I interviewed Uncanny Alley: A New Day co-directors Rick Treweek and Stephen Butchko along with Ferryman Collective’s Deirdre V. Lyons and Christopher Lane Davis at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] 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 Venice Immersive 2024, Uncanny Alley, A New Day They saw it and they really wanted to build out in a whole immersive journey in this world where you're kind of in this cyberpunk future where all these corporate overlords are controlling different aspects of these virtual spaces and metaverse. And so it's kind of like this journey to try to escape this world in order to go and build the open metaverse. So it's a piece where you're kind of spawned in and it's more of a theatrical staging of everything. So there's not as much kind of like live action role play. So even though there's like an open world adventure that you're going on, you're very much being led through the story that's being told to kind of tie the reason for why you're going from point A, B to C all the way through to the end of the experience. And they also ended up having a couple of actors play like somewhere between a dozen or 15 different roles. And so there's kind of like a rapid cycling of these different characters. And so, yeah, I think, you know, it's very interesting intersection between what's happening with immersive theater and the VR chat world building. And also, you know, the VR world that they built was compatible for quest as well. So, so yeah, just some world-class world building on top of this VR immersive theater troop that is weaving everything together through the story that they're telling. Yeah. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Uncanny Alley, A New Day happened on Sunday, September 1st, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:10.445] Rick Treweek: Hi, my name is Rick Trewick, and people know me as Metarik. I've been in VR for, sure, since Google Cardboard days, and a lot of experimentation, a lot of original kind of sculpture content and sci-fi worlds, I'd say, yeah.
[00:02:29.491] Stephen Butchko: I'm Stephen Buchko. I'm one of the founding members of... Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Kent. Happy birthday to you.
[00:03:00.626] Kent Bye: Thank you. Thank you. All right.
[00:03:02.348] Stephen Butchko: And now for something completely different.
[00:03:07.613] Kent Bye: So you were saying?
[00:03:09.495] Stephen Butchko: I'm done. My work is done here. My name is Stephen Buchko. I'm one of the founding members of Ferryman Collective. We produce live scripted theater in virtual reality.
[00:03:22.028] Christopher Lane Davis: Hello, my name is Christopher. As an artist, I go by Screaming Color. I make some VR chat worlds. I'm best known for my Gumball Lounge and Club Gumball. And my most prominent work the last few years has been working with Ferryman Collective.
[00:03:34.311] Deirdre V. Lyons: Hello, my name is Deirdre V. Lyons. I'm with Ferryman Collective and, yeah, part of this crazy group that made something magical happen.
[00:03:42.993] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:48.200] Rick Treweek: Sure, so I've been game developer, character designer since as far as I can remember. I've kind of been on a quest to see how close I can bring characters to life and that's kind of taken me on a journey from animation to game design to 3D printing to electronics all in the quest to see how close I can bring my characters to life and I think when I tried Google Cardboard the first time and actually you know inhabited a character that was really the pivotal moment in my journey and adopting VR because I think Currently that is purely the closest you can be to seeing characters come to life and I think through that journey doing a lot of experimentation, a lot of works and finding platforms like VRChat where essentially it's like a Unity multiplayer where it's a sandbox, an infinite sandbox of players. So yeah, that's where I kind of play in this space.
[00:04:45.672] Stephen Butchko: I am primarily an actor and a producer, and I guess adding a couple more credits to the list with this project, but Ferryman Collective started producing this kind of work during the pandemic. When we were all locked at home, we discovered that the 360 virtual space allowed us to continue producing live immersive theater, now to a global audience.
[00:05:13.163] Christopher Lane Davis: Well, I first started working on 3D design was working at a gay nightclub. And so I got really good making shiny rainbows and neon stuff like that. And so at the beginning of the pandemic, I first started dabbling in a VR chat world because I wanted a way to deliver my music primarily to the world, bigger audience. So after I released my World Gumball Lounge, Deirdre, who also likes shiny rainbow things, just approached me and she told me that she loved my work and essentially the Ferryman Collective recruited me as the special effects and animations designer and then I also commandeered the soundtracks as well for our last three shows. And I just love working with them because the reason I originally set out to make a video game, in addition to the music thing, was to kind of offer an opportunity for the player to sort of have this spiritual, cathartic mirror held up to them. And so it's been really cool working with Ferryman Collective because that has very explicitly magnified the ability to do that in a very narrative way.
[00:06:11.668] Deirdre V. Lyons: Well, you know, Ferryman Collected started after The Underpresents and Tempest closed because I was one of the performers in that along with Witt and Frank, one of our other team members. And we wanted to continue this journey of like the live theater in VR. We'd done several shows, Welcome to Respite, Gumball Dreams. We did the English version of Find Willy that Wynton Frank directed. And now Steve is getting the opportunity to do the theatrical direction of this production, and I'm assistant directing that. And it's been like Mr. Toad's wild ride.
[00:06:44.110] Kent Bye: Great. Well, I know last year at Venice Immersive, there was a whole Uncanny Alley world that you built, Rick, that was part of the competition here. And so I know you've also been involved with the Metaverse crew. And so maybe you could just give a little bit more context for how the Uncanny Alley world came about.
