I interviewed The Art Of Change co-directors Simone Fougnier and Vincent Rooijers with producer Peter Ariet at Venice Immersive 2024. I had a chance to get an early look at this piece, and I watched it three times before stepping foot on the island. I absolutely loved this piece, and it was at the top of my personal favorites from the festival.
I found this piece to be so emotionally moving, as well as innovative in it’s spatial transformations and use of consonance and dissonance cycles within pacing and editing. I also really enjoyed the time-travelling self-reflective narrative conceit that’s woven throughout the album, and then condensed down into each of the beats of that story. Overall, I loved this piece, and look forward to having more folks be able to see it on the festival circuit or if it picks up more distribution through domes or other LBE efforts.
Fun fact is that I’ve been listening to the full Droeloe concept album also titled The Art of Change on repeat upon my return from Venice and throughout the process of editing and publishing this series. So I can also highly recommend checking out the full album if you’d like a sneak peak to the vibe of this piece.
See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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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 in the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from Venice Immersive 2024, today's episode is with a piece called The Art of Change, which happened to be my favorite piece from this year's selection. So this is from the same studio, Studio Syro, that brought you Tales from Soda Island. And this is like a music video that's of a concept album, The Art of Change by Drolo. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can go buy it and listen to it. It basically condensed down this like hour long concept album down into like 10 minutes and like woven throughout the course of this video. concept album is this narrative where this woman is kind of talking to herself over the course of her lifetime, where she's having these self-reflective conversations to reflect on different stages of her life. And so that's kind of like the narrative through line, but the visual through line is like very much like a music video that's very driven by this sort of like spatial language that is developed by the concept art that Funi was brought on by the Vincent, the head of Drolo, in order to take each track on the album and then create these whole artistic pieces. He happened to use Quill where there was all these VR pieces and then he kind of ties it all together within the context of this music video where you're going in between all these different worlds. So I thought it was just a really beautiful piece. I found it really moving and it's starting to kind of play with this spatial grammar of how to build the contrast and use consonants and dissonance cycles to drive emotion. So, yeah, I just felt like it was a really intuitive translation of this music video and just really resonated with me and was one of my favorite experiences from the entire show. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind the Art of Change happened on Monday, September 2nd, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:13.328] Simone Fougnier: Hi, I'm Simone Funilab. I'm a VR director. I work with Quill. I run a studio with Peter, my producer. We have Studio Syro. We were here last year with Tales from Soda Island, our previous work, which was a Quill-based animated series funded by Meta. This year we are presenting a new project called The Art of Change. Myself, I come from illustration, and I have always been obsessed with music and the relationship between music and visual. And I've been working with musicians most of my life. And this is just another step in the process. I had the luck to meet and discover Vince's music a while back, but we never got to work together properly like we did for this project. So it was extremely great to do that.
[00:03:05.453] Vincent Rooijers: All right. Well, hey, I am Vincent Rooijers, Drooloo, producer, composer. I have a background in electronic music production and composition. Yeah, started out on Soundcloud and that's also I think where Funi met most of his people to work with. That is kind of where we met in the first time around as well because at first we worked together but we weren't really, we didn't even know each other. I just really appreciated what he did in terms of artwork and he appreciated that he was part of a song of ours. And yeah, really glad that we got to work together on the artworks for the album and that we decided to turn this into what it is right now. Yeah.
[00:03:51.769] Peter Ariet: Hello, I'm Peter Ariat. I'm the producer of Studio Saro. I have been working with Funi for over the past four years now, working on Studio Saro pieces. We've done Tales from Soda Island. We brought Chapter 7, The First Ingredient, back in Venice out of competition. This year, we are here with The Art of Change. Right now, our studio is focused on making virtual reality pieces and mixed reality games. And we're very happy to be here with Drew Liu, Vincent Ruggers, with The Art of Change, the derivative of the album. And yeah.
[00:04:20.822] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:04:26.340] Simone Fougnier: So yeah, as an illustrator, and again, like I said before, I've always been obsessed with the relationship between music and images. And since I saw the Star Guitar Chemical Brothers music video when I was a kid, I was like, I want to do that one day. And I always wanted to do music video, but I never had the patience to learn traditional way of doing those. Until one day, I randomly stumbled upon Quill, which is this incredible tool that allows you to paint virtual space and animate and edit. Basically, you can create an entire experience by yourself. I don't want to say minimal effort, but with reasonable effort, you are able to create experiences like the one we did and all the amazing quill pieces that have been showcased here at the Biennale. There's always a few every year, which is great. And yeah, I started using this tool in, I guess, 2016, 2017. And funny enough, the first project, the first big project that I've done was a music video for Deadmau5 and Mr. Bill. which put us on the spot and it led to the creation of our series and the support from Meta to create this series that we just completed. and the Art of Change was Vince's work. Vince approached me with a different approach than normal, because usually when a musician hits me up, he really just needs an album cover, or maybe just some tiny animation for social, for promotional material, but Vince was like, I want an artwork for each one of the tracks, because this album is very narrative-driven, it's a concept album, and each track needs its own world, let's say. And Vince wasn't familiar with VR, and I told him, if it's not a problem for you, I will do it with Quill, because I much rather use Quill than any other tool, than Photoshop and a Wacom. And he was like, sure, do whatever you think is right. So I started doing all this material in VR, and then by the time that the album was completed, and we had all this virtual world, we thought, you know, we have all this VR material, it would be great if the audience was able to see it in VR, rather than just see a flat version only for the singles, because most people, like we didn't even release most of this VR content, we only released tiny loops for the singles, which were, I think, four out of 15 tracks. So all this material, we were like, let's try to come up with a way to present it to the public so they can see it. And we thought about maybe turning it into a VRChat experience. But then there was too many complications about that and Quill kind of needs to be on its own. It's not really optimized for... And also, you can use Quill with other software, but you need to prepare that from the beginning and I didn't do that. So the scenes were way too heavy for any other way of displaying them other than through the virtual animation player. So... Basically around April, March, Michel asked us basically, do you have a project for the Biennale this year? And I'm like, not sure. And he was like, please, send us something. So I was like, OK, the only thing I can do is grab all this material that I made for the album and edit it in a way that's somewhat coherent. We submitted it, and we got accepted. And then Vince came to my house, and we finished it. We polished it. We recorded trumpet solo in my kitchen. He finally watched it in VR, which was great to see. Because we've been seeing this material and talk about it an entire year, but he never experienced the VR pieces like they are intended to be seen. So, yeah, that's basically how it went.
