I interviewed Play Life (Žaisti Gyvenimą) co-directors Zilvinas Naujokas, Vilius Petrauskas, and Mantas Pronckus at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
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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, Today's episode is with a piece called Play Life, which is by a Lithuanian musician and writer and photographer and painter. So a Lithuanian film producer wanted to create some of these different immersive stories and then felt like this translation of a lot of these paintings from this Lithuanian painter would make a good landscape to explore all these kind of surrealistic scenes and translate them from 2D into like these 3D immersive images. stories. They had versions of the original piece that was just with music background, but then one of the other four of the co-directors suggested that they try to weave in more of an explicit narrative. And so they went back to the painter and had him share a number of different stories from his life that were matching up with some of the different scenes that may have been coming up with different moments and the different paintings. And so They then had to edit that down into the overarching arc of the story, which is reflecting on this failed relationship and what happened within the context of their time together. And so as a piece, it felt like it was very much driven by the visuals first, and then sometimes the story would correspond with the visuals and sometimes it would kind of deviate and almost be like this completely separate track. And it was kind of like weaving in and out for moments when it was coming together and coming apart. So yeah, I have a chance to sit down with the creators to get a little bit more context for how this piece came about and to get a little bit more around, you know, some of these different decisions that they had made in order to create this piece called Play Life. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Play Life happened on Monday, September 2nd, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:09.247] Zilvinas Naujokas: Žilvinas, no jokas. I'm a producer and director of the film. Play life.
[00:02:14.431] Vilius Petrauskas: I'm Milus Petrauskas and I'm also director and not producer but creator of the film.
[00:02:22.190] Mantas Pronckus: My name is Mantas Pronskus and I was responsible for production team leading.
[00:02:27.135] Zilvinas Naujokas: Also a director. That's why I wanted to mention there are four directors in the film. The other one is missing somehow. Donatas, because all of us did this for the first time. and since there's no right way like to put only one credit so the decision was taken to put the main people that worked on the film as directors as a solution awesome great so we have three of the four co-directors and maybe just give a little bit more context as to the the other director The other fourth director, Donatas Ulvidas, he's best known for film feature directing in Lithuania. He made the biggest film features that I also produced. So he's like a big film director in our country.
[00:03:18.442] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working in this space.
[00:03:25.908] Zilvinas Naujokas: I myself work in the film industry my whole life. It's going to be, I guess, 27 or 28 years now soon. We run the biggest distribution company in the Baltic States that represents some Hollywood studios, Warner and Sony, and other independents like Lionsgate and others. I also was producing for more like 15 years, produced the highest grossing movies of all time in the country too. Stopped doing that a couple of years ago and wanted to do something new. VR came up somehow. It's still a movie. It's still a storytelling. That's what we do the best. And it's just a new technology. So I decided to go that way and approach some people, team members that we have now that I knew from the older times or the new people. And here we are in Venice after finishing production like six months ago or something.
[00:04:32.130] Vilius Petrauskas: Yeah, I've worked as a concept artist for 15 years and for many production companies, Universal, Warner Bros, Disney, Marvel, things like that. And I know after 15 years, I felt a little bit old in that freelance space and I just wanted to turn around and to do something else and that we are virtual reality looked like very interesting new media that i can do something cool and it's the production it's a little bit cheaper than to do like full feature movie and yeah we just started with monta started to do their production
[00:05:15.620] Mantas Pronckus: I'm working in CGI, with CGI, almost 15 years. I started as a freelance artist mostly in the archivist sphere, mostly work with the skyscrapers and stuff like that. But little by little, I stepped into entertainment business based on CGI. I worked with the games, worked with the media, and then In an interesting case, we found each other and we started to create our project. All four directors share basically the same idea that VR is new media, it's evolving media and everyone is interested in where it can get us.
[00:06:03.639] Kent Bye: Okay, and so how did this project of Play Life come about?
[00:06:08.263] Zilvinas Naujokas: So there's a painter really known in Lithuania. He's a very known person because he's a musician, he's an author of the texts, he's a painter and he's also one of the best photographers in the country. And I knew him well from the older times. Everyone or many people in the country know his art. And I believe that I was always looking, even with my movies that I produced, I was always looking for the projects that could cross borders, not only be interesting to local audiences. So from the old times, I have his paintings in my house and myself. It just clicked. I understood that this is something I want to do. I called the author and said, let's do this. He said, let's do this. And that's how it started.
[00:07:08.881] Kent Bye: Nice. And then how did you come on board or hear about this project then?