[00:07:02.321] Rick Treweek: Yeah, sure. So Uncanny Alley for me kind of started in, like I say, in VR chat, trying to develop, you know, everyone that gets into these social VR platforms, I think, initially wants to try and be as real as possible and inhabit these real avatars. And quite often you see people make that transition. The deeper they get into these platforms, they start getting less and less real. So Uncanny Alley was kind of a journey of playing off the uncanny valley saying where you know seeing that digital human and that awkwardness that comes so playing on the opposite side of that how how deep does that rabbit hole go in terms of the other side and really came about for the style of the creation so instead of you know spending countless hours on fixing little things, kind of really playing with the glitchiness of the characters, you know, it's the uncanny alley, it's the brokenness, it's the, you know, everyone's there trying to survive in this metaverse space. It really also is quite a topical diary in a sense. The previous Uncanny Alley was very much a commentary on the current state of the metaverse as it was then. You know, that story was very much about Ghost trying to find this concept of the open metaverse and you're constantly trying to find her but you could never actually find her in this world. And eventually you realize she's actually broken out of that metaverse and you could find her on these various web platforms. So a lot of it is kind of a commentary on popular culture, very much influenced by books like Ready Player One and playing a lot of those topics of is, you know, people say it's still coming, but I think a lot of people in these platforms like VRChat, the metaverse is really here and it's the The pushing of that boundary, how real can you make these worlds? Because a lot of people actually do exist in them and there's clubs, there's worlds. So Uncanny Alley was really, I wanted to build something that was way bigger than a world, that was actually a place. I call it a civilization in the metaverse. Great.
[00:09:10.567] Kent Bye: Well, that was a foundation of the context of the world that you had built that serves as the foundation of this iteration of Uncanny Alley with this immersive theater showing. So maybe from the Ferryman Collective side, elaborate a little bit about your experiences of this world and then deciding to use that as a context to be able to tell further stories on it.
[00:09:32.697] Stephen Butchko: In 2021, Deirdre and I were here at the Biennale representing another show of ours called Welcome to Respite. And we were at the Excelsior Hotel sitting in on a panel discussion that Rick beamed in from Johannesburg. He was doing a panel talk with somebody else, and he comes in to us on the big screen in his avatar. I think you were in Uncanny Alley, and that was when we became acquainted with you. first. And Deirdre and I were like, wow, this is somebody that we have to know. And then the following year in 2022, we were back at the Biennale representing Colors and Deirdre's show Gumball Dreams. And by that time, Rick's World Uncanny Alley was also moving through the festival circuit along with our show. And we were so busy here that we didn't get a chance to really take a peek inside of it. That was until Raindance came. We both found ourselves in Raindance, and Deirdre and I took a tour of Uncanny Alley with Rick, and the themes and the dark, dystopic, yet whimsical nature of the show, of the world, just resonated with us immediately, and we knew that this was something that we would love to use as a backdrop with all of these beautiful characters and the lore that he created and the world. And I remember when he was setting up the tour and it's PC VR and he was getting ready to launch the tour and this guy spawned in in Quest and landed in the little dingy prison cell that's part of the spawning area. And Rick says, oh yeah, if you come in on Quest you land in the prison and that's it, that's all the further you can go. And I immediately loved that. And I thought, I want to do a show, do a story based in Uncanny Alley. And that's where I want the onboarding to happen, where all of the audience members just spawn into this prison cell and they have no idea why they're there. And then the story just takes place and unfolds from there.
[00:11:38.953] Kent Bye: Nice. And do you have any memories of first seeing the Uncanny Alley world?
[00:11:42.876] Deirdre V. Lyons: Oh, hell yeah. Oh my god, yeah. Steve and I were like, it's all here. It's like low-hanging fruit. There's all of these characters in this world, and there's a story all around this thing. And we were just like, wow, this just needs the live actors to just come in and tear it apart.
[00:12:02.185] Stephen Butchko: This is something that we've talked about through our journey through starting to produce theater in VR, is that there's all these very talented folks that build these worlds that exist in VR chat. And most of the time, it's the builders and friends go through these worlds and say, I did this, and I did that, I built this, and they talk and hang out. And then they give a world hop to another one. And we've always thought, man, this would be cool. They're just waiting to be brought to life with stories. There's so much rich potential storytelling here. So that's... That's what we're always thinking about. And they did that with Gumball Dreams. That's how that is.
[00:12:35.947] Kent Bye: What was your first impression of Uncanny Alley?
[00:12:38.589] Christopher Lane Davis: So I didn't even see Uncanny Alley for the years that they had. I was sort of out of the loop a little bit because at the end of last year, I was very focused on adapting Gumball Dreams to Mandarin, which showed at KFF again last year. And so that was pretty all-consuming. And so finally, when the dust settled from that, you know, it was... Because I'm so incredibly ingrained in what everything Ferryman does, but I... Now that I had the bandwidth to check it out, you know, Rick basically took me in to Uncanny Alley for the first time. And needless to say, it's freaking amazing. And one of the exciting things about that day is because it was kind of a two part tour. He showed me everything that he had so far. and also I got the opportunity to sort of take him a little tour on a couple of the things that I had done for the specific reason of I knew that one of the most things that he was stressed about was being able to make this as much as he hoped it could be based on his standard of quality, but he was really worried about making it in Quest. And so making things pretty on Quest has been sort of like one of the cornerstones of what has made me successful so far in VRChat. And so I was able to take him into the quest version and say like, no, we can make it look like glowing and magical and sparkly. And so I just felt his relief dripping that day. And that was very exciting.
[00:13:57.341] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah, I saw it in PC VR for the latest iteration, at least. I think I've always only seen it in PC VR. But Rick, I know that when I first saw Uncanny Alley, I think you were the one who gave me the tour. And I think you were able to add a little bit more of the lore than maybe I would have gotten if I would have just gone in through the world. And so maybe you just speak a little bit around the process of environmental storytelling, because it's got a lot of rich lore that's kind of embedded into the world. But that it was kind of sparse in a way that if I would have just gone without that guided tour, then I wouldn't have known nearly as much as what I got from hearing from you a little bit more around that story. But I'd love to hear a little bit about your own process of how you normally use world building and environmental storytelling.