[00:08:24.859] Vincent Rooijers: To elaborate even a little bit further on that, and also by doing so giving context how I entered the VR space, I didn't. I did when I got to Funi's house. Because before that, my only reference to VR stuff was that I once played that game, Hot... It was like a game that you have... Super Hot? Super Hot. Super Hot. It's a cool game. But that was also a long time ago, so this was like... What I experienced at Funi's house was completely different. He showed me the islands stuff. I was blown away. Yeah, I think there is so much more to be gained within this sphere as well, and that music and sound can play a very, very big role here. So yeah, I feel like I just entered a new space, actually, which I'm very excited about.
[00:09:12.594] Peter Ariet: So my journey into VR kind of starts when I came from the University of Florida. I was in Digital Worlds, where I learned about game engines and real-time engines, where I eventually started to go in the route of developing VR games. And then I looked into augmented reality to tell augmented reality kind of short stories, open domain stories. And from then I was given the opportunity to work on a music video with some of these really talented Quill artists, which was highly successful. We finally got a million views on that video. So that was like a real positive. We were like, wow, we really found something here. And then we were offered an opportunity to pitch to Meta back in 2019. Tales from Soda Island is kind of when it was born. And that was like when we were truly making VR content, the studio was founded. And we've been doing that for the past three years where We've kind of been focused on making all sorts of different VR type of content, whether it was immersive galleries to the stories that we were telling. We also have just been kind of understanding what it's like to share all these experiences in a festival space, because I think we were heads down for many years in terms of just working on a piece. We didn't really know that it was being celebrated to such an extent. And that kind of brings us here where we're still following the passion of making music videos and kind of seeing how that can come together within this space. Because I think that, of course, with the music that came from the album, it's a perfect match with the visuals. And, you know, Funi talked about it a little bit, but in terms of actually making this visual accompaniment, it was how can this be experienced in an entirely unique way, but then kind of restructure what is the story that needs to be told here. And that's what makes it a really interesting piece that's here. And so this is kind of now staying within the story of why we're here today.
[00:10:56.744] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. Well, I was fortunate enough to get access to an early build to be able to see it ahead of Venice. And I watched it three times before I even got onto the island and then watched it again this morning after listening to the full concept album this morning, just to kind of try to understand more. Well, first of all, it's very poetic and beautiful piece. I was really quite blown away by it in a way that I have to watch a number of times just kind of deconstruct what's even happening because it's very quick flashes and doing things that my brain can't quite fully process. And the music's amazing. And then there's this whole other trippy story that is got this kind of time travel, like person who's talking to herself over time, reflecting on her life. Think about the nature of process and your perception and how things change. But it's very poetic in a way that there's a lot that is there. And it was very emotionally moving when I first saw it. But then I watched like 20 plus hours of content here at Venice. And then all these interviews. And I was like, I have to actually just watch this again just to try to understand what's happening in this piece. So I feel like to kind of dive in, it feels like... The project starts with the album that you had created and that there was already some narrative bits that then took from the album and basically edited down into a 10-minute piece. First question I want to ask, was there any new narrative parts that were recorded? Like anything that's in the VR experience, was that directly from your album or did you have to record any new story bits around that story?
[00:12:26.227] Vincent Rooijers: Not in terms of story, but we did record some extra musical instruments and musical elements. I built some sound design to build out one track into sounding that it was taking place in the VR space that it was played under. Yeah, no, not...
[00:12:43.226] Kent Bye: Okay, and so there's a number of tracks on the album. Is every track represented or is it like jumping around? Because when I listened to it, I was like, oh, I didn't hear that. Oh, I definitely heard that.
[00:12:52.753] Vincent Rooijers: Not all the tracks are represented. No, not at all, actually. There's a few that are being focused on, I think, because to also make sure that the story doesn't go all over the place. Because within the album, it's... more separate ideas of change and of different mechanics that I found when I'm exposed to change. And it would have made the piece just a little messy, I guess.
[00:13:18.070] Kent Bye: But you were saying that you were creating art for each track. Is that right? Is the art from each track in here or?
[00:13:23.273] Simone Fougnier: Usually each track is represented in the piece, but not musically, because again, it was like it's more than an hour, the album. So basically when we I had to come up with the first rough edit. I felt that the last track, the closing track of the album, Counting 10, was the perfect track to edit with. And I just loved the track. And it had the great energy. And I felt like it represented the whole album in its entirety. Even though, yes, obviously, if you listen to the album, there's so much more to it.
[00:13:56.949] Vincent Rooijers: It does. It's like that one together with the intro Spark. They are both in very similar keys. So they kind of where Spark is the like the conception, Counting Ten is kind of the culmination of the whole journey.
[00:14:10.635] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. So when I was listening to it, I saw probably like four or five songs that I could like discern that were like, okay, this is definitely in because there's kind of a through line of a narrative that's in your concept album that's spread out throughout the entire album and you condense it all down. So, okay. So I've got that settled. I want to ask you now, how did this album come about? Since it's a concept album that's so narrative driven, maybe you could just kind of give a bit more context for the art of change and how it came about.
[00:14:37.717] Vincent Rooijers: So it came actually from a time of feeling a little bit down and in a rut. I felt like I needed change and a lot of the world was changing around me. But I also knew that a lot of that change was dependent on my view of what already was. And that in order to really effectively bring about that change I first had to look at how do I view the world around me and what is the best view that works with my intentions where I want to go so I started to define those first and like what kind of ideas are are those and then I tried to yeah really sit with those and have a feeling I guess and then with that feeling I went behind my Ableton and just started experimenting at first And until something really stuck with, okay, this kind of works with that feeling. And then I started building on it. And I think the whole process from beginning to end of all the tracks in the album took like a year, maybe a little less. But the first track was actually Counting Ten. That was the culmination feeling like, okay, this is the end point that I want to be. And all the other tracks are kind of the steps to get there. And yeah, the mental software that I needed to install. Yeah.
[00:15:56.337] Kent Bye: OK, and so you're listening to the album and you're making these different worlds inspired by all of the tracks. And so then when Michelle came to you and said if you had a piece and you decided to start to edit, then did you work together to try to create like a master mix of this? Did you start with an audio track to go around? Or where did you start to begin with trying to take each of these kind of disparate art pieces and then tie it together? Did you try to lock down the audio track first? Or where did you begin with that?
