I interviewed director Alisa Berger about Rapture II: Portal that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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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 and digital storytelling pieces from IFA DACLAB 2024, Today's episode is with a piece called Rapture 2, which this is a VR piece that's kind of a blend between photogrammetry scan, but also this kind of oral history capture. But the person was in this hypnotic state, and it's actually of a former apartment of this main character who is a dancer, but also is gay and formerly living in a region in Ukraine that was invaded by Russia back in 2014. So he hasn't been able to actually go back there, but So it's kind of like this VR piece that has a lot of experimental techniques, and it's actually a sequel to a previous version where they created this whole six-doff fly-through of this apartment. So the first version of this piece, Rapture One, is a video installation of Marco, who used to live in this place. And so he's got an opportunity to go revisit his former home within virtual reality and see some of his emotional reactions. Some of the clips of this video installation piece are actually included within the context of Rapture 2. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Elisa happened on Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:41.115] Alisa Berger: OK, hi, my name is Alisa Berger. I'm actually formerly just a director of documentary, experimental and fiction film. And this is my first immersive work that is based on an idea that I will also later develop into a documentary feature film. And yes, I come from the arts, from performance, also from film, from both. And yes, I'm very excited. It's my first time at DocLab. It's my first VR work. And do you want me to introduce the work?
[00:02:12.219] Kent Bye: Yeah, we'll get into that. I want to first get a little bit more context as to you and your journey into this space. So yeah, just if you could elaborate on other sort of design disciplines and everything that you're bringing into your practice.
[00:02:22.168] Alisa Berger: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, I have a very multicultural background. I was born in Russia, raised in Ukraine, and then in Germany. I'm currently based in France. I finished Le Frenois, which is this like very... media art and film focused place where you have to do you do a film but you also have to do something with new media and that's the reason I got into immersive storytelling but with this work I was already interested from the beginning to I mean the work is about my friend who cannot access his home since 2018 he hasn't been home and we wanted somehow to find ways to talk about it because we have a lot of interview material for the later documentary feature film And we were thinking about ways, how can we access, how can we tell the story, how can we not go to the Donbas, which is a war area. And we found this way that we will do a photogrammetry. So that's actually all my first experiences with immersive media.
[00:03:19.373] Kent Bye: And it's titled Rapture 2. Is there a Rapture 1? Maybe you could elaborate on the title and what that means.
[00:03:26.814] Alisa Berger: Yeah, there is a Rapture 1. So basically, We had this idea of making a photogrammetry. We hired a photographer in the occupied area in Donbass through the internet. We found a wedding photographer in fact and asked her to go to the apartment of Marco. The apartment is empty right now because his mother passed away there and since then it was just closed and it's remaining empty and we asked friends of Marco to open the door The wedding photographer came, made these photographs there, and then she sent us the photographs, and we started building the house. Also, he made us a map of the memories, like how does this apartment look like. We made this apartment. And then we invited him to come to a studio, because he never saw the 3D model until we really finished doing it. And then it was sort of an experiment. He would revisit it for the first time since 2018. And it's just him. And that's Rapture One, actually. It's him telling us the context, putting on the VR glasses and entering the apartment. It is a very emotional... It became an 18-minute short film or like a video artwork. It's very... very minimalistic, it's just him and the emotions. We never see the actual apartment, so that's Rapture 2, that's where we see it. And in Rapture 1, he describes it, he describes the memories, the emotions, he's actually also crying during this experience, and he... also like reflects us how it feels because in the beginning it's like wow i wanted to get here so much and finally i'm here and then it's like this excitement it's like a revelation maybe for a moment and then it also becomes something different because you cannot touch it it's not a real experience is it a simulation is it not a simulation and it reveals something about, and I mean for me it reveals something about this concept of rapture so that's why it has this title that you are taken from somewhere to experience something maybe better, maybe worse. You are mentally taken away to another place that you like maybe yearn for and that's where the title is also coming from. Okay.
[00:05:38.130] Kent Bye: And so it sounds like that you're a part of a program that is looking at both like the cinematic tradition, but also immersive media and kind of blending the two. And so maybe take me back to the catalyzing moment when you decided to investigate this as a piece that you wanted to dive into both from the first Rapture One and now into Rapture Two. Just maybe take me back to the origins of where the story began for you.
