import a Quill scene directly into Blender and work right away and add lighting and stuff. So the workflow is incredibly easy. And because I'm already proficient and fluent in Quill, it makes it like a much easier process. And I've already made great relationships with other Quill artists and Quill studios. And that way I've got a great team that I'm ready to go. Like, oh, the moment we sign a deal, I've got the team ready to go.
[00:32:45.816] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, it's certainly very exciting. And what's it been like to be here at Venice and be able to exhibit and show your pieces in a way that a lot of times, like when you show VR pieces on the store, there's not a lot of great ways to get direct feedback from people. So what's it been like for you to be at this public showing of Nat Mara?
[00:33:05.720] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: It's honestly been a dream come true. Liz and Michelle, they've been amazing curators. Like all the pieces here are so unique in their own way. And they have been very supportive of artists in different mediums. And so if it wasn't for them, I don't know what would happen really. And so they've been doing this for the past couple years now. And I've had my friends go here last year and they said it was incredible. And then I got the opportunity to come here. And it's just the way they've set it up on their own island. It's only like a literally a 30 second boat ride from the shore to immersive island. And it's all air conditioned. It's everything looks so sleek. It's everything is it's beautiful. It looks like an art museum for the new technology and new medium. So they've done an incredible job. I get to sit and watch these people come in and experience Nightmara and see their reactions right away. And I've gotten amazing feedback. I've gotten people who just go, where is this? Where has this been in my life? So it just shows us that there is a want and there is some people subconsciously know that there is something available like this in the future. They just haven't had the resources or even the promotion to even know that this stuff exists. And thankfully for people like Liz and Michelle, who run the Venice Immersive side of Venice Film Festival, that we get to do this. It's been incredible.
[00:34:31.851] 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?
[00:34:41.229] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: Yeah, that's a good question. So I think it comes with there's actually so much to pick apart here. But in what I want to do next, I want to do location based virtual reality experiences where you're dealing with an entire building. People are walking around and interacting with physical objects and the immersive world too. I want to combine the real world and the virtual world as close as possible. I'm working on a really cool project that we're trying for that. We're hoping to get about 60 people in at a time to do this experience. I can't really say much more about it, but it's an incredible opportunity. I've been working on it for eight months now. And so hopefully that will show what the future of VR will be. And I just want to blend as close to possible the real world and the virtual world. And that's using eye tracking technologies, that's using mixed reality, that's using haptic technology. So if you put on a vest and you get shot by something, you feel it. So there's games that are doing that, but then how do you weave a narrative around that And it comes to the point where the technology of the headset, I believe, needs to be more streamlined for mass audience adoption. And so I believe with Apple Vision Pro, with a meta headset, with Index and Valve, they're trying to get there. And it's only a matter of time before it happens. I've been working in this industry for 10 years now and I've been here every step of the way pushing this medium forward trying to do what I can in the medium and tell my own really trippy bizarre stories in this and I think virtual reality really lends itself to a new language of cinema that has yet been explored and we're just exploring it now.
[00:36:28.387] Kent Bye: Yeah and I think a lot of that grammar and language of VR as a storytelling medium has been developed in animations and so especially with Covering a lot of the cool artists last year and just generally in the history of film, animation's been right there and helping to push forward what's even possible because there's not as many constraints. It's a boundless representation of your imagination and what can be represented. So, yeah, I really feel like that pieces like Nutmara and other cool pieces are, especially the Art of Change this year, is one that I was particularly resonating with just because there is so much... continued evolution of being able to transform the space and to modulate it in a way that, yeah, it's just really quite beautiful. But yeah, just generally a lot of animations that have been able to, over time, really shape the grammar of the medium.