[00:07:13.320] Mantas Pronckus: It's a really interesting story. Zhilvinas ordered me to do some archivist visualization for VR movie theater. He created a movie theater center in Lithuania and I was the dude who He was responsible for doing the visual stuff, how the environment would look like. And in the process, I was really interested in what he's doing in VR, what it's all about. And I started to ask him, what are you doing? Do you understand VR? Did you work in the movies or something like that? And then in that way, we connected to each other, and that started.
[00:07:57.248] Vilius Petrauskas: I knew Žilina for many years and I helped him do some production work, concept storyboards and it came naturally that he just called me and said I have some crazy ideas about VR, I want to do like cinema in Lithuania, like VR cinemas and I need to do some production because cinema without some movies, there is no cinema. and for people to come he said that we need some localization versions of this media and yeah it just came naturally because this painter Algis Kishunas is very very popular in Lithuania and just yeah it was like no-brainer just to start with him and I think what we did it's good ideas and his style he's like this very light style and light style but it's the stories is very serious and everything came in movie nicely i think i hope that people will like it yeah
[00:09:01.992] Zilvinas Naujokas: Actually, I approached Viljus for a VR project that was different than this. We were supposed to make another project that is in works now. It's about Lithuanian mythology and gods, pagan gods, because, you know, we have a history of that. The country was the last pagan country in Europe. And so we have like deep connection roots. And the mythology is very similar to Nordic mythology. So Viljus is very into mythology from his childhood as an artist, as a concept artist and so on. I approached him and we started developing that project first. And then I came up with the idea of Play Life during that. And we all of us decided that it's better to start with this one first. because that one is more difficult, and we started doing play live. So that's how Vilous joined the team.
[00:09:54.674] Vilius Petrauskas: Sorry, I misremembered that, but it happens.
[00:09:58.777] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm also a fan of mythology and, you know, sort of this exploration of these archetypes. And yeah, I'll be looking forward to watching the new show on Netflix, Chaos, when I get home from this trip that came out a week or two ago, which is exploring Greek mythology in the context of the modern day. But yeah, I look forward to the next project after this. But going back to Play Life, so there seems to be two strands here. There's the translation of these paintings into these volumetric worlds. And then there's the narrative component, which is the story or the audio recordings that are being included, which in watching the video, find out to be actually featuring the main protagonist as well. So there's the kind of art that's interfacing with the story of his relationship. There's some intersections and then weaves in and out when it's just overlaying some of the surrealistic abstractions for when it also more directly aligns with the audio, with the visuals. But as you were starting to put together this story and this piece, was there a phase of technological exploration just to see if this was even possible? Is that where you started? And then maybe you could just talk through that process of starting to take these 2D paintings and art and then translating it into 3D and just seeing where you're at and then from, I imagine, kind of developing it from there. But yeah, I'd love to hear you elaborate on that.
[00:11:19.998] Zilvinas Naujokas: From the beginning, you know, the idea was the painting and its visual style, transferring it to a virtual reality. That's the main goal. because the paintings are visual people react to them they have deep connection and they have their own fantasies or whatever in contact with those paintings and we knew the painter always has every painting's description written as a kind of emotional text but it's more plain than what we have now and each painting had that so we thought Either we're going to do the musical version only, which sound and music is going to play the main game, or we'll try the audio. But then the fourth director, that Donatas is not here, he came up with the idea that let's do a conversation between a man and a woman based on those texts. And originally we thought maybe a screenwriter was going to write that, but we asked the painter, if he can do that. So he did that really fast and the text was really emotional and deep. We had to shorten it because it was longer at the beginning maybe. And still, when we received it and we put it on the film, It was really hard to decide which version is better. Some of us, if not all of us, liked the musical version because, you know, we're visual artists, right? So in Lithuania, we're playing both versions simultaneously. And we now know that people react, 95% of the audience choose the storyline and recorded the voiceover. The version of the voiceover is the main moneymaker, if you can say it.
[00:13:20.382] Vilius Petrauskas: I can tell you the thing how we made it and I think it's good process because we approached the painter with a pitch with demo version. We did two scenes with the music with all the 3D scenes with stereo video. and I think it's a good way because it's so hard to any artist to say we want just to make your art in VR space and it's so hard to explain and we not explained anything and producer Zhilunas just came to the painter Algis and he just put glasses and he said like play And we solved the idea in five minutes, I think, or 20 minutes, I don't know. But yeah, I think it was a good pitch. VR is a very good thing just for pitching, you know?