[00:06:01.448] Alisa Berger: Well, the story began for me when I met him. I mean, it was a friend for almost a year until like we talked about both our backgrounds. We are both from Ukraine, but I didn't realize that he is from the Donbas where the war started in 2014. And so he was 14 when the war started and how it felt for him to grow up in this like propaganda environment. Also, he's queer. Then in Donbas, same like in Russia, there is this very strong anti-gay, anti-queer propaganda. And And we've been just talking and I realized, wow, and he's a Vogue dancer. So that's a very like I have been doing also films about dance and I'm very interested in the body and in the power of the body in dance. So then the first idea came to me that I would like to do something about the body in the face of war, the vulnerable body, and also the strong body in dance. And I wanted to combine like his story, it was supposed to be just like a short film without a clear idea at that moment. And then the big invasion started like 2022. So that's when we just started doing interviews. And for me personally, it became even like almost a psychotherapy, you know, to have this feeling that you're doing something meaningful in the arts. connected to what is like really making you struggle and not doing just Instagram posts after Instagram posts or donating all your money. So that's how the project started and we were doing interviews and then I was looking for images, you know, how do you tell his story, his background without doing silly reenactments or something. So that's how the idea of the apartment came to photograph it, to make a photogrammetry and to have like this... fly through camera to have images to talk about it. And then later, it's actually like a collaboration because after he saw the 3D apartment, then now he wants also to be an artist. He wants to build this apartment as like a real installation. And the journey of this film is like taking different shapes. Sorry, I'm talking about like a future film, but this is where it all starts, I guess. Yeah.
[00:08:08.098] Kent Bye: Okay, and so I guess the structure of the piece is that you have the photogrammetry scan of this apartment, and you're almost like a fly on the wall. You're flying around this space, and there's a soundtrack of memories and life experiences, and then it kind of goes into other phases later that we'll get into, but I'd want to start with just the basic structure of... spatially exploring the space and then coming up with oral history testimonies and memories that were coming up. And so you talked about Rapture One where you created the whole photogrammetry scan and then he had a chance to walk through it and go back to this apartment that he hasn't been to since 2014. And so what was your process of then starting with that spatial capture? And then how do you think about putting together the narrative and the audio? Because it's usually an iterative process to have the space and then build the story. So I'd just love to hear a little bit more about your process of starting to piece together this as an experience.
[00:09:01.522] Alisa Berger: Yeah, this will be an interesting answer. I mean, for me, it was just the first time to see these images. I was like shocked. I loved it. And I also loved the absence of a human just like this fly through the apartment. And when we had the first render, I was just like looking at it all the time and just thinking, OK, what can be the audio for that? and then the truth is that at the same time I was doing another artistic performance about hypnosis and I was making my own hypnosis sessions and sending it to different artists and friends and they were supposed to listen to it and then after that like really immerse yourself into it just like with your eyes closed and then after that record me back a hypnosis session from them that I would send to another artist and it was a later a big audio installation And then when Marco sent me his hypnosis, so he automatically delved into his own experience. And suddenly I just got it back and I was like, wow, it's just like condensed all the story, all the things that are important. I mean, it's talking about his queerness. The off text is talking about his mother, who was an alcoholic and who he started caring for when he was like 11. She also got a disability, that's why she became an alcoholic. And also the first bombs, how the war started. But he's telling it all in this very distance, abstracted way, because it's like a hypnosis. I think while he was speaking the text, because it's really like I sent him the text and he listened to the hypnosis of mine, and then outside he just took his phone and recorded the new one. That's why also the audio has a certain quality. Maybe you realized. And then I was like, wow, okay, so there is the audio for this piece. And yeah.
[00:10:48.980] Kent Bye: I was going to ask around that, because there is like some scratching sound. So it sounds like it's probably like his AirPod or the wind blowing into the microphone. I couldn't understand the rhyme or reason for why the audio was screeching in a way that I had to actually kind of pull my headphones off at certain points because it was very loud. But the film was actually about exile. There's a lot of sadness and depression. It's basically not a happy situation or stories that he's diving into. And so I didn't know if that was a happy accident that was also building into this tension. But yeah, I guess it was sort of like an artifact of how it was recorded from him just walking around and having wind blow into the microphone.