[00:37:17.065] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: And I will say that the most important thing in virtual reality for me is do not make it boring. Because if somebody has a headset on, the last thing you want to do is bore them, because then they get frustrated. And if you get a frustrated viewer, then they don't want to be in there. So with me, I've had to learn a lot. I've worked on scenes for two months that I've had to scrap and redo. And I've had to do a lot of study on the ballet of the eye. Because in film, you have the x-axis and the y-axis that your eyes can go. So it's either up, down, or left to right, really, or diagonally. But in virtual reality, there is six degrees of freedom that you've got to pay attention to. So now you've got to deal with the Z axis. And so that was always in my head was, okay, in this scene, how do I make it more fun and dynamic? But... i cannot make it confusing it's gotta feel natural and so what i did was i actually created a headset in quill that had angles of point of interest that i would always wear in each scene so that if a character was moving to my left i would track it with an x on it and then the next scene there would have to be something that would start at that X and then move away because when you're looking at a piece of art and your eyes are moving because the piece is telling you that and it's just happening naturally, that's what makes a great piece. If it's just static, you don't know where your eyes should go, it becomes almost a frustrated experience. So I knew intuitively I needed to make sure that people were in a ballet with their head movement. so i did episode one and i would record everybody i brought to my house i go watch it and i would record them and i would see how their heads were moving where they were static where they were maybe kind of just you know staying still to a little too long and then i learned from that so episode one i think there was only 13 scenes in about 13 minutes and episode two i doubled it so it was about 25 scenes in the same amount of time because i learned and so i i realized that there was And also the story does add more dynamics. Basically episode two is act two and episode three is act three. So act two is a much more dynamic kind of story. I've already set up the characters, set up the world, but I needed to make sure that the eyes were constantly intrigued by something. And in the moment that they, I have to make sure that their attention is where it needs to be. And it's a balancing act. It's a lot of studies, a lot of watching the same scene 100 times and then redoing it and redoing it and redoing it and making sure if I'm being surprised as the artist, then I know somebody else will be surprised too. I have to constantly chase being surprised. If I feel boredom in any slightest, I know somebody else will feel that 100 times. So that's been the biggest thing for me is making sure that I'm not making something boring. Great.
[00:40:22.676] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:40:28.032] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: let's keep fighting and keep pushing this medium forward because we have yet to scrape the surface.
[00:40:34.275] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast today. I really enjoyed the Nightmare series and looking forward to seeing more how you continue to develop this IP. And I'll have to go back and watch some of these episodes again and pay attention to my ballet of my head movement and ballet of my eye movement. I like that as a turn of phrase. It's really nice to think about. And Clearly, you've been thinking deeply around both the theory and practice of storytelling and script writing and animation. You're diving deep into a deeper part of yourself that seems to be connected to something that's coming through, that seems very much coming from another realm. You yourself are blending in between the different realities, I should say. It's been fun to hear a little bit more about how that's been for you.
[00:41:19.538] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: i totally thank you for recognizing it because it is such a weird dream to me to do this experience but with night mara and i had to make sure that if people watch this once and they want to watch it again i have to give them something new so i've hidden easter eggs in every scene and for instance mara uses a squirt gun in the nightmare world to as her weapon of choice in the real world her grandma wakes her up with the same squirt gun. So there's that correlation that her brain makes subconsciously. And then the car she drives in the nightmare world, I don't know if you've found this, but there's a little Barbie car, the same exact one she drives, that's old and forgotten and sun bleached in the front of her mobile home. And it's just laying in the front of her house. And so I've realized that's been the only car that she's ever driven. And so that's what her brain correlates with a car to drive. So I've added a lot more. And posters, if you read the posters, everything that you look around you has something to do with the scene that you're watching that adds much more in-depth detail to the story overall. And I needed to make sure I do that because people... And my favorite stuff, I have to watch a second time to even understand it a little bit more. And that's been actually some of the best feedback is people are contacting me from all over the world going, I've watched this 20 times. And they love it because they find something new each time. And I've set it up that way because I know how rewarding that is as a fan to watch something that the creator has given so much attention to that it's a fun thing for me to find people go, oh my God, I found that car. It's in the front of her lawn the entire time. So that's been like a huge reward. And there's a one comment that I got recently that topped every comment I've ever received from anything. And the comment said, this is like almost verbatim because I've memorized it. He said, this has to be fruition because I brought my headset on the toilet and I sat down to go to the bathroom and some reason Nightmare started playing episode one and I did not leave the toilet till I finished the whole entire series. and i save that comment and i whenever i'm working alone at 2am in the morning and i feel like i can't go i'm a terrible artist i pull that phone out i read that one comment and it makes me realize okay if he likes it i can do it for him and that's been kind of my pleasure for this awesome
[00:43:47.216] Kent Bye: Very, very beautiful to hear that. So, yeah, John Palo, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down and all your journey. And, yeah, looking forward to see where you take this in the future as someone to definitely look out for, for sure.
[00:44:01.070] Gianpaolo Gonzalez: And thank you, Kent, for keeping our voices in VR heard. Appreciate it, man. Thank you very much. For sure.
[00:44:07.817] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