[00:16:25.512] Simone Fougnier: Yes, I started from the audio. Obviously the album has a lot of songs, so I was like, we're not going to use songs for some reason, because even though they're amazing and I love to hear Vince singing, I felt like it's better if we don't have lyrics, so it can be as universal as it can be. And editing to audio is always so satisfying to do. And so yeah, I picked the track that I felt like they were most fitting first. So we had this intro from, I can't remember which track was it. The one with the voice, the woman singing. The wheel? The wheel. So we used that as an intro, and then I used the entirety of Counting 10 and added to that. But then when Vince came to my house, we kind of rearranged. We kept the big montage of the end with Counting 10, but we reworked the first part of it. And we added a lot more, and we created original visuals, like the part in the house, the desk, the museum. All those places are unique to the VR experience. yeah i mean obviously the music is always the the driving force of our work just because how much we you know um music fanatic like specifically electronic music fanatic has always been in our dna all the projects that we do have that at the forefront and i think we're gonna keep doing it because we don't know any better
[00:17:57.245] Kent Bye: And at what point did you step in and kind of see what was happening here, and what role were you playing in helping bring all this together?
[00:18:04.829] Peter Ariet: So when I first found out that Funi was working with Vincent on the album, making visuals, I mean, I was very excited because I love Drew Lu. I've kind of grown up listening to Vince's music without him knowing, of course, until I finally met him, which is really fun because it was the same thing with Soda Island, kind of knowing this, like, these musicians that you discover in these various niche networks of the internet, but we were discussing that concert idea that Finny kind of discussed before where we wanted to make a real-time concert and see if we could do everything, kind of pack it all in. We have a mentality kind of for accessibility where VRChat worlds and things like that, it requires quite a lot of processing. So we could have done something that required a lot and it probably would have fit the community that is driven by that for VRChat. But then once we wanted to do it more mobile, it kind of moved us away from that. I think Over the past year, after Funi was working on the visuals and Vince was touring, it was a matter of, oh, you know, this is a whole body of VR work that Funi has done. I mean, he's only working in Quill. And we discussed, we were like, hey, like, what if we put this together? What if we actually made it like our previous Quill pieces, like Soda Island, but not so narrative driven, more of just like a little bit more of a loose audiovisual treatment. And that was when we kind of came up. When he had done the rough cut, we were talking to Vincent, we submitted it to Benally. And then it was a matter of, okay, great. We have this kind of first draft of what this can be. Now let's ground it. Let's give it some more of like this linear kind of style in terms of use the narration of the album to kind of piece it together. And of course, Funi and Vincent started to kind of just discuss things on just like a director level, just writing kind of the different sections of the album, how it could be broken up. And I coordinated with them just to see visually how kind of each kind of step worked. And they had kind of, there's these grounding moments in the experience where you're in the room and that's kind of when you start to hear the narrator kind of speak to you and kind of tell you like what she's doing and how she's kind of feeling in all these various moments and then the archetypal kind of environments that you're kind of going through. And so I was kind of there as a support in terms of just making sure that all of the ideas were being communicated and everybody's on the same page and just kind of getting to speed with what Vincent kind of was thinking for the piece and what Funi was kind of feeling in terms of how he was already approaching kind of these environments and really kind of understanding the deeper connection that had with the album and what the album was. And then, of course, just how we wanted to handle more of the technical things, because It's not easy to work with Quill. It's still like, you know, this interesting timeline, but then at the same time, it's like how Funi wanted to handle kind of everything kind of coming in a linear sequence and then how Vincent, if we could have any additional audio accompaniment, whether it was sound design in particular moments or whether it was just how, what portions of the album. So just kind of handling the production of putting the piece all together from that first initial draft to where we are now.
[00:20:58.732] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. That helps set a lot of the context. And I think the spatial language stuff that's explored, I think we'll dive into, but I think the other route from the music side is this narrative that you've already had woven in there that was really kind of stitched together from each of those tracks, kind of like a different points in time that really creates kind of a self-contained narrative within itself that you had already kind of embedded into your album that you had released. So I'd love if you can maybe elaborate on the process of coming up with this idea of a woman who records herself for 81 years, kind of recounting the same set of questions and prompts for her to listen to how she's evolving throughout the course of her lifetime.
[00:21:39.045] Vincent Rooijers: That's a great question. I think the most important element to that is, well, when I make music, I make it for myself first. And what I wanted to tell myself by having women from different ages that talk to themselves and reference earlier and later times is that every version of reality is just one, whether you are in the present now and you are referring to a future or you're thinking about a past like neither of those technically exist you can only choose the ones that you want to extrapolate from i guess and by recording i try to record a lot i try to write in my journal a lot and by doing so that's kind of what i'm trying to how do i say this um
[00:22:32.170] Kent Bye: So it sounds like you're actually writing out all the scripts and then having people read it. Or are you also doing interviews with people? Or where did you come up with the idea to be able to do that?
[00:22:42.596] Vincent Rooijers: To have those voices, to create a tension between recorded parts. So whether it's in a notebook, if you put one page of a notebook and lay them next to a page of a year ago, then there might become a tension between those pages. And this is kind of the audio version of that. Because when you hear the younger woman that is still trying to figure stuff out and she just turned 27, and then the later who already has a kid and the kid is out of the house and she's lonely, that loneliness wasn't even in the cards for that other woman. And I think it's a healthy process to broaden the scope by... looking back at what you've already recorded and captured but also projecting forward and like if i draw this line out like where does it take me or yeah i think that's a very important mechanic in becoming an active participant in change and that's i think the biggest reason why i incorporated that
[00:23:44.195] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's got some really poignant moments throughout the story that there's some moments of regret in there. As I'm listening to it, it's like reflecting back on your life and then wishing that things would have gone differently or just there's a grief or sorrow in that moment.
[00:24:00.706] Vincent Rooijers: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've had a bunch of those. And yeah, this has definitely been a way that I... Well, cope is not the right word. Process that. And I think it's also a very universal thing and happening that people go through. And sometimes even something that makes... The great and happy times look all the more valuable and better. I sometimes even go as far as saying that you don't know what happy is if you haven't had bad times, because otherwise, how would you know the difference? And I think even the further away that spectrum goes, the more you notice where you are on it. So if you have experienced a lot, then there is more to define.
[00:24:46.016] Kent Bye: And the other, I guess, interesting bit around the way that the story was embedded in it is that it is spread out throughout the entire album. It's kind of poetic in some sense where it's spread out through the album and then it's also spread out through the film. I think it works like really well in terms of like there's a through line in the film and then in the album it comes in and comes out and it's not as highlighted as it is in this piece. But it was always there. But you're going in lots of other directions before you pick it up again. And so What was your process of like kind of telling this distributed story across the entire album? You know, this idea of a concept album is something that we don't hear as much about because everything's sort of atomized into like one track. But you're taking a thread, a narrative thread, and kind of weaving it through multiple tracks over the course of an entire album. So, yeah, I'd love to hear you kind of elaborate on that.