[00:14:41.877] Rick Treweek: Yeah, so I think that version of Uncanny Alley was very much, again, it's kind of topical conversations around what's happening in the space. And I think initially building, it's like building stages, multiple stages. And how do you get audience to navigate certain things? It's all set in this dystopian future where you know, the big Metas kind of runs everything. They own all our data, including, you know, physical data. So the last kind of way left to transverse these worlds is the toilet system, which is the last thing connecting humans together. And during that stage there, you know, I was exploring this idea of the open metaverse, these other platforms and other concepts. But at that stage, there was also very kind of big backlash towards any of this kind of, you know, let's call it crypto space or NFT space. So I wanted to kind of tell that story in a way without getting people upset in a sense. So half the world is very much accessible in terms of this is how you get to the certain rooms, you know, jump through the toilet. There's your four other options to go to the different spaces. But while you're exploring this world, building it like an actual physical space, If you're really into it and you've got the time, it's constantly playing these little cinema pieces on the TVs. Now, if you sit and actually watch all of these, you start realizing that those portals are not just the only way to get around. There's a whole hidden world by the nature of being curious enough you start finding other channels and you start realizing there's a deeper meaning in these spaces and I think the challenges like you say without really if you go there very quickly and many people did visit it very quickly and they're like oh very nice world but very few of them actually got all the way through to the end and Again, the commentary on, you'll notice in the avatar room, Skull, which is one of the old classic VRChat avatars, you know, people are very against NFTs and all of that, yet Skull is one of the most famous VRChat avatars and there he is as a NFT. So a lot of these stories that you might not recognize just passing, but people that are into the space would recognize these type of things and by following that kind of thread, they would eventually find these underground hacker spaces where the information is now presented out there. But it's a very interesting way of how you draw an audience to where you want to go. And I think that's what got me so excited about working with the Ferryman team is that now we actually have people there to lead the audience into spaces. And I think, again, being able to build stages that are basically infinite is what is so exciting because one world can have many, many different worlds inside. So I'd say the biggest thing is experimentation and the question of what if and how can you do something is kind of the process.
[00:17:40.270] Kent Bye: Yeah, my recollection of the world was that it was a little bit more open-ended and you can go in different directions. It was less of a linear like go here, here, and here because there were these kind of hidden areas that you would have to jump off this ledge and then you would be able to find this other thing. And so there's kind of branching points in that. in that in order to have a narrative it was much more of a linearization of that creating a pathway to the vibe of the world that was there but also translating it into like you're going to go from this scene to next scene to next scene throughout the course of the story and so i guess i'm curious from the collaboration from Ferryman and Metarek to come up with how do you create a pathway that's a little bit more linear, but also is telling a story. So you have to both at the same time know how the story's developing, but also know how the world's developing. and iteration can be hard when you've already built the world and you like and i guess you can like move stuff around especially within the context of unity but there is a little bit of back and forth there of trying to figure out both the story and the world and i'm just curious how that dialogue started to progress from trying to figure out okay here's what we have now let's like change it to have these different scenes in these worlds but have it more of a linear path
[00:18:53.666] Stephen Butchko: Yeah, it starts with copious amounts of scotch and other assorted drugs. The nature of our work, it kind of rests at theater, cinema, and games. And so there's elements of all of those that we're playing with. And there's a relationship with the audience and the actors and the audience and the world. And it's sort of this juggling act that we have to keep in the air. And so... Uncanny Alley is such a rich world that Deirdre and I wanted to, as we were developing the story, it was primarily the two of us that came up with the story and then we'd send it to Rick. We wanted to showcase as much of that world as possible. and Rick has never worked with a team like us before, so there's some things that are happening that he hasn't done before, so we came up with this synopsis that we thought could showcase the world and then also tell something of a linear story or at least establish the groundwork that we could build a linear story on. And we sent it to Rick and nobody said no to us. We just kind of shot for the moon and the stars and sent the synopsis to Rick and said, all right, feel free to tell us to F off, man, if you can't do this. And he's so good, he kind of read it and he was like, yeah, no, I think I can do that. I've got a couple of concerns about audience this and that. And we said, well, let us handle that part. And we were amazed because we kind of got belly eyes because he just kept delivering. And it's like saying, okay, did this, did this. And every time we would ask for something else, he would say, okay, I did that. Or if he couldn't do it, he would say, well, we can't do that, but I can do this. And so there were some characters like Ghost that existed. I mean, she's sort of the foundational character in this. this whole lore and so we started with her but then there's other characters like CRT that existed as well and we wanted to bring these characters to life and there were other characters along the way that as we were developing the story Rick would sign off on it and say yeah okay that sounds like it's pretty much within the ballpark here of what we're going for so we would build upon that and then say well So he was building a map, a completely brand new map of Uncanny Alley, because we didn't want to use what was already existed, but take inspiration from that. And so we would get to a point in the story that we were building and say, well, maybe they would meet this kind of character and so we'd write this character in and send it to Rick and he would read what we wrote and then he would create these amazing whimsical characters based on it and it sort of just came together in pieces like that and along the way I mentioned that the three pieces kind of of the tripod it's really tricky to we're not a game we're not a puzzle world We're not an escape room, but there's elements of all of those that come into play. We talk a lot about taking advantage of the affordances of VR and we need to use the environmental storytelling and we need to provide opportunities for the audience to interact with the world if they're not interacting with the actors and the other characters and if none of that is happening the trick then becomes how do we use the world to create this sense of awe which is a combination of rick's work and screaming color that's really where he comes in he brings the sparkle and the magic and when there's not a scene playing out or there's not something to interact with in the world we can be still and quiet and use the world to expand kind of our consciousness in ways that we normally would not be able to.
