Play episode

#1517: LBE Lessons Learned from 20-Venue Tour of “In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats” with Producer Dan Tucker

December 23, 2024by kentbye

I interviewed producer Dan Tucker at IDFA DocLab 2024 about the lessons learned from touring In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats across 20 different venues over the past couple of years. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.” See more context in the rough transcript below.

This is the last episode from my series of interviews from IDFA DocLab 2024. You can see all of the interviews in the list below:

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Share this
FacebookXRedditEmail

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 Voices of VR. So this is my last conversation from IFA Doc Lab 2024 with Dan Tucker, who's a producer at East City Films. And we talk about some of the experiences that he's had with touring around the experience called In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats that I saw a couple of years ago at IFA Doc Lab 2022. So Dan, It's looking at the early days of rave. And it's kind of like this mix between this immersive documentary where you kind of walk through being taken back in time with all these posters. And then you're step by step. This is how they would actually travel and go to these different rave events. So we talk about some of the different challenges that they've had with in pursuit of repetitive beats, because when they first developed that they were really focusing on optimizing for immersion and not really thinking about throughput and how many people per hour and how to make it all financially viable. Okay. So they've been trying to go from a single player experience into turning into a multiplayer. So with the same four by six meter space, they can have four people going through at the same time rather than just one and basically quadruple the throughput that they're having and to make it more towards this financially sustainable business. So Dan Ticker and Darren Emerson from East City Films were presenting during the If A Doc Lab R&D Summit about some of their lessons learned. So they had a whole presentation and they had a whole breakout session that I attend both of those. And I have a little bit more detailed write-up on that that's going to be coming out in the If A Doc Lab R&D Summit write-up that should be coming out here within the next couple of weeks or so. And then I also wanted to just have this conversation with Dan to share some of these larger takeaways that they've had from the frontiers of location-based entertainment distribution with the In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Dan happened on Monday, November 18th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:06.699] Dan Tucker: Hi, my name is Dan Tucker. I am a producer in the immersive space, mostly virtual reality experiences. I was also the curator at Sheffield DocFest for three years, running the new media exhibition there between 2017 and 2019. And before that, I have a history of working in public broadcasting and digital agencies, mostly making factual content. So I began as a documentary maker, like a producer and a director, and then moved into interactive digital media, games and apps. And then eventually I moved into virtual reality in 2015, 2016. Made my first VR documentary for the BBC called Easter Rising Voice of a Rebel. Then I went to work in the festival, Sheffield, and then I left the festival to go back into producing. I've worked on a bunch of different projects, but skip forward to where I am now. I'm working with East City Films and the artist Darren Emerson and his business partner, Ash Cowan. And at East City Films, we make purpose-driven storytelling. And the big success we've had since I've been working there is in pursuit of repetitive beats, which is also the reason why we're back here at IDFA. It was shown here in 2022 and we're part of the R&D program with MIT. And we're back really this year to talk about distribution and the success that we as a team, but specifically me, I guess, have had with getting the project out there, getting it to public audiences, giving it a life beyond simple one-year festival run but also perhaps just shifting the dial a little bit so that people believe that these kind of experiences can be put on in public art spaces and bigger festivals and festivals are not necessarily film festivals and attract a paying audience so that we don't have to distribute by emptying our pockets I mean I'm not saying we're really filling our pockets but Beats is a project that has traveled without losing money. And I think a lot of people who really push to distribute their own work sadly end up losing money.

[00:04:11.991] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you can also give me a bit more context as to your background in terms of all the different design disciplines and other insights you've had from your career into what you're doing now, but also like what kind of drew you into getting into the immersive space as well?