[00:25:35.457] Vincent Rooijers: It's kind of, while you asked the question, I was just thinking about this. It's kind of similar how with, for instance, a Ghibli movie, you see so much more happening than you are actually being explained what it is that you're seeing. But that's, to me, when I watch a Ghibli movie, where the value lies, that there is so much more to this world than the narrative is able to completely get across to me. I have to fill in the gaps. And we've tried to do a similar thing with our piece that we have over here. And I think, to answer your question, that some of those elements, they mean a lot to me. Some of the songs mean a lot to me, might not mean as much to other people. But I do think that it adds part of that perceived depth that you can then attach your own meanings to. Because that's, yeah, I'm not going to tell you what the meaning is of life or anything. I have an idea for myself, but that's the...
[00:26:37.765] Kent Bye: Nice. So, okay. So we've got, we've got a little bit of the, the story is, is there the backbone of it? And then when it comes to the visuals, then there's like this development of a, well, you're, you're doing some direct illustration of elements of the story that are being talked about with this house and a tape recorder and trying to representing the narrative bits, but then you have what's essentially like a whole year's worth of experiments of these worlds that are all kind of jammed together in a 10 minute piece. And there's like a spatial grammar or spatial language that you're starting to develop. And so maybe you could talk about the process of combining it all together, aside from just a snapshot of some of these pieces of art, but to really have a dynamic and interactive and kind of flow together.
[00:27:25.034] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, so when Vince approached me at the very beginning, he had a very structured and very, like, I was shocked, honestly, because I've worked with so many musicians in my life, and nobody had a vision that at the same time defined and undefined as it is because he had like these symbols and each track had his connected symbol and also the symbol represented an intention and that intention also was leading into a brief description of what he imagined for the track the visual representation of it but it was very loose and obviously we trusted each other so he was like this is kind of what I envision for this specific track but then he let me do whatever with that just a nugget of an idea and Yeah, we wanted to stay in a gray area between familiarity and unfamiliarity, something that is known, something that isn't known, archetypal things that are nothing too crazy, nothing too sci-fi or fantastical, something that was also always grounded and somewhat familiar. weird and interesting and strange because I guess that's just what we like and from when we experience other people work and that's also what we're trying to achieve and obviously you know working with Quill for five years every day on Soda and you know the culmination of all the things that we learned during that work went into this project, even though it was a very different production pipeline because, you know, Salina was a collective work and I was writing it. In this case, it was very also liberating for me not to be concerned about the decision I was making in terms of storytelling, because that was already present and I was just like trying to visualize what Vince was explaining and putting out there. The process was... I'm not sure how to explain it other than whatever felt right and whatever was flowing in the right way with the song, that was how we went about it. We were kind of rushing to finish it, so there wasn't much time to... look at it and try to improve it. We kind of had to go with just our guts, like this feels good, let's do it. This doesn't feel good, let's fix it. And not second guess ourselves, also because obviously we worked so much with Quilt and now we have a certain confidence on how the software and how people experience Quilt pieces. We just trust the quality of the visual and the music without worrying too much about how people are going to perceive the meaning. Just make what you want of what you're seeing as long as you have a good time, basically. And yeah, again, it was very different from Soda Island on a more technical level. Something that I did very differently was just the way I used the camera. So this piece, the camera never moves. The environments are floating to you. And that made it way easier. I wish I thought about that earlier during Soda Island because that makes editing so much better. Otherwise, if you move the camera and you have to retime a scene, you need to slide all the key frames. It's like, oh my god. But keeping the camera static and having the environments move towards you, it's just so much easier to tweak and I'm super happy that we came up with that. I'm trying to think if there's anything specific about the difference between the two projects at a technical level. you know there's not that many ways that you can approach a project like this with quill so quill has his own rule you kind of need to follow those rules and i'm more than happy to follow them now that i learned them so yeah
[00:31:31.138] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that was really striking to me is that most of the VR pieces I've seen, especially with Quill or Tilt Brush even, they tend to have a spatial geometry. But this seemed to be a little bit more 2D planes with abstractions, lots of symbols, the magical sigils, and other glyphs that you have in there. You know, it's kind of like a lot of symbolic logic that isn't meant to be explained, but I could tell there was like some sort of reference to something that I didn't know quite what, but it was more of how it was flowing together in a way that you were creating new types of spatial grammar for they're not communicating words, they're more communicating feelings. They're starting with the music but amplifying the music, if that makes sense. A lot of music visualization will be more explicit, like audio reactive, and it's responding to something very specific, what's happening in the waveform, like either from the rhythm or the... intensity, the power. And so this type of music visualization is kind of like taking into this level of abstraction where you're able to kind of break free from any direct tether to the spatial geometry of the music that's happening. And you're going into the more of the abstractions of the poetry of the symbols and spatial architectures that are also symbolic in a way that aren't directly connected to any specific meaning. So it kind of, in the end, for me, just gets this feeling of poetry, spatial poetry, with all these abstractions. So because there are so many sort of mysterious glyphs and sigils that are in here, can you maybe elaborate on your process of infusing each of these symbols with some sort of intention?
[00:33:11.826] Vincent Rooijers: I can only let out so much about that, because that's a very personal part of my process in creating this. But the process of it was when I had a sentence down that was as clear as day in, this is my intention, I want this to be part of my life. Then I went to the letters and I arranged them until I found a shape that was sparking something within me, I guess. Just interesting enough for myself. But I did all of that after having smoked a fat joint and meditated for a while. And sorry if this is not... No, it's totally fine.
[00:33:55.785] Kent Bye: It's your process, you know.
[00:33:56.966] Vincent Rooijers: It was my process. It was my process. I'm being real. But yeah, I was kind of in a slightly altered state of consciousness, you could say. And I knocked out all those symbols in half an hour. And then a half an hour later, I arranged them like I had a light plate, like a plate with light beneath it. All the pieces of paper that I draw the symbols on, I arranged on top of each other. And half hour later I had the hyper sigil. That's all the symbols together. And then I went to my meditation space and just looked at it for an hour. And it was a whole process. And I said, this is going to be an album. That's all I can say.
[00:34:43.954] Kent Bye: So then take me to the point where you actually had a chance to get into the headset for the first time and then see all these symbols animated.