[00:11:23.450] Alisa Berger: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I knew when I got this recording that we cannot recreate that, even if I give it to him and we put him into the studio. I know from prior experiences of working in documentary, but also in fiction, when you have a good take, it's a good take and you will not be able to recreate it. And then I somehow also kind of like the artifacts of the sound. Of course, it was cleaned a little bit, but I thought it's bringing some kind of strange atmosphere to it, also these strange crunchy sounds that come once here and there.
[00:11:58.910] Kent Bye: At some point you kind of flip into more of a negative space reversal or you kind of have like certain points where you're in very much the physical reality of the space but then you go into this more liminal space, the in-between space that has more imaginal dances and sometimes you flip into a space and there's a person that's walking around the apartment so I'd love to hear you elaborate a little bit more on what I'd say is a little bit more like the experimental film lineage it feels like there's like a little bit more experimental ways of playing with space or telling the story in a way that allows you to bear witness to this physical apartment but also going to this other transcendent realm where you're also talking about these other issues and having these other dance sequences and voguing and reminding me of the Stan Brakhage kind of experimental filmmakers that are pulling in these different types of techniques but in a VR space that I haven't seen that as much.
[00:12:52.142] Alisa Berger: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Stan Brakhage and that's also where my filmmaking began at 60mm experiments, Flickr experiments. I'm a huge fan of Flickr films and it was also just, I wanted to try it. So how do you react to like flickers or stroboscopic effects in VR and I was very surprised that they are actually very soothing while all the movement of the camera can give you some nausea like if you're not endangered for epilepsy or something the stroboscopic effects actually really ground you so I really wanted to try it because I thought also I've never seen it in VR or in 360 so how will it look and I started doing it and I was very happy about it And if you ask me about these other elements where you see the invisible person, so I was also very interested in general this film is about like the body but also about invisibility and I mean apart from exile and memory simulation reality because I was thinking that Marco, the protagonist, he is like his trauma is invisible to us because he's like this person walking around us but we don't even know like i for a long time didn't know his background his history and i kind of had this idea that i wanted to work with this transparent grid like the cut out grid from photoshop because maybe you remember when the big invasion in ukraine started there was the butcher incident the butcher massacre and at that time like people already on the social media were so At that time, Instagram would censor, which still does, the images of violence. So all the dead bodies were cut out from the pictures, the evidence pictures of the killings. They would cut out the bodies in a grid, like a Photoshop cutout grid. This image really stuck.
[00:14:47.294] Kent Bye: Yeah, when you have like a transparent PNG, it has like a checkerboard that is there that it's like the transparent layer, but they would replace that as an overlay. And that's a visual motif that's in this piece.
[00:14:57.478] Alisa Berger: Yeah, that's an inspiration. I mean, you wouldn't know it probably until I say it, but this was like an inspiration for how do we deal with invisibility, invisible trauma, things we need to cut out because we are not ready to see them or they will be censored. This is like a visual inspiration. And then I went to play with this aesthetic elements and to use it also in this flicker stem breakage way. Yeah.
[00:15:21.826] Kent Bye: Yeah, at some point it flips into a statement that he's talking around. I don't know if it was like an experience of sexual violence or he's recounting these memories. And I don't know if that was just a part of the hypnosis process where there's associative links or just going through all these things. But I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that piece a little bit, because that was something that stuck out when I was watching. I was like, just felt like it was kind of dropped in there in a way that I didn't have all the context for what was being referred to at that point.
[00:15:48.320] Alisa Berger: Yeah, to be honest, me neither. So when I heard it, I was like, I wasn't sure is it like exactly, is it something about sexual violence or is it maybe like a very happy gay provocation? And I tried asking Marco like carefully because I don't want to like also trigger anything. And it stayed in the dark. Maybe it's okay also. Okay.
[00:16:09.405] Kent Bye: So it's just an artifact of coming up and maybe you don't even fully know.
[00:16:12.886] Alisa Berger: It's an artifact of coming up in the memory and the hypnosis. Yes. Okay.
[00:16:17.719] Kent Bye: I think you're maybe the first person that I've come across that is using these kind of hypnotic techniques in the context of documentary. It's like putting people into an altered state of consciousness and then have these kind of associative links. And so it's just something I haven't seen before. So it's kind of interesting how to navigate that. Yeah.