[00:04:24.702] Dan Tucker: Yeah, I think what drew me into the immersive space is imagination. You know, it felt like such a rich place for imagination. And I was a kid. I was quite a nerdy kid that played video games and board games and role-playing games. And I just loved a story where I would have a place in the story. I loved a story where I could be a participant, where I could go on the hero's journey. I'm still totally addicted to all those fantasy and sci-fi stories where you're really suddenly in a new world. Not that that's the content that I make, actually. I like making content about the real world. But that's kind of what drove me to be in interactive media and then immersive media. Before working in VR, I had worked in television for a long time, and then I moved into digital and kept trying to collide the two. Like, how do we get television and film level storytelling, that quality of storytelling where you really believe in a narrative and you're absorbed in it, but how do we smash that together with agency and presence? and sometimes, you know, social elements. And so I worked a long time in the BBC in different digital teams, sometimes making content for kids' audiences, sometimes adult audiences, like grown-up audiences, and had a really good run, you know, about 10 years in and out of the BBC, coming and going and coming back and scoring a commission and doing something new. And then one day somebody said to me, kind of head of a department called Chris Sizemore, a really great guy who could always find money for innovation projects. He said, why don't you do something with VR? And I was extremely dismissive at that time. I can't remember what the headset was, the thingy-me-one. The Gear VR or something like that? No, no, it was the Oculus one. Oh, the DK-1. Yeah, so the DK-1. I put this thing on my face, which felt like there was a platter on my face, and watched all this terrible stuff. I'd watched all this terrible stuff. jump scare and roller coaster. I said, this is a fad. It's just terrible. But Chris Sizemore, the guy who was trying to persuade me to do VR, persisted. And then my direct boss said, oh, I've just been to Sheffield Dockfest and met this incredible team. You should speak to them. And that was Oscar Raby. No Oscar. No, I'm not sure. What was the piece that he did again? I think Oscar Raby. This is just another side, right? Oscar Raby, one of the hidden stars of immersive. People in immersive production really know about Oscar because he's very talented. But the outside world of people who've seen big immersive projects in festivals, et cetera, may not know him as well. But his first piece, I think, was made for the DK1 or DK2. And it was a kind of autobiographical piece about his relationship with his father. who was part of the Pinochet regime, and it was just, it was like nothing I'd ever done before. I had this duality dilemma, like, am I me? Am I him? Am I his dad? And I came out of the headset like fizzing. It was called Ascent. So I would recommend Ascent by Oscar Raby. He made other pieces, including the first piece I made at the BBC, Easter Rising, Voice of a Rebel. We got him on. After I watched Ascent, I was like, that's the guy. That is the guy I want to work with. And then I saw a few other things. I saw Gabbo's first one, the refugee camp. Clouds Over Sidra. Clouds Over Sidra. And so that and Clouds Over Sidra are like kind of Beatles moments for me. I was like, oh, hang on a second. Perhaps this is a good genre. And so I got excited about it. And then I secured money to make this documentary called Easter Rising Voice of a Rebel, which is about the uprising in 1916. And so we were making it in time for the centenary. And we made it with Oscar. And my God, that was an eye opener because I've worked on so many digital projects. I was like, I've got this. I get it. Let's get on Basecamp. Let's get our sprints organized. You know, it's a very digital project manager about it. But what I think what, you know, you realize when you work in, especially in virtual reality, it's like what's so important isn't what it looks like. I mean, actually, what it sounds like is very important, or what it sounds like. But even so, what it looks like and what it sounds like is not as important as what it feels like. And that's why I really love Descent, actually, because I really felt something unusual. And so there was a learning curve. I felt like all the production tools I had from television and mobile and apps and gaming and digital project management, I had to go put that under the bed and then start anew. It was a great learning curve, but I really enjoyed it. And I think we made a piece of work that was great. It was shown in a bunch of festivals, including Sheffield, which then led me to go and work in Sheffield.

[00:09:01.382] Kent Bye: So that's the kind of potted history. Well, that's a really helpful context. And, you know, I remember being here at the Doc Lab back in 2022 and seeing In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, and it just really blew my mind in terms of what you could do with having this blend of documentary with immersive interactivity and embodiment but also with like haptics and you know a six by four meter space and free roaming and just really epic in terms of you know pushing to the edge of all the different types of immersive dials you could turn and creating an immersive documentary And then on the other hand, in terms of getting practicalities of the throughput and getting to actually have it sustainable, you know, that's part of your job is to make it so that you could turn it into a viable, sustaining business venture as you start to distribute it. And so you have, on the one hand, the pushing to the edge of the immersiveness that you want to get. But on the other hand, you also have trying to make it practical and scalable in the way that you can have enough throughput to make it make financial viable sense. So maybe you could elaborate on that tension that you've been at the center of, of trying to both work with the creative, but also, you know, thinking around like, how do you actually now take a piece like this out on the road and have it in a way that is available for people to even have a chance to see it?