[00:34:51.496] Vincent Rooijers: I cried. I literally cried. I was emotional. It wasn't even that it was... I've heard my own music so many times already, of course, but it was that it turned into something that I could experience with so many of my senses in a way that I have never done before that made it actually real so it kind of It was also the culmination of that moment, how I created those symbols. Like, holy shit, there is something here now. And yeah, thanks to whomever.
[00:35:29.204] Simone Fougnier: It doesn't normally happen for someone when he tries VR for the first time to witness his own work in VR. So that must be kind of weird. You know, try this experience. It's yours.
[00:35:43.391] Kent Bye: it's only the most personal intimate intentions you've said in the course of your creative life uh yeah well i i mean there's there's a way in which i kind of felt something i just felt emotion i felt something that was ineffable I couldn't put words on but you know that's why I watched it three times before I even came and then did all these interviews and had to watch it again for the fourth time just to even start to like try to parse it and understand it and it's it feels like it's something that I could keep coming back to because there's so much more that is happening so quickly that it's hard to discern but I'll sort of point to like two like points after I just watched it again which is that there's something around the the arc of the narrative that's really touching and and then just the the ending part where you're kind of playing with like the the different contrasts the consonants dissonance cycles of like the slowing down and then kind of the explosion into mandalas and kind of like the climax of the whole piece it it feels like the pacing of i guess throughout the course of the piece there's a kind of a putting your foot on the gas pedal and slowing it down you know kind of acceleration deceleration so there's a bit of like a way that you're using the speed of the music, but also the speed of the visuals that are coming at me. And then, like, it's slowing down, slowing down, and then it just sort of explodes into this kind of, like, finale that just keeps, like, the next level and the next level. It's like, whoa, what's happening? Oh, my God, oh, there's something even more. So it just kind of, like, has this... awe-inspiring experience of like not quite knowing what to expect but also just having my mind blown at each like subsequent level but then the same time the music is like amazing so then it's like got this other whole other thread of connecting me to something deeper so there's something around those those two things together that i was like this is i like i sent you a message or way this is like this is amazing this is like i was totally blown away and like still after seeing everything here at Venice, it's like my favorite experience. So I think, you know, for me, it just was, there's something around the combination of all the different ways that you're modulating the symbols in space in a way that is more of a kind of a music video genre, but it's also kind of leaning into like a new form of spatial grammar that can play with different things that can draw people's emotion that When you watch it, it's hard to put language to. I couldn't even parse what was happening when I was watching it. I'd love to hear any thoughts around the process to get to that. Finding the rhythm of the piece feels like a big part of why it works.
[00:38:18.920] Simone Fougnier: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you, because, you know, your opinion is super appreciated. And yeah, when I saw your email, I was like, oh, wow, OK. Because again, I wasn't that confident in it, especially coming from South Island, which is so much bigger. This felt... way simpler, but I love simplicity, especially when something looks simple at a surface level, but is way deeper than it looks. That's one of the things that I always loved. And as far as you were saying the, you know, the gas pedal idea, that's basically I was just trying to really give someone a visual representation of what I felt when I first listened to the album the first time, because obviously I I worked with Vincent before the album was even finished. I think the first I heard the tracks before you even recorded the lyrics. When the album was finished and I went through the first time from start to end, you go through it and this track is about this and then at some point there's a woman talking about... Like being in the Garden of Eden, so you're like, like what? There's just so much ideas and so many things that I was just, yeah, it's so hard to process like all these things, but I like to being, you know, having this many inputs thrown at me and I have to try to make sense of it. And that's basically what I try to do with the visual aspect of it. And once we settled on what the tune was going to be, so the Counting 10 tracks, then it was just a matter of figuring out how the flow needed to be done to properly represent those emotions, I guess.
[00:40:02.495] Vincent Rooijers: Well, Counting 10 as well does that gassing and braking a lot already. It has not a very common time signature, or at least in the first half of the song, and then I changed it into, I think it's 6-8, I'm not sure. Yeah, right? Yeah. But yeah, it's like, that happens a lot in the music already, that breaking and punching the gas. So I feel like you just went intuitively into it in finding those, like what edits, what glues nicely.
[00:40:34.136] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, I mean, you do need to be somewhat analytical and plan things, but sometimes you just have to do what feels right, and specifically for this project, that's how we approached it. I mean, especially from my end. I just feel this is what I want to see, and if I like it, then surely someone else will.
[00:40:54.775] Vincent Rooijers: I think as well, because you had all the places already built, that it was easier to kind of just test it. See like, hey, does this world work after this section instead of what is going to happen now and how can we build it? So I think that helped a lot with that intuitive approach as well.
[00:41:14.508] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, and also I like, you know, cosmic imagery and crazy, like, flying through planets and having things that you don't really normally see in, you know, like sci-fi has its own tropes and there's own, like, there's, you know, rules and I guess it's, you know, I don't know, it's hard to explain, but... Yeah, it was just visualizing what I was seeing. I don't remember who said it, but I remember this quote someone said, you know, when watching something that makes you feel like you're listening to visual and you're watching music. And that's what we try to do with all of our work. And again, I'm so stoked that we are at a point in time where we have tools like Quill that allows you to do that from the comfort of your house. in VR because I want to see more of this type of experiences other than do it ourself and hopefully inspire other people to use this tool and to do this more abstract music videos I guess. I hope to see more of that because it's just one of the things I always loved since I was a kid. And I saw the first, like I said before, Michel Gondry and you know spike johns and chris cunningham those people that have always had a special relationship with musician and they're making they're not movies they're music video but they're not just music video they're like full like experiences that you'll see and everything on the track is visually represented in a way that it just makes it so strong when you know the two things are well combined it just elevates both in a way that it's impossible to achieve in any other format and any other medium I think and this applied to VR it just takes it on a new level that we still don't know where it can go and we're yeah we're we feel like explorers in a cave trying to figure out this new ways of experiencing and also making experiences like this and yeah it's super humbled and appreciative that the response has been great from you from everyone else so yeah i hope to keep doing that i'm sure we will
[00:43:38.137] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when you got here on the island, I think I said something like, oh, I didn't know that Quill had lighting effects now. And you're like, what do you mean? Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that.
[00:43:50.344] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yeah, Quill doesn't have lighting effects. Yeah, it's all color. It's all painted.
[00:43:57.809] Kent Bye: So any lighting effects that I saw was all hand-crafted.