[00:16:34.113] Alisa Berger: Yeah, thank you. Yes, I mean, I found it very funny because I had a mentor on this project and when he was watching the VR piece, it started and the voice says, close your eyes. And he was watching the VR piece and he closed his eyes. And then after a bit, he was like, wait, when I'm watching a VR piece, I'm not listening to hypnosis. So I kind of like... all these layers that it has, and then how does it... I mean, I'm interested in altered states of consciousness because it's very close to cinema for me also, and to use them to bring them into my projects, into my film projects, so yes.
[00:17:07.840] Kent Bye: Okay, so you're actually kind of inducing people into a hypnotic state. You're including a lot of that audio in there. When I watched it, you know, because I've watched a lot of VR, I immediately was like, okay, I'm going to open my eyes now because I don't know how long. I'm going to have my eyes shut, and I kind of...
[00:17:20.811] Alisa Berger: Because you're not supposed to close your eyes. It's funny if somebody does it in a way.
[00:17:25.908] Kent Bye: So I very quickly opened my eyes. But OK, so that makes more sense for that little bit. So at the beginning and an end, you have this television set that starts off as static and then eventually comes up, what I'm presuming is footage from Rapture 1 of him because he's coming out of the VR headset. Is that what you did? You put a link back of him watching it. So we're experiencing Rapture 2, what he saw in Rapture 1, but we see at the end of Rapture 2 him taking off the headset and having his reaction.
[00:17:52.253] Alisa Berger: Yes, but this is also how Rapture 1 also ends. So basically I want to have these two works at some point together in an installation, but I didn't have the occasion to show them together. Then they together become Rapture, which would be like a projection of him. And then you have the protagonist, like Marco, he's the same size as the audience and you see him having this experience. At the same time, you have somebody having the headset on mirroring both, they both end in the same way. I don't know, it's too abstract, can you imagine? Yeah, yeah, I think it's so... This work is also supposed to be at some point to be shown together, because then together it makes even more sense, so you connect the real guy, and you also understand, because the hypnosis, it focuses on you, it focuses on your way of imagining these things, but when you see him really visiting the apartment, it's a different emotion. I don't want to reveal too much. It's a different emotional experience.
[00:18:52.742] Kent Bye: wanted to ask in terms of the amount of information that's being disclosed and when about the full context of the piece because it's not until the end where you have some title cards that is giving the full context that this is in ukraine in donbass in 2014 and i heard from the curators okay this is what this piece is around and sometimes you have the synopsis that people read but if you're just going into a cold and not having any information then it's not until the end that you learn that And I'm wondering if that, in terms of that as a creative decision of revealing that at the end rather than up front, and if you feel like it has more impact if they don't know, because there's a certain amount of mystery of not knowing what's happening, then you find out versus having that at the beginning. I don't know if that's something you played with or how you kind of make that judgment call as to putting the title card up front versus at the end to reveal the full context.
[00:19:41.809] Alisa Berger: Well, I mean, in the end, I usually expect because it's still a very arty film that very often the people read the text. But in general, I think it's more interesting because it's not only Ukraine. You know, there are wars. There are a lot of horrible wars and genocides at the moment. And there have been a lot of wars. The experience of losing something like your home never changed through the human history. So I think you access this film very quickly. You don't need to know which war are we talking about. So you very quickly have a connection to it and then you get the full context, the exact story of this exact person. And I kind of like that because it's closer to you. Because once you talk from the beginning, you know, okay, This is the war in Donbass. You can almost like distance yourself a little bit from it, but when you don't know who's in front of you and who's having these emotions that you know from yourself, you are also emotional being. Like when you come back, like you're just touched. When you come back to, we all have our family house. We all maybe, I don't know, like lost it through just moving away or our parents moved away, separated, they lost their house. and we know this feeling of like a place of our memory of our childhood that we want to come back to. So we all feel like emotions for this and like my decision, I think it's more interesting for the viewer to first dive into it emotionally and from a very personal point of view and then at the very end get the full specific facts.