[00:10:16.036] Dan Tucker: Yeah, it was a challenge with Beats. To go back a little bit, I was on the other side of the fence when I was at Sheffield and I was the curator of the exhibition there where it was like, listen, it has to be the most groundbreaking exhibition with the most interactivity, the most different types of form. And it's just a creative wonderland. And I had a producer, Joe Cutts, a great guy who's also actually an artist. And he would wrangle all those wonderful curator ideas and say, OK, how do we make this doable? in time for a six day festival and then tour in the UK and Latin America because we were touring. So I had some experience, by the way, of already touring. And so he was the person that I then became with Darren, if you know what I mean. So I would listen to Joe and listen to how we could construct physical sets and how we could make it tourable. And then I went Later on to work with Darren at East City Films and I was on board to like, let's make the best VR thing we can possibly. Are we going to throw everything at it? Are we going to do motion capture? Yeah, let's do that. Are we going to do volumetric? Yeah, let's do that. Are we going to get a car in the blue screen and put a camera back through the window? And yeah, I was on board with all of it. I was even on board with things like the duration, which I knew would make it harder in terms of scheduling and slots, because we just wanted to make the best thing possible and take it to the festival network and have the respect of our peers and get awards. And then maybe it could tour, but maybe we'll just go on to the next one. What then happened was everybody loved it and they wanted to tour it. And then they started asking questions that I had begun to ask a bit myself, but I didn't want to get in the way of the creative process. Like Casper especially is like, okay, so how are you going to do this? And when's it going to be more people? And how can you reduce the amount of staff? And so we started to do that. And in fact, after its very first exhibition in Coventry, which is the city that it's about, it's it's about rave culture, but the lens is on the Coventry history. And it was also partly funded by Coventry City of Culture. We first had that show. We ended that show. We're like, what a great show. But we were doing four people an hour. Right. So I said to Darren, OK, look, it seems obvious. And by then we'd already started to have conversations with people like Casper. It seems obvious that we're going to have to make this multiplayer or we're going to have to think about different form factors because we cannot have 130 square meter space with four people an hour. Like once we get past the festivals, it won't be viable. And we talked about it, the three of us, including Ash, and the choice we made was, no, we're going to stand by how the work is. We're going to go big or go home, and we'll find a way to scale up, but we're not going to be able to scale up to like 50 people an hour or not. We could probably get to eight, maybe 10. And the way we'll do that is we'll have a certain number of people experiencing it as free roaming, where they're walking around, as you said, a four-meter by six-meter quadrant, we call them, and that quadrant is mapped to the virtual space. Every time you're in a room, you're walking around the same dimensions physically as you are virtually in the room. We'll also have, like for accessibility and also because we can't fit as many of those large quadrants in the space, we'll have smaller spaces where you can do it seated or standing and use the controls on the hand controllers, the Oculus, the Meta Quest controllers, to teleport around. And we have done that actually successfully across multiple festivals and galleries and museums and music venues for the last three years. We've toured it as a mixed form factor, some free roaming, some in stationary or stand-up positions. And that's worked, and right now, actually, it's on in Brighton, and there's 10 people doing it at a time, all doing it in the latter, the stationary position where you have to, you can still move around a bit, but you're mostly moving around with the controls. But it was always intended to be free-rhyming, and so that brought us back to, okay, We've done that. That has worked. But we're still talking about 10 people in an hour. If we want this project to have a future and if we want to look in the future at more multiplayer or multi-person projects, we're going to have to invest in some development time to make beats multiplayer and then maybe use that as a format for our future work. So that's where we're at now. We've just begun the process of making beats multiplayer. And what that means is the quadrant that I described, which has one audience member walking around a physical space that's mapped to the virtual space, will go from one to a maximum of four. So now each quadrant has four people which increases the audience size and the throughput and the ticket sales by 300% and suddenly gives it much greater legs as a bookable project for a museum or a gallery or a festival or an art center. And we firmly believe that's part of the future. But that's not always enough. I mean, having a project that maybe does 30 people an hour even, so let's say 300 people a day, that's still maybe not enough. You still need to then persuade venues to take the project, educate venues about this new medium, talk to them about actually what I believe is a very different audience profile, And then sometimes you have to bring some form of catalyst, like is it funding? Is it a relationship with a sponsor? Is it that your team is going to invest time to train their team? And that's a lot of the work I do now.