[00:44:01.491] Simone Fougnier: yes everything is like a little layer with a little hint of color that it's lighting that asset that element usually you duplicate the same element you color it bright and then you slightly offset it and so it looks like it's been illuminated and also yeah you mentioned to the elements that's another thing that i wanted to explore in in south island and i only kind of did it in some In some episodes, we have, for example, like two-dimensional characters in episode five. But yeah, obviously, I wanted to explore different routes and different things that you can do with Quill other than what we were doing in Soda Island, which is more, you know, cartoony and animated. This was more... simple and I was like yeah I want to see more like will it be satisfying to see 2D assets like rotating around you with that like make someone sick again it's always a process of discovering what works and what doesn't and other than using our own sensibility to see if yeah this can work this is gonna make someone puke We don't want to make people sick, and we did last year. We almost sent a Craig Quintero actress to the hospital after Watches of the Island. We were trying to avoid that. But sometimes it's good to feel overwhelmed, and obviously for the climactic part of the experience, You know, you need an explosion of color because that's just how I... That's what I was seeing when I was listening to the song. I was like, I just need to do that. And I thought maybe it's too much to fly through a kaleidoscopic thing. And I was like, you know what, it just feels right. So we're going to leave it. Yeah, it's very... It takes ingenuity and, you know, there's no rules. We don't know the rules. So we're just trying out and we will see. We make rules.
[00:45:50.871] Kent Bye: What's that? We make rules. Yeah, for sure. And there's one other bit that I picked up just seeing it again this morning, but you're rotating around the world, but the world is changing colors or shapes or seasons. It feels like there's some moments where there's so much happening. When you watch a film, you can have fast edits, but when you're in a VR experience and you start to edit at a pretty fast clip, then it's this weird effect of like... not fully processing things consciously, but unconsciously trying to figure out the through line for what's the consistent architecture of this, because you can't edit space that quickly to switch things out. It's kind of a surreal type of feeling. But yeah, maybe you could talk about that type of very rapidly editing and changing the subtle architecture of spaces.
[00:46:43.806] Simone Fougnier: Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that, because to me it was too slow. In the first draft, each one of those environments with the rapidly changing seasons was like one frame. So it was like, frame, frame, frame, frame, frame. And it was like, oh my god. It was way too much. And I don't really know.
[00:47:01.836] Kent Bye: You had also been living in this world for quite a while, so you kind of knew what to expect, what was happening.
[00:47:07.399] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I usually either ask my mom to show it as a test audience, and she's like, yeah, it's OK. So if she can handle it, then everyone can. But yeah, I am not the right person to evaluate how intense a piece should be, because.
[00:47:23.746] Vincent Rooijers: From that perspective, it was also a good thing that I was at your place for a week with my first VR experience to kind of offset your living space.
[00:47:36.878] Kent Bye: So was there any feedback that you were giving in terms of the visuals to kind of like tune it? Like things that you were seeing that... Sometimes, yeah.
[00:47:43.724] Vincent Rooijers: But it was like mostly from a perspective of what are we trying to say right now? And is this still part of that? Like I'm all for all the experimentation and all the trying and making crazy visuals. But I thought that the most important thing in the end was does it still... say something and is this adding to what it's saying is it amplifying that or is it kind of straying it in a different direction or is it saying something that can still be rhymed with what we are trying to say and the latter was that i gravitated the most with so i embraced most of all the additions and craziness that
[00:48:21.651] Simone Fougnier: Funi came up with, of course. I forgot to mention something that I think is interesting. There's more work from this album that is not neither in the album or in the VR experience. It is just a visual that were made obviously with the same style, always in Quill, that Vince used for his tour. So I also been working with musician. I use Quill to do live visual for music show, which I don't think anyone else does. So there's another layer to this project. There's the live version when Vince go on tour. And there's like Quill visual projected on a screen behind him. And then it's like inside of this neon cube. So there's other way of experiencing the project. And I just think it's super interesting that you can do that. Well, and some of those elements also came, are now part of this experience as well, right? Yeah, there's only one scene. You know, there's the blue, I guess, arches where we go through. That was just a little loop that I did for Vince's tour with a bunch of, like, maybe 50 other tiny looping clips that are used for the tour. But yeah, for some reason, I really felt like that one going through a bunch of gates. It always feels so good in VR. I was like, yeah, this can be like a defining moment in the story where we enter this new, I guess, era of our life. Well, not ours, but the woman life. That was like an introductory moment where we are sucked into this strange new world. And yeah, we selected a couple of those. But yeah, there's a lot more that are only visible on its tour that is now finished, I think.
[00:50:03.820] Vincent Rooijers: I think it's finished, but I might do a show later, in the beginning of next year, maybe, before that time.
[00:50:11.851] Kent Bye: And so, Peter, as you're watching the edits and seeing how this is developing, you know, there's certainly a lot of innovation that's happened in Tales of Soda Island and you like understand different elements of spatial grammar, the language of VR. And so as you look at this piece and reflect on it, how do you start to put words on some of the things that are even happening in it that are kind of maybe new innovations for what's happening?
[00:50:35.475] Peter Ariet: So Funi and I have a background of, I mean, Vincent as well, just loving electronic music. And a lot of visualizers are, like you were talking about earlier, and they're either really reactive or there's an interesting cut if you're doing it in a music video format. So Funi started to explore a lot of these things from just principles of how VR is being done, how Quill is being used, and then expanding on that. and doing all the various things that he got to explore. Something that was kind of a really core focus that I personally enjoy because I love audio production, and Vincent is an extremely talented music producer, and so we were just discussing how can audio play kind of that role as well. There's like that one unique moment where the horns are playing, which is an entirely new recorded portion, right? And so you have moments like that where...
[00:51:19.428] Kent Bye: It's a spatial audio moment, right?