[00:22:58.171] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it sounds like that there's both the world design, but also the character design and different characters that are coming in. But also the architecture of this world, there's portals. So there's a little bit of freedom to kind of add stuff or change stuff around because you don't always have like physical spaces that are closely tethered together in a way that would lock you in. So there's a little bit of at least how the world is architected that you can have a little bit more freedom, I would expect. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, Rick, in terms of like, getting this feedback and what it was like for you to have a little bit more of an idea from the narrative impulse and then trying to serve that narrative by building out this world.
[00:23:39.477] Rick Treweek: So I think, yeah, the biggest thing is that I'd say the difference here is that linear journey and in this case having a very specific beginning, middle, end of the journey and being used to the previous world where the user could really take any journey they wanted. So it did make it, in a sense, quite chaotic in terms of trying to take them in a certain route. So I think the way this was created in a way was a bit easier because you knew okay from point a from the prison you'd go down to the sewers from the sewers so it was quite linear in a sense but now to be actually knowing where moments would take place in the show so previous uncanny alley is obviously like you know you don't know where people are going to be looking so you've got to make everything kind of beautiful you've got to make every corner pivotal point whereas in this next show it was like okay great there's the world still but now we have stages stage one stage two stage three and really building out those stages and once it's there and then seeing the actors inhabit the spaces I think that's where the new kind of ideas and new journeys kind of arrived that wasn't possible before because Previously, every show, everything would be completely different. Sometimes people would run off completely randomly. I had to build a microphone because the world was just so big that people were completely getting lost. Whereas in this time, there was that kind of idea of hurting people a certain way. And I think that that really gave the opportunity to make the scenes where those places took place kind of the focus of the stage, as well as the characters, I think. I like to sculpt everything from scratch in VR, and I think being with those characters and seeing how they interact with the spaces then helped with my design. So quite often, you know, there'd be a stage of like, oh, the character needs to run off at this point, but now we don't actually have a bridge there, or we don't have a specific way for the character to escape the room to change into the next character. just by the nature of creating almost that first sketch and running through it, and then that really helps define how each scene works, not only for new characters or new objects in the scene, but really gets you thinking about funny little moments that could happen in these scenes that draw a bit of emotion, which is kind of my goal a lot. Get a smile or get a laugh is the magic for me and kind of the key in these experiences.
[00:26:12.905] Christopher Lane Davis: So one of the, because they were talking about things being non-linear and then becoming much more linear for the sake of the show. Something that I'm thinking about a lot and I keep bouncing off of Rick and he's pretty enthusiastic about as well is now that we have this in the future, both our future but also the future of the industry once people can handle this, is making this show much longer. I'm talking like three hours, surely an intermission in the middle. One of the things that made me want to make video games in the first place is sort of like games like Life is Strange 2 and Detroit Become Human, where you had an extreme amount of autonomy and choices. And one of the things about the show is there's so many amazing characters, but it's like speed dating. Like you meet them for two minutes and then you never see this character again. And I dream of the ability for the audience to have so much more agency. Like, OK, well, what do we do now? It's like a Disneyland ride now. You're basically just on a track. But for the audience to be able to say, Ava's not there. You know, there's no one in our workshop right now. Let's go see if we can find something there. Let's go see if we can find a clue or, you know, just this kind of... And like you said, the portals allow for that really well to sort of... And of course, the show would eventually sort of go to the same place, but maybe instead of two endings, there's five endings. Maybe the show ends with you going back into jail and like, sorry, like you screwed up maybe. And of course, that also creates this replayability factor as well, which will always be awesome.
[00:27:36.857] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that was one of the tensions that I felt in the piece was kind of testing the limit as an audience member, how much agency as a live action role play, like I'm embodying a character, but there was an interesting conceit where it's like, oh, or there's this thing that's erasing your memory. So it was okay that I didn't know who I was as a character because all of my memories have been erased. It was kind of canonical within the world. So I was kind of free to make up who I was going to be. But It did feel a lot more on rails. Like there was a very specific one story that was being told. Whereas like in the Metamovie Project with Jason Moore, there's a little bit of like, oh, there's going to be some choices that may actually have some branches. And so I feel like that's a bit of a tension where if there are lines that are being delivered in terms of like, this is the next story beat, then... If there's something that I see that I want to respond to and I start to speak, then it's like, oh, I'm actually kind of interrupting the performance of the show. And so there's this kind of dance as an audience member of there are moments to like really engage and I'm being directly asked different questions. And there's other moments that, you know, I may want to jump in, but, you know, there may be kind of stepping over the story that's being told. So from the ferryman side, I'm curious what that's like to kind of negotiate that interaction. giving the players like this group experience and trying to create this group cohesion, but kind of limit their agency to not have them be able to do anything that they want to do.
[00:28:57.172] Deirdre V. Lyons: So we do theater. So that's, you know, it's not a larb where, you know, the audiences come in with a pre-prepared character and they get to do whatever the hell they want. We're still creating a story around them and including them with that. And our actors are asked to... improv with them to include them in the story, because really the audience, as the Metamovie would say, is they are the star of the show. So we really do try to cater to their little gifts to us, their gifts being a gesture, a question, a pushing of boundaries. And we try to encourage their participation. But sometimes when you've got too many people in a show, and some are rowdy and some are quiet and some want to listen to the story and some want to be crazy and jump off the walls, it can be difficult. So Steve and I had talked about the idea of what is the perfect number of people in the show to try to keep it from getting so off the rails that those who want to hear the story, who really want to participate in that, are able to do so without crazy people making noise throughout everything. So that is also for us a balance and then trying to find actors who are capable of doing that as well.