[00:15:32.981] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to go back to the idea of the festival circuit that I think is really actually coming from the film festival scene where you have independent films that will go to Sundance. Some of them might get picked up and then go off and have a distribution strategy. Others that don't get picked up will then go and do the festival run where usually it's around a number of different other festivals to maybe get more press and maybe eventually get picked up. But within the context of the immersive space, there isn't those distributors that are going to be picking it up at a later festival. Either it's going to happen in the early festivals or not, or you kind of have to still do the logic of the film festival scene into VR, but it's got a different distribution model. So it's like you kind of have to also make that make sense in terms of just the cost to even do a festival run. So in terms of having the staffing and everything else that you had with In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, how were you able to make that happen in terms of doing a viable festival run in the absence of having clear distribution strategies after that?

[00:16:32.638] Dan Tucker: That's a really good question, actually, which is how did you even do the festival run in the beginning of a year and a bit that led to opening up new opportunities? Well, as I said before, we ended Coventry. Actually, you know, just to say a little bit about that very first exhibition. So we were funded by Coventry City of Culture to kind of celebrate some of its musical roots. And we were funded by the BFI, the British Film Institute, as an investment, not a grant, an investment. And so we always knew the first show was going to be Coventry. I suppose we could have talked to Coventry about, like, we want to do a world premiere at a festival. first before we do Coventry. But that didn't feel very honest to the subject matter of the commission. And Coventry wanted to help fund the first exhibition, which then became the format for the show. And the show is much more than just the VR. It's like a physical environment and a post-VR gallery. So we did that show in Coventry and what we did is we kind of reversed the model. So we started with a show for three or four weeks in an art space and we invited all the film festivals to come and see it. And we said, look, here is the oven baked project ready for your film festivals. And they were all kind of a bit seduced by it. And we also brought people. I mean, it's minuscule, the world of distribution. But we brought them too. We brought Atlas 5. We brought 5 Studios. And everyone came and saw all their friends, just like they would at a film festival, because it is a small crowd. But they were like, oh, hang on a minute. They've already done an exhibition. So it's exhibition ready. And then all the film festivals were like, oh, we've got to have this. And then there's the discussion about how do you actually make it possible for your festival? And we were quite firm, actually. We're like, OK, this is the way it's going to work. It'll come here and it will cost and you will have to pay for it. And our suggestion is that you ticket it separately so that you can recoup what you'll have to pay, because that's how we imagine going forward in the future. We're going to work with venues and Either there is the fee and we just come in and we do it and let's see how it does compared to the other projects. Or there's a bit of a negotiation where we will take some of the ticket revenue. And for most film festivals, the immediate answer to that was, no, you can't do that. That just blows our minds. You know, like no film is coming to the film festival. Herzog's not coming and going like, give me a chunk of the ticket sold. Or maybe he would. I don't know. So the majority of festivals were like, no, we get it. OK, it's a big one. Let me go back to the film fond or whoever and see if I can work it out. And they did. They all worked it out. So, yes, it was inexpensive, but we were open about that. And we're not the first. I'm sure, like, if you want to book a marshmallow laser feast project, it's really expensive, right? So we're just really honest about that. We're like, it's not going to be for every film festival because of that. So that first year, it was go big, go home. We were going to festivals. We were doing big installs where a festival couldn't raise the money, but it was a big opportunity, like South by Southwest, for example. I raised the money to take us there. But my God, those big shows in big festivals led to big conversations with the microscopic pool of distributors, but suddenly beyond. like to venues and other types of festival. And so then that year and a bit passed, and we started to mellow a bit on the Go Big or Go Home. And it's like, there's loads of festivals that want it. This feels unfair. So we tiered the experience so that we offered what we call Beats Lite, which is like, okay, really you're just after the VR bit. You don't want to build up the whole... immersive set design and spaces around the experience. You're really just after this bit. And if we feel confident in you, then there'll just be a fee to show that. But you've got to provide all the equipment and we're going to give you like a guide and a setup guide and like what you need to have and off you go. And then suddenly, you know, then it was like another 10, 15 festivals because we made it... available and the advantage for us was that loads more people were seeing the project and the perception in in our community and even outside our communities even filmmakers were like wow you guys are like the momentum it just keeps going and we hear that now and you know the last four days everyone comes up to me and says i can't believe it's still going i mean i do have to remind them it's because it's good um but those smaller film festivals really really helped and lots of people got to see the show Then somewhere in between the really big installation and Beats Lite, we realized that There were some operators who really knew their, English expression, knew their onions. They knew their stuff, they were reliable, they understood technically how to run a show as complicated as Beats. So then in the middle we had Beats MIDI, so it's like, okay, it's a higher license fee because we're going to spend more time explaining to you and your tech team how to run it, but we'll give you the license to kind of show the fuller exhibition, but you'll have to pay for all of that. But we'll give you a license, including how our show control system works. And we'll spend time teaching your teams. So we've got this three-tiered kind of model of Beats, which is that there's the full installation. There's Beats MIDI, where you recreate the installation yourself. And then there's Beats Lite, where it's just really the VR. And that has led to almost 30,000 people now seeing Beats, which is, in VR terms, a lot. I don't know if it's a blockbuster, really, because I'm sure when you're online, and you're a meta-funded project, you're probably going to end up getting, I don't know, 100,000 or a million or whatever downloads. For location-based entertainment, at least. Yeah, I think it's successful. And also, apart from the quantitative measurement, the qualitative measurement is great. We always make sure, as much as we can, across those different tiers, that it's a really great experience for audiences. And we get so much love for the experience. It's on right now in Brighton. And every day in all these Facebook groups, like Old and Young Ravers, we get all this love. So yeah, it's a gift, really, the project. It's a gift that has kept giving. But it's also taken. It's taken a lot of attention and time. So we have spent a lot of time focused on beats. And now we want to do two big things, really, which is let's make it multiplayer. so that it will have an even longer lifespan and become much more commercially viable. And that project will become a product. And that product will earn us income. And that income can then be used to fund our next project. Because that's what we really want to do next. We want to start the next project built on the bedrock of the multiplayer system of Beats. The world in which we operate as the people making this immersive content, and this will really resonate with the listeners who do my job or Darren's job, is we're blocked at the beginning and we're blocked at the end. To raise the money at the beginning for development and to get it out to audiences is the really complicated thing. Actually, the production funding in the middle, the producers on a project, they'll always find a way. But unlocking the belief and the development funding at the beginning and unlocking a way to get to audiences at the end That's the real challenge, I think, for immersive art or immersive narrative projects.