[00:14:14.633] Kent Bye: So when you said that you took it to the painter and he came back with the story, was he doing documentary recordings of stuff that had happened, or did he write it, or how did the storyline come about?
[00:14:25.316] Zilvinas Naujokas: Actually it was pretty simple. He knew that 20 paintings were using in the film. One of the directors explained to him what do we want. We want a man and a woman going through their life and we asked him to look at those paintings of his paintings. I mean he knows them really well. So he knew the timeline because from the beginning, right, we didn't know in which line we're going to put the paintings, how to make a story, singular story from it, even visually. So we kind of did, if you see the movie, you can see that it comes from the child to the end of life kind of a story. And naturally the audio text came up.
[00:15:14.747] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Cause I feel like that it makes sense that it started with the visuals. Cause I felt like the visuals were really visceral and strong and surrealistic. And then sometimes the audio would be disconnected and sometimes it would be connected. And so it felt like kind of like weaving in and out, like having these little touch points. And so sometimes they were kind of diverging and kind of going off on their own and And then coming back into what was being said was also being represented in that moment. And so it definitely felt like a piece that was driven more by the visuals first, in the world, in the environment, rather than the story first, because it felt like the story was added on in a way that was a little disjunctive at times. Yeah. So I guess if you were to describe what the arc of the story is and what's happening, because it seems like part of the problem I had with I had a little bit of confusion was like, who are these people? What's their relationship? And it's not until like later that it's OK. OK, they're former. friends partners and they're kind of like recounting different parts of their life and so what was sort of the uh i guess the direction or the instruction or the the arc that you were trying to tell through having some sort of story to kind of tie it together and like how would you describe that
[00:16:26.616] Zilvinas Naujokas: It's two people's love story, life story. And actually it's kind of based on the painter's personal life experience. Like having one family falling in love with the other woman and trying to go back maybe. Okay, I'm not that familiar with that storyline of his, but it is based on his personal story. We just wanted to add some finishing touches, like some drama at the end. I don't want to have spoilers maybe here. People should see the film to enjoy it or to feel it. But yes, it's a man and a woman talking about, you know, the relationship they had, they supposed to have, or they couldn't have. It's his life story.
[00:17:19.542] Kent Bye: And from your side, as you're interfacing with the story, how is the story impacting some of the different translations of the paintings that you were doing? Was there any interface between those, or was it kind of just like a separate process as you were kind of doing more of the technical translations?
[00:17:35.785] Mantas Pronckus: With the story it was kind of interesting because like Zilvan has mentioned before, basically most of the team members was for the version without the story and for me personally it was really hard to accept that part, that story actually exists because in my idea, in my understanding the whole concept of VR, of that media is more interesting when you have more questions than answers. But after we made the movie, I became the fan of the story. And you know, the story and the visual, They don't connect actually. You see, for example, flying whale. But story is about not a whale. It's just an illustration of idea, of the feeling, of wishes, of something like that. So it was interesting enough to put everything together, but I think we made it and we did it in a good way.
[00:18:35.228] Vilius Petrauskas: There is another thing because like a lot of artists doing like Monet or Picasso and they don't can have a feedback the artists and our artists are alive and living happily and he have a feedback for us and then he had a story for us because he showed him this story bits and then he said okay I love it but in my mind I have a lot of words and say okay show us the words And there's many words, too many words. We tried to make it shorter, but we've tried to respect his ideas because, okay, we have the sequence of the paintings and we have his idea how to tell the story. Okay, we keep silent. We just do production and we kept a lot of his words in this movie.
[00:19:28.413] Kent Bye: Yeah, and my understanding is that he's a fairly well-known artist and musician, and I imagine folks from Lithuania may be particularly interested in different aspects of his story, whereas here in Venice, it's a little outside of the context for people already knowing who he might be. So, yeah, I'm just wondering, maybe you could elaborate a little bit more around why this painter is particularly situated within the Lithuanian culture. Hmm...
[00:19:57.387] Zilvinas Naujokas: You know, today people that are social websites, stars... Influencers. Yeah, so they're just known for what they influence, what they do. So, Algis is one of the painters, he's like one of the pretty big influencers in the country. But through his work, of course, you know, he started as a musician. He played in one of the, if not the biggest musical group in the country. Think of U2 or something, you know, kind of level. So from age of 16 or something. So then he became a very known photographer. Then came the paintings. So he grew up. I mean, he's 50 years old. So, you know, it took time. But he's very well known for those. And as an influencer, as a social website star, he's writing really good texts. I mean, you know, when he writes, all the women cry. So that's what it is. You know, he's just good. He's good at it.