[00:30:10.583] Stephen Butchko: Yeah, it's tricky because each one of our shows is so wildly different from the last one. And this one, like all of them, it really is an experiment, really, to see what works. And Rick built this huge, beautiful map of a world, and we need to get from point A to... Point D here, down here somehow. And we have, well, we have about an hour to do that because that's sort of the sweet spot for our shows. It's a little bit over that for the Biennale. It's about 15 minutes with onboarding. But it's really tricky to find that balance between allowing that amount of agency and keeping sort of a reasonably coherent narrative as well. And that's tricky. It's one of the things that we've discovered doing this type of immersive theater where It's scripted but then we build in windows of potential improvisation with the audience based on where their mindset is and how much they feel vulnerable and willing to participate. And we can let people go if they really are into it and go to some amazing places but then we have to sort of find a way to bring that back to the narrative. It's our goal though to allow with this work as much agency and exploration. as possible and it's such a fascinating study in human nature as we interact with our audiences too it's just i'm blown away every performance that we do with how people behave and where they go and what they do and some are very reserved some are very well behaved and others are like they haven't taken medication for a month or something they're crazy and just want to break things and it's all very fascinating
[00:32:01.823] Kent Bye: Yeah, it sounds like you have to negotiate the temperamental mix of each audience and adapt, but it sounds like there's some windows of improv, but also it's like a cutscene in a video game that the channel switches into more of a story moment and then back into the interactive moment. So similarly, there's the... moments of participatory interactions and then back into the story mode in this piece and i was talking to maria from rain dance and she was saying that she had a really good time because she was very familiar with all the backstory and lore and that ghost is a the character that you're looking for in the original uncanny alley and that there's a flying bus and there's all these elements that are coming back into this version and so i'm curious how much of the assets were you able to reuse? Or if it was completely scratched from all the Blender, if there's textures or obviously there's characters and ideas, but what percentage would you say is completely new? And what were you able to bring over as existing assets from the previous iteration of Uncanny Alley?
[00:33:00.290] Rick Treweek: Yes, that's a great question. I think it's 98% brand new. I think the only assets that we reused were characters that were, for example, CRT that was there from the very first Uncanny Alley where It was more like he has to be there because he's been there forever. You know, he's got a tattoo, Ali for life. He's one of the first uploads, you could say. And so he was reused. And then Ghost, she was the other asset that was reused, even though because we had from the beginning this challenge of, OK, let's make this quest compatible. Even though Ghost is reused, I did have to remodel everything from scratch to bring it under the levels that Quest could actually handle. With regards to the world, everything was built from the ground up again. And I think that's also what I do to challenge myself. I love to create and that's kind of my core kind of focus is the creation of spaces and the creation of new. I think initially we were like, playing with the idea of using uncanny alley but then you know it's like let's escape the prison it would be nice to maybe have a tunnel and then just lead straight to okay this is a new thing it also again it makes the universe seem like a universe and not just a world by starting from scratch so yeah i'd say there were only really those two characters that were reused even though they were built again from scratch and again because it was quest compatible everything in that world had to be designed in a way with that in mind especially with avatars like i'm very used to my kind of builds in the past is always experimenting and pushing the limits of vr of what can be done with avatars but now when you're doing something on quest you have so many limitations you just can't do any of those bells and whistles like post-processing one of the tech stacks in Unity is like a way to make things look super nice and glowy and you know like at very atmospheric and color just came in and absolutely smashed it you know by turning something that quite often in the test world on Quest, and we both try and bring up PC options, completely forgetting we're in a Quest world itself. So everything essentially was built from scratch for this show, yeah.
[00:35:19.719] Kent Bye: Yeah, ScrimColor, I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what you were working on, on the context of this project.
[00:35:27.859] Christopher Lane Davis: Well, originally, I was only supposed to be doing the sound and the music, to be quite honest. And then, just because I simply can't help myself, I asked Rick, is it OK if I just make a couple things glow here and there? Just because that was kind of a specialty of mine, is adding this sort of artificial, no one can see in the microphone, my finger quotes, this artificial bloom. And I just kept showing him stuff when I do. And he was like, awesome, awesome. And then I wasn't sneaky about it, but I just kind of kept stretching my leash farther and farther and farther. And he just kind of continually gave me the thumbs up for just adding effects and sparkle here and there.
[00:36:05.773] Stephen Butchko: There were a couple of specific things that Deirdre and I asked for that existed in the original Uncanny Alley, like the tour bus. I was enamored with, and most likely it was an unrealistic ask, I wanted to fly the audience I wanted to, like, with fly sticks, just fly this tour bus through the city. And Rick said, no, we're not going to do that. We're absolutely not going to do that. But we do get the tour bus. It's a little bit more on rails as it needs to be just to make things work. A, and then B, we would make the entire audience sick if we had to teach all of the actors how to fly this thing, because it's crazy when you fly in VR, it's very realistic, and boy, I could imagine the damage that we would do. The other thing was, in Uncanny Alley he created these massive huge mechanical gorilla security guards and we wanted to use one of those and one of the really cool things about Rick is he's not just a technician and a builder but he really is an intuitive storyteller as well and it really shows his game making experience and just the way that his storytelling mind works when we created a there's a character named Sloane that we meet occasionally throughout and at one point in the story we come across this huge massive gorilla and Sloane is sort of, there's a relationship with Sloane that we meet and in the story I kind of, I didn't know because I don't understand what they do technically but I was like, and then Slone and the gorilla, this thing needs to happen. And Rick didn't say anything. It's just because we worked. He's in Africa and we're in Los Angeles. So he's creating based on notes that we're sending back and forth. And then it came time to show us what he was doing. And the way that he dealt with Slone and this gorilla was just, it was even more brilliant than even I could have come up with, you know, with Deirdre and I on our own. So there's very exciting things that we came up with.
[00:38:23.956] Kent Bye: Well, part of the other, I guess, context of this piece is that we're in a totalitarian, authoritarian context and we get spawned into a jail. Actually, it's a very nice spawn in where you push a button and you're, when I saw it, I saw the little button that said you're putting on an avatar. So when you spawn in, you're all in these kind of jail outfits and these orange jumpsuits. And it's a little bit of like a Stanford prison experiment vibe where you're a Like, you're a prison guard and you're slightly abusive.