[00:51:21.030] Peter Ariet: It's a spatial audio moment where you have these kind of different players coming in. And that's one element where it's common amongst most VR pieces, but it's one of those standout things where there's little techniques that we did where we either added an additional delay to simulate space and stuff like that. That was one major component in terms of the spatial grammar of what we're trying to mess with. But then where Funi started to change how he was editing one scene to another, it was a matter of still particularly spatializing the audio in those moments where you have the one where you're in like a blue environment where it's just a black void where you're kind of spatializing the voice, but then picking there is a tactile kind of like, oh, this is where the voice is going and it's jumping around, giving yourself like this attention to wherever it's coming from and then kind of always following the voice with the cassette and so like there's these moments where you're kind of drawing the attention visually with audio and this identification because then you also have the cassette in the room and you have the cassette as it's floating by you when you're kind of you have these yellow pillars that start coming up and kind of these different interactive moments of listening to the audio and knowing where it's coming from on top of kind of these very rapid cuts which you can't really do too much unless you're having like in a normal narrative like like our soda island pieces where you're kind of following these characters unless you're doing like an abstract dream sequence or something like that where in this it's almost like the entire thing is almost like a dream Like, you have this very spontaneous, you know, in-and-out moments from the room that you're kind of initially based in, and then you're leaving that room, which is a great vehicle for just, like, kind of grounding the kind of viewer, where it's like, hey, great, you're almost back home. And it's like you're coming back home over and over and over, and then you leave home, and then you're just kind of, okay, you're never coming home. And then it's like your home, your walls have fallen. You're now in an entirely new environment that's kind of overgrown, and it's like... You've been transformed and changed in some ways. I've been transformed and changed. And, you know, I think that we have the kind of liberty to do something a bit more experimental here where we're not following this particular character and how they're kind of like... Because in Tales from Soda Island, it was very much like this logical journey. At least I tried to make it logical with Funi. Because there are times where it's hard. You don't want to tell the audience everything. And I think that's what our discussion was, a lot of the points, because we don't want to be too literal. because you want the audience to fill in their own gap. It's their experience in some way, especially with the quotes that Vincent had put together. Because, I mean, that dialogue alone, outside of just the narrator, is really impactful. And we piece it together. We give you that introduction to the beginning, and so that kind of frames things for you. Then there's like a small Easter egg of where it appears again, and then it kind of reveals one final time, where then you kind of have this full encompassing idea of what this means and where it is. And they're such slight moments. Of course, you kind of get overwhelmed with the overall cuts and everything. But if you pay really close attention to some of the things that Funia animated, you then really feel the pacing. And then you're like, oh, whoa, something's happening. So you've seen it so many times where it's like, that's kind of something that we have done, where there's so much rich detail, whether it's in the music, or it's in the visuals, or the animation, that kind of makes it what it is. And I think that with this piece in particular, there's a moment where you do have the exploration where I think in Soda Island, it's such a rich world. You do sometimes get lost because it's just like, and that's what everyone loves about it too, because it's like this vast, intricate world where the moments of grounding you in a room allows you to explore the room, but there's not too much to overwhelm you in that room. So you get to sit in that room and then you get to leave the room. And so it's really kind of a well-contained moment after moment and then kind of just visually kind of shows you everything in front.
[00:55:12.179] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's kind of bookended with these quotes around perception and the way that what we pay attention to will change our experience, alluding to more of a participatory universe where it's not just things that are already happening, but things are dynamic, they're unfolding, they're in process, they're changing. And so it's kind of in the title itself, The Art of Change. But I didn't notice those quotes anywhere in the concept album. They may be in there. Where did the bookending of those quotes come from?
[00:55:39.784] Vincent Rooijers: that specifically uh we were just thinking and brainstorming what do we want to say what what kind of language do we want to attach to give that framework that people can um yeah and yeah at some point we were just writing things down and i think this came out of it but it was a very good like and capturing of what i also was trying to say with the album before that so yeah i'm very happy with that quote actually yeah
[00:56:06.741] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, me and Vince are clearly on the same page in terms of doing something that is clear and it's up to our interpretation where when we were working on Soda it was very different. It was always like a battle between how unspecific we can be with an idea but with this project we wanted to be way more vague but we felt like if you kind of need something for like to grasp on like to reframe what you've just seen otherwise you just saw pretty picture and pretty music and that was it but we wanted to give you something to think about and what I guess what we were trying to achieve with the piece without being too specific or obvious I actually was arguing against not having that because that's what I just but luckily they convinced me to keep it and I'm glad we did because everyone appreciate it and everyone's saying oh you should probably left that a little longer because you know we really need to think about what we we just seen but yeah that was specific for the VR piece
[00:57:11.136] Vincent Rooijers: I also like because with so many films and just forms of media there is a persona or like an entity that that is being followed and that the narrative is flowing through but when there is no such entity it goes from a sympathetic narrative to an empathetic narrative that you really tried, okay, there is nothing that is feeling something here, so I must be feeling something here. What am I feeling? And especially with such a little bit of language that primes that as well, you are already looking inward instead of to what you are actually seeing and therefore stay away from projecting. And yeah, I really like that mechanic of narrative in that sense.
[00:57:56.480] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it works really well to kind of bookend it, but also, yeah, just overall the piece feels like it's pushing into new forms of what the music video, it's not even a video, it's a music experience, a music journey. Do you have a name for what you created?
[00:58:10.251] Simone Fougnier: Audiovisual experience. Immersive audiovisual experience.
[00:58:14.214] Kent Bye: Okay, immersive audiovisual experience, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's what it is. OK. Great. So yeah, as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear from each of you what you think the ultimate potential of immersive art, immersive storytelling, and immersive audiovisual experiences might be, and what it might be able to enable.
[00:58:34.128] Simone Fougnier: It starts from Pete, so I can think about it.
[00:58:38.506] Peter Ariet: So it's really interesting with this piece because it derived from an album is that there is kind of now this derivative work where it gets to continue to live on because I think with this kind of fast pace in terms of specifically music and streaming and and of course the advantageous social media where there's so much media where it's now a new body and I think that there's kind of still this room within this new VR space for media that's still currently existing to now find some new life and I mean, we're interested in seeing where else we can go because you have these two creators right here where they're so enriched in terms of the worlds that they're building, whether it's sonically or if it's visually, where there's so much collaboration that can still happen here. And then it's also just without going too far into what you can experience in VR, it's still quite limitless and it's still very interesting no matter how complex the production may be or how simple it may be, it's still very rewarding. And so I think that, you know, moving forward, there's probably going to be more of these kind of smaller narratives that can still be had to kind of reach the audiences of any particular creator that's in the space. And so I think that's what's interesting with what we've done here. We've kind of ventured out into what this could potentially be in terms of a new horizon of how we can make new pieces and start bringing other artists into the space that may not have even considered, oh, VR is still a space where there's a story to be told that I can very much well be involved in.
[01:00:03.635] Vincent Rooijers: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I would even go as far as saying that we're on a precipice, especially with the combination of technologies and without opening the can of worms that is AI. Just from a music creation standpoint, I was already so interested in what it would be like to, for instance, make an album in a VR world where I instead of think about composition from like a purely stereo scape just more of a like like in VR the spatial audio kind of elements and how would that influence a composition process I find it a very interesting thing that I would like to explore but that would also mean that the visual elements as well as the audio element would start and be created at the same time or at least we would need to be in the same place, I think. Like just thinking about like, okay, what is this cube making? What kind of sound is this cube making right now? Shit like that. I think that's just a very interesting, it gives so many options for new forms of creating, but also for new forms of consuming. And I hope that this technology and other technologies as well will broaden our horizons in the way that we consume music, film, immersive content art because it's so much more than the product and I would love to see that reflected in the reality that people experience in VR because then it's so much more closer to home because it can have such more an impact and I think that it will turn into less of a product if people appreciate that element of it.