[00:21:04.673] Kent Bye: Nice. And so I guess as you start to translate the photos, maybe you could just talk about the technical process of what it took, if there was any use of AI tools or if it was all handcrafted. Yeah, just a little bit more of your process of this translation from 2D to 3D.
[00:21:20.623] Mantas Pronckus: It was kind of difficult in the beginning because the painting is 2D. And if we move everything to VR, to 360 area, we need to recreate a lot of things. And it was the first difficulty. So in some scenes, we interpreted how that painting would look like if we put it in 360. And in other cases, we blended together two paintings. which look similarly by the color scheme or by something that match correctly. We did use IE tools to increase resolution because when you render out the final output, it's a lot faster if you render in lower resolution and later on upscale. Rest of the work in 3D pipeline, it was nothing too crazy. Most difficult part was for our texture artists to recreate basically everything, you know. You need to paint on 3D and not paint nicely, but you need to recreate exactly the style of the artist. So I think those three points was kind of most difficult. We had kind of zero experience doing that, but I think we executed kind of nicely.
[00:22:36.883] Vilius Petrauskas: Not zero, but I can say that the painter's style was almost realistic and it's way, way much easier just to make figures or make landscapes because it's already there. Yeah, we had to interpret a lot of space, but we expanded the space. Like, for example, in the painting you have sky, but the sky is okay in the frame, but you need to have sky above your head. And we used some tools for that, for the expansion, but not much. Mostly artists did it with the hand. And yeah, as Manta said, everything else was mostly straightforward, 2D, 3D pipeline. Yeah, we just had to cut it, do nice scenes and then think about how camera moves, how fast. And yeah, just to talk with another three directors, how they think and how the painter, Algis, thinks. And yeah, that's how we did this production.
[00:23:46.127] Mantas Pronckus: camera movement actually it was another challenge and I think everyone who is creating something in VR not interactive but more to classical cinema style it's really hard to place camera and you don't in typical editing you have like cutting 15-20 seconds even in the shorter intervals in VR you can do that And you need to be really careful how you move with the camera, because if you're gonna be too aggressive, the viewer instantly gonna get motion sickness. So when played around that, so to avoid motion sickness, it was also kinda difficult.
[00:24:29.727] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a really beautiful artist statement video that's highly stylized that was put together for this as well. It has a lot of lightheartedness, kind of in the spirit of the painter, Algis, kind of infused in there as well. But also just the whole production team and each of your unique voices. And at the end, it kind of has this... poetic reflection on talking a little bit about the meaning behind the title of Play Life. What's it mean to live versus playing life? And so maybe you could elaborate on the meaning of the title of Play Life and, you know, the Lithuanian translation of that as well.
[00:25:04.393] Zilvinas Naujokas: Lithuanian translation is 100% the same. It's called Žeisti gyvenima, as in English, play life, yeah. And I guess the decision was, you know, I had to take first what's the title and what's the main image of the film. like the main poster as a marketing person that I did all the time marketing the biggest movies in the industry. You always look for the good tagline and for the good title. So... It was pretty easy. One of the paintings of Oligus is called Play Life. It sounded something that sounds good as a marketing tool. It has a meaning also. Let's play with life, you know, risk, do more, try. and then one of the paintings was the girl playing or inflating the balloon which explodes so it's kind of she's playing she's playing with the with the balloon she's not stopping you know at the some time she wants to explore And I think that's how the title came up. One of the paintings has it, and then it plays well with the audience. It's pretty simple. It's two words. It also brings a question. So, yeah.
[00:26:30.600] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And is there any other aspect of this film and this project that you wanted to talk about or dive into?
[00:26:39.485] Zilvinas Naujokas: Oh, good question. You guys...
[00:26:42.768] Mantas Pronckus: I think the whole concept is kind of interesting when you took someone's art and make another art of that art. That approach is kind of interesting, difficult, but overall, at the end, I think creators can achieve good collaboration and create something even more new and exciting. So I would think everyone should try out something new and play live like we did in production of the play live.
[00:27:17.034] Vilius Petrauskas: Yeah, I think there are a lot of words and visuals in this movie. And I think that every man and woman and viewer can find at least one word and one visual that sticks with him. And I think maybe that's the point. Because playing live, there are a lot of nice moments.