[00:21:20.495] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought that seeing the virtual simulation of the photogrammetry fly through and then have the virtual luminal space that has the Photoshop checkerboard cutouts as a visual motif, but then ending with him taking off the headset and then having the title cards with more context and then showing the documentary photographs of this place that we had just seen at high resolution, black and white. I thought that was really powerful to go from the very abstracted, not high resolution, high fidelity photogrammetry scan because, you know, you need a lot of photos, thousands of photos to kind of make it a fully realized photogrammetry scan. But it kind of like represents those fragmented memories in a way that the art creators are embracing that artifact-y or slightly janky aesthetic in order to represent something that is a fractured or fragmented memory within its own right. But then to see the high resolution photos after getting that title card, I mean, that's the way that you created and I thought that was a really powerful effect. there's also things where I was like, oh, I wonder if I would have had some of these little bits, if I would have remembered other things about his story differently in a way that was in the full context of someone who's a queer person under like Russian occupation or having to be exiled and all these other contextual implications that have much higher stakes in terms of some of these experiences about what his life was like. So I feel like the way that you created it is how I experienced it. So anything else is kind of like this many worlds interpretation of like okay this is a parallel reality that I didn't experience and it's hard for me to to know like what my experience would have been if you would have put it at the beginning but
[00:22:52.361] Alisa Berger: Yeah, that after that you could watch it again.
[00:22:54.182] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess that's the idea that you could watch it again to get that other context is what you're saying.
[00:22:59.684] Alisa Berger: Yeah. No, I kind of like that you get the facts at the end and they shock you and maybe this makes you think maybe I should watch it again because first I was just like immersed in this experience in a different way and now I would look at it again. So that would make you watch it again, which is nice.
[00:23:18.490] Kent Bye: Yeah, I do think that there is this motion sickness sensitivity that some people may have when they watch it. I know my triggers, especially when the camera's tilted up or down. And even flying around can be motion sickness inducing. So I know my own triggers. And so I kind of shut my eyes on things that I know they're going to be a little bit intense when it comes to motion sickness. But I'm wondering how you navigate that in terms of user testing or other ways that you kind of tune certain camera movements or other things in order to make sure that it's as comfortable as it can be for folks.
[00:23:48.484] Alisa Berger: So I have to admit unfortunately that's my very first VR work and I didn't realize the motion sickness effect as how much it will be so when I first saw the render I was also motion sick so I had to just understand okay so for me it's not closing your eyes just stop moving because like when you have static images you really love to move and I hope that with the hypnosis you really relax your body and unlike you do in the other VR works where you just look around what's happening there where you just like sit down and let the camera show you and guide you because if you don't move too much you don't have so much motion sickness. There was a lot of testing but there was not much we could do at that point already in terms of time and render possibilities so I hope people will forgive me and find their way through the piece, yeah.
[00:24:41.789] Kent Bye: The challenging thing around motion sickness is that there's a lot of people that have different types of triggers. And so for some people, they're totally fine. Other things that I know just like by tilting the camera up and down and moving with the horizon line is the thing that gets me and moving sideways. And for some people, going up and down can be motion sickness inducing. So I mean, I think for people who are seasoned within VR, they can modulate it by squinting their eyes. They're just shutting their eyes completely. But I was able to make it through in managing that. But I know that's something that as you start to show this, especially for people who haven't seen VR before, then it's something that's still the disconnect between what we're seeing and what we're experiencing in our inner ear and our balance. It's part of the medium that people are still trying to navigate and negotiate. But everybody has different tolerances and different triggers.
[00:25:27.814] Alisa Berger: Yeah, but it's funny because first I thought like, I mean, when I did my first VR games or saw first pieces, I thought like, I actually love this, not the motion sickness, but the feeling in the body, this first feeling in the body that you have like in the Achterbahn.
[00:25:43.368] Kent Bye: The roller coaster?
[00:25:44.208] Alisa Berger: Like in the roller coaster. So I actually wanted it, but then I regretted it later a little bit. But just for whoever wants to watch the film, it's just in the first 60 seconds. After that, the camera stays in a very calm movement. And I don't know, how did you experience the dance war scene there? I think because of the flickering edit, it actually really soothes the motion sickness effect. So I think... This problem is only at the very beginning of the film.