[00:23:25.565] Kent Bye: I wanted to elaborate a little bit on this kind of flipped model that you have, which is to do the exhibition first, bring all the festival curators, because usually in the film world, you would have the festival run and then there's already existing infrastructure for film distribution and also all the online distribution and so for immersive it sounds like that a festival run is less around like say getting those distribution deals but more around having the people who are a part of the network of different location-based entertainments museums other places that could show it or even i guess it's we're still at the phase where there isn't like the equivalent of an immersive theatrical distribution network of different venues and spaces around and you know in a lot of ways you're on those front lines trying to find spaces that would have the space and the technical capability and cultural institutions that would be able to actually facilitate that type of run and so we're still very early in that cultivation of those distribution networks and so the festival run seems to be at least from what I'm hearing you say is an opportunity to take it around to these different regional festivals and have other people from other institutions see it but also potentially get press that for me i cover the xr industry and i consider myself to be more like industry press i'm not necessarily like speaking to the end users but there's also an element of having press that does talk to people in a way that is going to have them say oh wow that sounds really amazing i want to just go experience that as an experience of nostalgic going back into their early days of being a 19 year old raver rather than focusing on the technology and That being the catalyst for them to go see it. It's actually more around the story and the experience than it is around the medium in which that it's being communicated. And so I'd love to hear you maybe elaborate on both what the value of that festival run was at the end, but also like the role of the media when it comes to getting the word out, but not also getting the word out too early in a way that people hear about it, but can't actually take action on it because it's not actually showing anywhere that they could actually see it.