[00:38:52.154] Stephen Butchko: We electrocute everybody.
[00:38:54.969] Kent Bye: So there's a bit of like playing with, you know, at that point you're an audience member just trying to figure out what's going on. But clearly there's a power dynamic of like the authorities and then somehow we are in prison and exiled and there's an escape. So there's this threat throughout the course of the piece where there's the authorities and then there's these escapees from prison, whether they're justly accused or not. I didn't feel like I had a fair trial or fear. I felt like it was unjust that I was being withheld. So I felt totally vindicated when I was able to escape. But there is this dialectic between the threats that are in this story and then escaping all those. And that's a theme that's kind of built out throughout. One of the things that I didn't get fully was why Ghost, from more of a story perspective, is like why is Ghost and her family... putting themselves out so much to save these people that they may or may not know. I didn't know what the previous relationship to Ghost was, but it seemed like she was really putting herself out to save us, but I didn't know why. Yeah, that was probably the one area where it was like, okay, I'm going here, but there was a certain point where it was like, okay, we're going to these places, and we're trying to escape, but there's, yeah, just... So maybe you could just recap the journey of where we're going and why we're doing it. And yeah, just love to hear a little bit more elaboration on that.
[00:40:22.029] Stephen Butchko: Sure. It starts with the push of the button in the arcade as the opening credits appear before us and it's in darkness. And with the beautiful sound design that color created, all we hear is the increasingly more and more chaotic sounds of a crowd and a rally. So it's sort of... Sonic weapon. Yeah, the sonic weapon that's used is radio frequency waves that are weaponized and used against people. So if we start from where Rick left off with Ghost exploring getting out of Uncanny Alley now, that coincides with this increasingly totalitarian corporation that has now taken over power and they run uncanny alley and they're increasingly robbing people of their freedom. And so in our story, it's not explicitly illustrated why Ghost is chosen to do this but throughout the story at least we hope that we create this sort of constrictive feel of our agency being taken away and so she was in the story Ghost is at this rally there's this adaptive learning industries is the name of the corporation that is now in control of Uncanny Alley and They're creating ways to control the medicines of the city. And so it's all flim-flam, and they're creating this... They call it the New Day Update, which is now... You get to vote on this, whether or not you want these kind of changes to be happening. It's kind of like a municipality coming in and redoing your sewer lines and burying all the power lines to make things safer and better for you. And we're using now radio frequency waves to... use the technology to make the city operate better. And so Ghost, at the rally, we learned that, I think you did actually pick up on some of this stuff, maybe the puzzle pieces, we weren't clear enough, but
[00:42:28.365] Kent Bye: Just as a clarification, like as an audience member, am I part of an underground resistance or movement? Or I think it's a challenge of like having people spawn into a world and it's like, how do you onboard them into their identity? Because, you know, it is more of a theater piece, but there is like it feels a little bit more like a LARP. And so there's this like confusion as to like. what's my relationship to, do I have a previous relationship? Have my memories been erased? And, like, kind of establishing that context under which, like, oh, it's ghost part of my family, my part of resistance. Like, what is the larger context that, like, makes this make sense for the expectations that I have in terms of, like, that I'm a part of something that even if I don't have all that backstory, that it kind of makes sense from a story perspective. And I think there were some gaps there as to, like, confusion moments of confusion that would help build up that suspension of disbelief because like it's like a in presence like it's a can be a house of cards when it starts to fall then it's like oh the illusion breaks and so there's like moments of that that had to do with me like not fully understanding like who i was in relationship to everybody else
[00:43:37.047] Stephen Butchko: Once that everybody is sort of safe out of the jail and Ghost takes time to check in on everybody's well-being. And that's when we discover that, wait, we don't have all of our memories are intact. And that's when she's informing them. But at the rally we spoke, you said that you were a coder member. We talked about coding and you're a brilliant coder. So... There's this insinuation that things have gotten so bad in Uncanny Alley that we need to, the fascist powers have become so constricted that we either need to leave, and that's Ghost, it's gotten so bad that we need to get out of Uncanny Alley. And because I recognized and met you at this rally that you are brilliant and you can help me build, once we escape out of this metaverse,
[00:44:26.570] Deirdre V. Lyons: There's a line in the show where Ghost says, Adam is like, why have you brought home inmates? And she's like, they're not inmates. These are some of the brightest minds in the alley, and they're going to help build our new home. There's also the idea, well, because Ghost, once you get to the end, you discover there's going to be a lot of work building this new home. This is a whole lot of work. So Ghost does need help, can't do it on their own. And then also that they have a reason to help her because now their faces are plastered all over the news. They're escapees. They're going to go to the experimental program if they are caught. So those are all of the reasons why that audience would be motivated to help and go with Ghost. And the reason that she does care about getting them out is because they can help her build that new metaverse.
[00:45:12.398] Kent Bye: I hope that helps. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that onboarding moment is a key moment where I'm trying to figure out who am I, what did I do, what am I here for, and trying to figure out what is the... And so, yeah, I think the earlier you get that in, for me at least, and also sometimes I just miss stuff if it's a line of dialogue or something where it's like...
[00:45:35.669] Deirdre V. Lyons: happening on that you know it's like the world is happening and the music is happening and colors things are happening and somebody's talking and the audience is jumping around so yeah it can be overwhelming.
[00:45:45.655] Stephen Butchko: I think it's the nature of being inside VR as well when we learn these scripts We're actors and it's what we do. We learn scripts and we get the script down and then we get into the VR space and we're like, oh God, what is... You forget everything. There's sort of this over-sensory load that happens. And then with these two guys, Color and Rick working together, it's overwhelming to the senses. So it's absolutely reasonable that you would miss something.