[00:26:15.733] Kent Bye: And back when you were talking around the Rapture 1 and Rapture 2 and putting them together, we were talking a little bit around the revealing of the full context of the information. And so in the Rapture 1, would you imagine that if you were showing them together that people would watch them at the same time? Because one is an immersive experience and one is a film that you watch. So I'm just trying to imagine how you would sequence that, if people would watch the entirety of him watching it or if they would experience it themselves and then watch it, or how do you kind of blend those two together? Since one's like a 2D film and one's an immersive VR piece.
[00:26:49.587] Alisa Berger: Yeah, but I mean, that's unfortunately the problem with VR. Only one person can watch it at a time. So per day with a 20 minute film and maybe like cleaning the glasses, it's not so many people who can watch it. And maybe also not so many people are willing to watch it. I mean, especially not at the doc lab, but like in an exhibition space. So the concept would be that a lot of people can see Rapture 1 and those ready for an emotional trip, they go and watch Rapture 2. But also, I mean, it's like a performative experience when you have another person like the guy on the screen experiencing that. So the viewer of Rapture 2 becomes sort of like a sculpture, like a living sculpture that is there together with the protagonist watching his apartment. I haven't exhibited like that. I've also applied to some festivals, so keep your fingers crossed for Rapture to premiere as a one-piece.
[00:27:45.898] Kent Bye: Okay. I know a lot of times there could be queuing, so would you imagine people would be waiting to see the experience, but they could watch the film as they're waiting, or the onboarding or offboarding part?
[00:27:55.180] Alisa Berger: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:27:56.421] Kent Bye: Yeah. Okay, great. Well, so what's next for this? Is there another edition? You started to talk earlier around like a future project. I don't know if this was connected to Rapture one and two, maybe a third, but I'm just curious what you're going to be doing next.
[00:28:09.434] Alisa Berger: There is no title to this project or there's just a working title that I don't want to say but it will be like Rapture 1 and 2 will become like a documentary like of course they will be different they will have fragments of this but this protagonist and his story that starts in the Donbass in his youth and then brought him to Japan. So he became a model in Asia because that's the easiest way for East European young people to get out of this place. And that's where we met. We met in Asia and like all his journey because he cannot get a refugee status anywhere as can the other Ukrainian refugees because he left Ukraine before the big invasion. So it's a very emotional journey about him. after his modeling career finished because he's too old not having anywhere a working visa. So he went to Canada and I followed him to Canada where he got work permit for the first time since many years. Became sort of a refugee in Canada and now finally he came also to France to study art. And yes, it will just become a portrait documentary about my friend, his history, but also our friendship that has also a very interesting effect.
[00:29:23.957] Kent Bye: Is that going to be a film?
[00:29:25.337] Alisa Berger: It's going to be a film, a documentary, hybrid essay film with some reenactments. We will also reenact some things from his childhood, like how it was to be in a school when the war starts and you get military training suddenly as a teenager and stuff like that.
[00:29:47.144] Kent Bye: I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the technical process of doing the CGI motion capture for the voguing that's in the piece.
[00:29:55.080] Alisa Berger: Yeah, it's a pity Ludovic is not here, the 3D artist. He was supposed to come, but now he found a slot to see another VR piece. Yeah, it was a motion capture. First, we wanted to do volumetric scanning, videogrammetry, but we didn't have the financial means and the technical setup for this. So we did a model of him, a 3D scan of his face and body also and we did several takes with a motion capture suit and then we couldn't choose any takes so we took them all into the 3D world so they're like multiple Marcos dancing. It was interesting because I never wanted really to do that because I always thought, oh my god, the power of the Vogue dance, you know, these like very powerful movements, they will get lost in the 3D motion capture scan. But I was surprised it actually works partially. But the next step also for the feature documentary would be to finally find ways to work with volumetric scanning.
[00:30:57.870] Kent Bye: I think that you get the embodiment and emotions, and that translates pretty well, but you kind of lose a lot of the facial expressions and stuff. So I think that you miss the emotional expression on that front.
[00:31:07.376] Alisa Berger: Exactly. Yes, of course. You cannot translate that. So that's like, I mean, this is also my research journey. How can we bring this together? You know, like this real body experience that you have when you see like a Vogue dance show, which is like a very hot and very all about emotions, all about face expressions, hand expressions. and merged with the 3D world where a lot of it in the process of scanning can be lost. It's good to have an experimental approach to try to merge them. I can't tell you more because I'm at the beginning of this journey at the moment.