[01:01:47.466] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, I mean, they kind of said what I think as well. I hope that this keeps happening and it will increase. It has, to me, a ritualistic kind of approach. It's like... maybe you know 10 years ago I mean we still do it you know you in our current scenario like music is you know it's streamed you listen to music while you're cooking while you're doing your dishes and it's not like when you sit down you put on a vinyl and you just take it all in so this is like the substitution like a new version of that you you are dignifying the work by giving it the attention that it deserves because someone spends so much time thinking about this, recording it, arranging it, mixing it, mastering it, polishing it, redoing it. And then we're just like listening to it in between an ad and the other. But, you know, sitting down and experiencing an album in VR is the force you just to give it your full attention and you're just like... there and you're taking it all in and you can't escape. I mean, you can, obviously nobody's forcing you, but we kind of are forcing you to watch it, especially here in Venice. But I hope that this, you know, it gives a new spin on that idea of just music as a ritual, you know, just like a background thing you do while you're doing other stuff. Like this art is more important than doing your laundry, you know? I mean, I guess, but... Both are important. Both are important. I'm not saying you shouldn't do the laundry. I'm saying do the things separately, you know? And I feel like, yeah, watching an experience like this in VR, it really glorifies the process and the care that us and everyone else puts into their work. And you should give the same attention. You should put the same, not the same effort, but a little bit of the same effort into experiencing it. Like when you go watch a movie and you're not doing other things, you're there and you're focusing on it and you're taking it all in. And VR just takes that and elevates it to a new height. And I am extremely curious to see where this can go and how big it can be. And if it can become like a multiplayer experience, it can be maybe 300 people, 5,000 people are experiencing a virtual concert all in VR. Who knows where this is going, but I'm super stoked.
[01:04:14.842] Vincent Rooijers: Can I add to that? I think it's in the word immersive that what you just explained as well, and also what I was just saying, I think that importance of a different way of consuming this art is in that immersive element. Because if we are not immersive in our own lives, how can we be immersive in a thing that is supposed to be that? So the fact that this is an art form that is about the immersiveness might even help bring us back to immersion in our actual lives. Because why would you even try to experience something that is about immersiveness if you have such a hard time of distracting your own?
[01:04:56.311] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess as we talk about all this experience, I immediately want to send it to everybody I know to watch it. A lot of times when things show at festivals, you do a whole festival circuit and it becomes a long time for people to actually be able to see it. So when do you hope that this might be available for the general public or in some fashion that people could get a hold of and see?
[01:05:18.720] Peter Ariet: I think the goal right now is to kind of understand, unfortunately, it's the festival circuit. I think just to see what the criteria is for if we're allowed to show it, depending on where it is. I know various territories can't show certain things, depending if it's been released. I would say the goal would be within the next year, to kind of have that publication because we're still trying to decide how the best form of distribution is for, of course, you know, Vincent's fans and our Street Desire fans. So it's like coming up with the best way that we want to deliver to them because I think it's, of course, it's on the virtual animation player right now, but seeing how we can repackage that so then we can actually have something they can dig into even further because there's just so much more material but then also kind of explore the other ways that it can potentially be experienced because you know Vincent has been using a lot of this on this tour so there's still like this element that we're really curious about of like you know an actual live experience that can happen or at least something that is another larger portion of all the work just recombined in a unique way so I would still say it'll be a little bit of time before people can actually experience publicly
[01:06:25.123] Kent Bye: I know Roman Rapic is a musician who was doing like these mixed reality shows where he would have like these anywhere from 10, 15 or 20 people in a mixed reality headset. He would play one song and play it over and over again. But it would be like a way before he would give a concert. He would have this like little immersive expedition opportunity for people to like come in and This feels like it's self-contained enough for people to be able to come in and, you know, watch the 10 minute experience. And maybe there's a number of waves to see people to get through it. And then there's a concert afterwards. But it feels like audiences would be like really, if they're already fans of the music, then a way of driving another element of the live performance. So anyway, lots of options there. Yeah. So is there anything else that's left unsaid or any final thoughts that you'd like to share to the broader immersive community?
[01:07:15.051] Peter Ariet: Well, I'd say go check out The Art of Change, the album itself, because the music is phenomenal. But you know, at Studio Cyrus, still making some interesting pieces. This Art of Change is something that you'll be able to see in about a year. But otherwise, we're still focusing on making games. So just stay tuned to see what's there. And yeah, I'm grateful to be here. Thank you, Kent.
[01:07:35.666] Vincent Rooijers: Yeah, hello. Yeah, no, it was great working with these guys. Check out Phonelab, check out Studio Syro. Yeah, I see myself working with these guys in the future as well. And I'm really, really curious what will come out of that, because I think we all don't even have a clue of what that could be at this moment. Like, I think we're going to experiment a lot. So, yeah, I would love to show that when the time is right. And for now, yeah, check out everything.
[01:08:07.897] Simone Fougnier: I would just want to say thank you, Kent. Thank you, Michelle, Liz, for inviting us. And it's incredible to be here again. We've seen amazing things. I love all the installation stuff. I am definitely thinking about doing something like that because I never even considered it. But seeing so many cool installations, it would add another layer that we never even thought about. So yeah, I'm excited to work on future projects. And again, thank you. And see you next year, hopefully.
[01:08:41.983] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Peter, Vincent, and Funi, thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast. Like I said, this is like my... I don't know, I watched it again this morning, and I found it really deeply moving, and I think that's the meaning of the story. the change and also just the the feelings that we're able to evoke and not really even being able to understand why exactly just the combination of the the audio and the visuals all working together and yeah just a lot of really innovative explorations that you're doing here and uh Really look forward to where this goes in the future, especially as you start to add more and more spatial audio elements and seeing how the VR itself is going to feed back into the production of the music process itself to see what are the new structures of music orchestration or composition that's going to be unique to the affordance of VR to be able to do things that you can't do in a stereo mix or even 5.1 or other kind of traditional surround sound, but something that's a little bit more spatial or interactive, I feel like, feels another like another frontier to see where that goes but i'm really excited to see where you take this in the future because i yeah just really a big fan of of the work of your album and of your previous work and in this work as well so yeah thanks again for joining me to help break it all down thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you 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.