[00:46:15.149] Rick Treweek: i think just to add on to the story you know looking at kind of how uncanny ali in a sense is a commentary on the current state of the metaverse and talking about you know the the second iteration of the alley was looking for ghosts because you've heard about this concept of the open metaverse you know and like exploring outside of the story we invest so much time and energy into these platforms that are essentially corporations in a sense that own these platforms so the initial story was like okay there's this concept of the open metaverse that exists out there there's platforms that are built supposedly to be open systems but Ghost went on this discovery and kind of you know there's a few jokes and by blockchain saying like you know that's that's not true this open metaverse concept is just a kind of fallacy in a sense and So the story of this next thing is now Ghost has come back. She's gone on this journey, you know, she existed, she built many metaverse platforms outside of the platform she's currently in, realizing that that does not exist. So the only next option is to really start her own from scratch. And I think that's kind of the point here of like she needs help there. You know, you arrive, literally you've got to this new metaverse. It's like the matrix, that blank white canvas. And now you're going to need people. You're going to need programmers. You're going to need builders. And that's kind of... a bit of a reflection again on my journey going through the metaverse and seeing what's out there, getting very hopeful about the open metaverse, but realizing it's not really what people say it is and kind of realizing if we want to build what we want, we have to do it ourselves in a sense.
[00:47:54.332] Kent Bye: Yeah, and in some ways, you're using VRChat, which is a closed platform, but there wouldn't be the equivalent open metaverse thing to build it on. Resonite is another alternative, but it's not any more open. I mean, there's more openness, but it's not open source like the open metaverse. Safari and WebXR are still a long way to go but is that something you're looking into in terms of like at the end of the original Uncanny Alley there is this use of some of those like web-based metaverse it wasn't VR it was more of a web kind of interface but yeah I'm just curious from your own perspective of considering all the story if there's investigations that you've been doing into looking at some of these more open platforms for building out stuff.
[00:48:34.249] Rick Treweek: Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say in previous Uncanny Alley, it was a VR chat world, but there were four other versions of Uncanny Alley at the same time. There were platforms on HyperFi, there were platforms on Webiverse, there were platforms, I mean, when I say platforms, there were versions of the alley on these different platforms. And all of them had, you know, these communities, this discussion, this open kind of concept, but essentially none of them really went anywhere in a sense and I think you know for me looking back I'm very excited to explore what is that new metaverse that Ghost is busy building with this team and I think you know it kind of hints to potentially what that next journey of Uncanny Alley is you know it's time to build a new metaverse in a lot of ways because certain restrictions are are enforced just because they have to be enforced because you're playing in platforms that you don't own and that's just the reality of these things you know you have to as free as you want to be you can't really be that free if someone else owns the platform yeah
[00:49:40.069] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to give a bit of a trip report and then we can start to wrap up, but yeah, I really enjoyed this piece because I feel like it's the fusion of the world building with the storytelling and this sense of going on a grand adventure that has the story elements that were alluded to in the first iteration, but more explicit in the different characters and Yeah. And just these moments of interactivity and agency, picking up things and, you know, kind of going off my own and going into the group. I think there's like a tension between like being in an open world exploration here where like, how far can I explore and how much can I do? And then, oh, am I missing something? So there's always like, where's my attention and kind of being corralled back into going to different places. moments, but there's a really beautiful moment of reciting a poem from Caitlin Krauss that I really appreciated and I don't know if Caitlin Krauss is canonical in the Uncanny Alley or Caitlin Krauss that I know from the XR industry if they're the same person. Uh, and then, uh, yeah, just, you know, in the avatars as well, embodying these different characters, going through these different shifts and, oh, I guess the other defining character was, I think there was like 14 or 15 characters played by two people or something like that. So there is a bit of like. oh, I know this is the same person type of suspension of disbelief because it starts to get a little bit untenable to have 15 actors on a show like this. But for the most part, I was able to kind of just surrender to those different characters. But there is a variety of different characters that you're meeting as you go through this world. And I also just appreciated the choice at the end and having different endings. And yeah, so overall, it just felt like a grand adventure and kind of really exploring like the next character Phase of like immersive theater mixing with like VR chat world building and kind of a really beautiful blend between those two So yeah, that's a sort of my report from my experiences that I just wanted to get out there But yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up I'd love to hear what each of you think as the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling and world building might be and what it might be able to enable and
[00:51:45.819] Rick Treweek: Yeah, so I think, you know, for me it's the unknown frontier, you know, it really is. For me, every single technology I kind of get involved with where I can't answer the question, what is this for, what is the purpose of this, is kind of the technology I go deepest into. I think this show for me really, like I said, it's the closest now to seeing characters come to life. And what does that mean on the next step? I think for me the... the one thing is scalability on something like a show like this you know we obviously the magic of having the live performers is it's something you just can't beat but then it does come with certain challenges of how do you scale this to a bigger audience you know do you have a thousand actors that you know or are there ways to take what we've done now and see what worked really well and you know how can you now look at the how does this grow in ways because i think quite often you don't know what you know until you actually go through the whole process and i think for all of us you know especially myself having now seen this play out and for me seeing the show and having a completely different experience each time because the actors are different because the audience members are different it's really just got me so excited about you know it gives you a web of options going forward and i think that's that's the most exciting thing about it it really feels like untapped territory and everything you're doing you could literally write papers about certain moments in these shows and yeah it gives me very exciting hope for the future of of the space because i think we literally just scratching the surface of what's possible
[00:53:26.212] Stephen Butchko: Yeah, I think that Rick and Screaming Color sort of illustrated it pretty clearly that we have established a foundation of something with this potentially huge, huge, broad, large world that we can continue to explore and meet more characters and get to know the characters that have been established even more. As technology and the adoption rate allows us to grow these stories, we can continue telling them, and they can grow, and hopefully that we can include more audience members and just sort of keep it going. This sort of, well, we're all here doing pioneering kind of work, and it's very exciting to really kind of push the boundaries into the unknown, which is what our company is sort of doing. named for but I'm really excited to see where we can keep going with this as well and then potentially even revisiting stories like Gumball Dreams and I mean there's so much more there but yeah Uncanny Alley is just I'm there's so much the whimsical nature of it and it combined with the themes and the darkness and the humor I think that there's a lot there to continue to be explored.