[00:27:41.636] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like there's like a real surrealistic translation of these different images and it felt like going through like a fever dream or like a psychedelic trip or kind of like a surrealistic twist and you know I really appreciated the whole visuals and I think the thing that I had the most trouble with was when the audio just seemed to be so disconnected from what was happening and like I wonder if I would have been one of the ones that preferred the musical version When they aligned, it was really nice because there were some scenes where it was more explicitly tied into what was happening into the world. Like when it came together and there was overlap, I felt like, okay, that's really strong. And then when it was separated, it almost felt like whatever was happening on that was more confusing and taking me out of appreciating the beauty of the art that was there. So that was sort of like my primary like tension. And it's interesting to hear that even within the directors that there was
[00:28:31.853] Zilvinas Naujokas: disagreement or discussions around that because i feel like there's traces of that that i could sense so yeah uh you know like not too many disagreements i guess almost 100 of the text which the author you know the painter wrote it's in there it's just shorter and i guess we had to stick with you know you know each painting's running time and that's why maybe sometimes you can feel disconnected Because when asking the screenwriter, the painter to write the text, you know, we had to kind of choose. Are we going to go direct way and talk about each painting? Which means you might talk geographically or what you see in the painting just, you know, straightforward. Or, as you say, you know, it's more general sometimes. Sometimes it goes back to the more specific subject, but sometimes it just flies away. So I think the decision is better this way, so we'll not stick and talk about 20 different kind of topics, but more it flows as one storyline. That's what we do with the movies, you know. Sometimes the best movies...
[00:29:50.994] Kent Bye: are not straightforward movies so i would say this one is something like that yeah and i wanted to ask kevin to come to lithuania because we have this version without voice and we're playing it 24 7 lithuania and just come and see it nice great well i guess as we start to wrap up i'd love to hear from each of you what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality in this type of immersive art immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable
[00:30:21.503] Zilvinas Naujokas: It's a broad question. You can talk for hours about this. I think me, my personal goals, what I do with film production is I want our work to be seen as widely as possible. We're not experimenting much. I mean, we're experimenting with the VR ourselves because it was our first VR production as that. But in general, we know how movie business works. So we want to make this as much wide as possible. And the goal is the same, you know, we're talking to different territories, feeling out if they could be keen on showing it. There's a feedback, you know, from some territories and it looks like there's a potential in it. So that's the main goal. As many people should see the work we did, it's a nicely made, warm, deep virtual reality film.
[00:31:19.255] Vilius Petrauskas: Yeah, I just wanted maybe to like in VR industry to just to grow audience. I like to be in underground kind of. Underground is cool, but I think we need more viewers, more interactions with the viewers, more distributions, things like that. It just became like normal because still there is like, I don't know, now we're sitting in a strange island and Silver Cinema is... Half kilometer away.
[00:31:48.793] Mantas Pronckus: Yeah, that's my thinking Overall, I think that we are as a media Not that far away gonna be as much mainstream as the smartphone now is and it will blend to our lives even more deeply and from that point I think movies games, everything will blend in and it will be really hard to separate the reality from virtual reality and everything will be mixed up. So I'm waiting for the time because for me VR as a media is the tool. to create things which can't be created in reality. Those things, those experiences can give you feelings, emotions that cannot be recreated or felt in any other way. So I'm really a fan of, not a fan, I'm in love with that media and I'm looking forward to where it can take us.
[00:32:52.173] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? Any final thoughts?
[00:32:59.476] Zilvinas Naujokas: I'm good. You know, you have plenty to write about, so... Start looking, play live in the meta quest story.
[00:33:10.399] Mantas Pronckus: So, no?
[00:33:14.401] Zilvinas Naujokas: We're not going to put it online for a few years yet, so... Sorry, Mantis. No, no.
[00:33:22.446] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that you want to... What's next for Play Life?
[00:33:26.267] Zilvinas Naujokas: Next is international rollout. Hopefully, maybe location-based experience that we can map on the walls and so on. We're working towards that direction, talking with some companies abroad. And then we're working on other projects already. So we are fully, 100% into VR.
[00:33:52.014] Kent Bye: Nice and as a half Latvian myself it's nice to see other Baltic state representatives doing some XR and to push forward what's possible with this kind of like fusion of taking art and making it into 3D and yeah fusing it all together so yeah it's kind of like this surrealistic trip and able to kind of have this meditative exploration of this dynamic relationship and just really beautiful surrealistic scenes and uh certainly trippy awe-inspiring and just the way it kind of weaves together so yeah very much enjoyed watching through all the visuals and uh yeah thanks again for for joining me here today on the podcast to help break it all down so thank you thank you for kind words thank you very much 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.