[00:31:43.720] Kent Bye: Yeah, certainly there's some facial capture solutions that exist, like the MediQuest Pro, and then there's other add-ons that you can add to the Vive. But yeah, it's all right now, a lot of work to kind of get all that integrated in a way that's easy. So the technology is out there to do it technically, but it's not easy to get off the shelf and to do, so...
[00:32:03.076] Alisa Berger: I think sometimes it's even good to have the limitations because it can lead you to creative solutions and then you actually use the glitches, the mistakes that you get out of it as something artistic and they become also emotional. Like for example we tried experimenting with just one Kinect so the volumetric scanning is just one side but you have all these glitchy effects that can also create certain aesthetics and certain feelings that can... translate maybe things that we try to translate from reality into the digital world and that can be interesting and fun because that's art i guess great and and finally what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable Hmm. I don't know. I'm curious. I want to see. I haven't seen so many VR works here. I'm very curious to see some. And I think it has a certain power. I mean, I would be like, I'm very interested in the psychology of the human. And I would really like to explore this part, like the hypnosis part. Because... Even when you're in the cinema, there is a certain distance. You immerse yourself, but you have a certain distance. But in this VR, you are really completely immersed. So I think it has manipulative power, but it can be used in a very cool way. I know I'm talking very abstract, but who knows? Maybe we could do a very good therapy with immersive media. And we all need therapy, I think. Create art with this art therapy.
[00:33:44.088] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:33:49.491] Alisa Berger: Welcome to see my film, to ITFA DocLab. I don't know. No, I have no... I didn't prepare a speech. Yes, I don't know. What did the others say?
[00:34:00.421] Kent Bye: I mean, I think sometimes they have a lot of different approaches for any other final thoughts. Anything else that we didn't talk about that you think is worth saying?
[00:34:08.824] Alisa Berger: For me, it's like it's my first time in immersive media. So I feel like I don't have so many things to say. I'm very new, and I'm exploring it. So I don't know. Folks, let's get more experimental. We don't need to be narrative in our immersive projects. Yeah. And I think like from what I saw, even though there's the danger of motion sickness and nausea, I really enjoy if it's like moving cameras in VR. I think we should all do it more.
[00:34:43.891] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think, you know, one of the things that happens in films and VR is that there's certain genres that exist. And I think part of the experimental genre is that it's trying to defy our expectations for what to expect. And so I feel like in this piece, exploring the experimental forms of storytelling and also on a topic that is around exile and being in these liminal spaces. I think it fits really well to the different types of techniques that you're using in order to explore this as a topic. And yeah, using all sorts of other experimental means of even using hypnosis and other modes, even capturing the audio.
[00:35:18.132] Alisa Berger: As I told you, I'm interested in altered states and psychology, and I think this is the best media to explore this. create a digital, I don't know, like LSD trip in VR or help people with post-traumatic disorder by creating like this, I don't know, reenactments of this traumatic experience but like in a controlled way like in other, I think it's like a work by Harun Faruqi where he's documenting how these soldiers use also VR to overcome post-traumatic disorder and These are the things that would interest me and these blending with structural cinema or other forms of experimental avant-garde filmmaking, I think that's the way to go.
[00:36:03.493] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, I know Skip Rizzo is also a researcher who's been a real big pioneer. I'm doing this kind of exposure therapy with treatments of PTSD out of USC, ICT. So yeah, he's been doing a lot of pioneering work on that since. And yeah, I think the nature of VR is that it is blending and blurring all these different media together and all these different structures and forms. So yeah, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. So thank you.
[00:36:25.108] Alisa Berger: Thank you very much. Thanks.
[00:36:27.574] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I really would encourage you to consider supporting the work that I'm doing here at the Voices of VR. It's been over a decade now, and I've published over 1,500 interviews, and all of them are freely available on the VoicesofVR.com website with transcripts available. This is just a huge repository of oral history, and I'd love to continue to expand out and to continue to cover what's happening in the industry, but I've also got over a thousand interviews in my backlog as well. So lots of stuff to dig into in terms of the historical development of the medium of virtual and augmented reality and these different structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