[00:54:40.265] Christopher Lane Davis: Art of course has many layers and purposes and you know it's entertaining but at the same time my favorite games and my favorite movies are the ones that you know emotionally move me in a way that make me appreciate the depth of life more or appreciate the people in my life more on an emotional level. And so I think the whole point of the hero's journey and storytelling in general is to take us on this journey that would be impossible for us to go on, but we can still learn vicariously through their experience, right? And I think the more immersive a story is, the more emotional impact it has, and therefore the more transformative it can be. And so VR being the most immersive form of storytelling that I can imagine at this point, I think has tremendous therapeutic spiritual benefits. And in the same way that we're seeing different therapies evolve, you know, things that were laughable 20 years ago, but now things like ketamine and stuff are being more, you know, even psychotropic drugs are being taken more seriously in therapy. I think that what we do is very therapeutic as well. You know, some shows more than others, but I think that immersive VR storytelling has the potential to, you know, you walk away from it not only saying like, that was really cool, but like, oh my God, I need to call my mom. You know, like, you know, so.
[00:55:49.528] Deirdre V. Lyons: I think that this is scalable in the same way that theater is scalable, right? So, you know, if you look at like Sleep No More and you look at some of the regional theaters and things like that, they get different funding sources and different ticketing sources. And, you know, I think that there is a model there for growing this, but it will never be a prerecorded experience. in this iteration. There are other things that we can do that we can stream from inside this world, right? We can do multiple instances with multiple actors, but I don't actually think that the audience or the tech is ready for that yet. So it is a great time for us to experiment, to explore, to find best practices, to have fun, and to take an audience member out of a show and see them smile and laugh and then greet the actors and talk about the experience that they just had is pure magic.
[00:56:39.483] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? Any final thoughts?
[00:56:47.247] Rick Treweek: I think, firstly, just around VRChat, I think anyone that's into real-time development needs to see what's behind the curtain. I think so many people, myself included, you try these platforms for the first time and they might come across bizarre in a sense but as soon as you stay long enough everyone kind of has that aha moment and I think especially for Unity developers if you haven't yet tried getting into these spaces and building something in these spaces especially for artists you know using these kind of new tools that are becoming available such as you know an artist that can draw by hand It's very hard to make the jump into 3D with traditional packages, whereas platforms like sculpting and VR really is an incredible tool for traditional artists to suddenly make that jump into the digital realm. So I think open your mind and get deep within these social platforms because there's something there for you for every single community to explore. Absolutely.
[00:57:50.802] Stephen Butchko: Yeah, it's our goal to bring as much visibility to these types of storytelling, these platforms, because this is part of the future of storytelling, and we want people to join us.
[00:58:02.918] Christopher Lane Davis: I have no further comments, Your Honor.
[00:58:05.542] Kent Bye: Thank you.
[00:58:06.383] Stephen Butchko: You're dismissed.
[00:58:08.770] Deirdre V. Lyons: Yeah. Come join us. Come create. Come make things. The more people who are doing this, the bigger the audience and the interest will be. And then the more people who will be seeking out our work and your work and other people's work. It's a great time to be in XR. It's very collaborative and growing and beautiful.
[00:58:27.315] Kent Bye: Great. And one other follow-up question. Is this a show that you're planning on holding? Can people see this anytime soon? What's next for Uncanny Alley?
[00:58:36.553] Stephen Butchko: Yeah, because the film festivals have been the first venues that really have showed interest in these types of storytelling, we treat our shows much like films. We develop them, and then we spend about the first year moving through the festival circuit. And then after that, the sky's the limit. We will be doing ticketed runs. We also do a fair amount of talks at universities and educational types of interactions with people, bringing them through to show them what we do, how we do it, how they can get involved. So, yeah, keep an eye out because we'll be around.
[00:59:14.219] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, certainly it feels like over the years I've seen like the evolution, you know, going back to Venice of 2019, I think that was Kara Bensing when she had her piece here that had like, I forget the name of it, but it was a theater piece that had both in VR and in physical reality. And I think since then and throughout the pandemic, we've seen a lot more of that. Fairman Collective and Jason Moore, Gumball Dreams, that also bring in the immersive theater intersection with more and more sophisticated world building that's happening in the VRChat scene. So I see this as like this fusion of the master world builders from VRChat, from the veteran immersive storytellers, Going back into like the Tempest and Tender Claws kind of inspired, you know, also happening in later 2019 after the Venice Film Festival. So, you know, kind of the lineage of that intersection of those VR, immersive theater folks are coming through and combining together. It's really great to see this fusion, and I feel like there's a lot more to continue to be evolved and grow. Like you said, it's like an infinite canvas for how you can start to tell so many different stories. You're all part of this lineage of this fusion of these two worlds coming together. Anyway, I just really appreciated the experience and looking forward to seeing where it goes and for more and more people to be able to have a chance to see it. Thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you.
[01:00:33.263] Stephen Butchko: Thanks, Kent, and happy birthday!
[01:00:36.921] Rick Treweek: Thank you, Ken.
[01:00:38.483] Kent Bye: 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.