[00:25:22.049] Dan Tucker: Yeah, I was talking to someone, a new maker in this space, actually, who I've been teaching, of course, in Milan. And, you know, I'm not officially a mentor of hers, but I'm trying to encourage her to engage even more with the festival circuit and realize how valuable the festival circuit is. Because as I was walking here this morning from my hotel, I was thinking about reflecting. on you know here i am it's a bit of a charmed life i've been here in amsterdam at this wonderful festival doc lab it's just incredible it's an incredible thing that casper has built over 18 years it's an incredible community of people showing such a wide variety of work like i feel really in this place right now i feel very thankful to be part of that festival world including working at a festival myself and this festival network is really really useful i think Yes, because it's a window onto your work. But actually, it's really useful because there is still such a collaborative, congruent community that wants to listen to each other, wants to learn from each other, and wants to help each other. That's, for me, the really valuable industry bit. You do get press from festivals, but you never get as much as they say you're going to get. And I have been in a festival kind of saying, you're going to get loads of press, and you don't really. You kind of need to bring your own press people, especially, I think, with Immersive. However, to go back to what you were saying about the subject matter, yeah, we've always pushed beats in pursuit of repetitive beats on the subject matter and the fantasy, which is like, it's about the origins of rave. We're going to take you back in time and you're going to be there. And then later on, there's virtual reality and haptics and wind machines, which is cool. But we don't want to put that in front of the audience, in front of the project, because I think sometimes that's a bit of a barrier. So we've really pushed on that. And our commissioner at Coventry City and Culture, Tony Gwilym, always says one of the reasons it's so successful, it's his phrase, is the nostalgia aesthetics of it. And I was a bit like, oh no, what do you mean? But now I've come full circle. I'm like, yeah, great. Nostalgia aesthetics are great. Like people are wearing that on the street right now. So we get these audiences that come to Beats who are intergenerational. Someone who's like my age, 50 or 45 to 55, who's coming to remember what it was like to be 19 in 1990. And sometimes they're bringing their teenage son or daughter who wants to know what it was like to be 19 in 1990. And that's really beautiful, I think. So yeah, that's really, really worked for us. But we have had a lot of press, actually. And I think the reason for that is not the technology. I think, again, it's the subject matter. And it's the feeling people get when they do it. And it's the time traveling aspect. You know, VR can obviously do so many things. And when you say to VR people, they immediately think about, like, traveling to space, going underwater, like first-person games, jump scares, and then eventually they go, oh, yeah, no, going back in time. But actually going back in time, that's how I started with Easter Rising. Going back in time is, I think, one of the best things about VR. And it also makes your content kind of timeless, which is really useful for beats.

[00:28:28.206] Kent Bye: Yeah, so during the little session that you had yesterday during DocLab, the R&D summit, you started to talk about how you did this big, epic festival run with 20 places that you went, and you had a number of different awards. But to actually exhibit it in the United Kingdom was actually more difficult than you were expecting. But now you're actually about to start a proper UK tour, and you've got other funding sources to help make things work out in terms of things within the context of the United Kingdom. But also you're looking at multiplayer, which is also going to allow you to have more throughput. So it seems like you've had the time to incubate this as a project over the last couple of years to really, like, get all your ducks in a row, just figure out all the logistics and really understanding what it means to do an LBE experience, push the immersive, but then look at the constraints of what you need to make it sustainable and have enough throughput and all those learnings and feedback that you've been able to now get to the point where you're actually going to start the proper UK tour. So I'd love to hear you kind of reflect on where you're at now with the piece and where it goes from here. I mean, that was the next big challenge.

[00:29:34.395] Dan Tucker: How do we bring this project to the UK for a meaningful UK tour? And it took a long time. We had to do this Blanca Festival run and it was about a year and a bit of applying for funding. And we succeeded in the end with getting some funding from the Arts Council England and the BFI. And we also have other partners like Wooja, the guys who make the haptic vests, who helps us with technology, and iTunes Media who do our audience evaluation. So we built like a small partnership network that could help us do it. And it took a bit of time to persuade the public funders that the approach for the application for the tour was correct. But we had had both the public funders, the Arts Council and the BFI, come to us and say, we know there's a challenge here for immersive productions. Like they've got nowhere to go apart from this festival network. But we don't know how to solve it. and we feel like because your project has toured and is touring so successfully why can't that come to the UK and tour and then leave behind you know what you were hinting at before a viable touring network and not just a viable touring network of physical spaces but now a viable network of people who understand what an immersive production might be what it might need who understand the different you know like any producer I spent a lot of my life in a spreadsheet With data points, like the amount of space, the ticket price, the throughput, the staffing levels, like a graphic equalizer, trying to get all of those to the point where it sounds right. And that's a fine balance. And so it's still a challenge. We have now begun this UK tour. We succeeded in getting the funding. We've begun the UK tour. We began in July in Birmingham. And I think our total capacity was, I think, 78% or 80%. So it sold very well. But it was a risk. And the museum there, it was a museum, Birmingham Museum, hadn't been open for three years. And they had a gallery space they opened especially for it before their bigger opening of the museum a bit later in the summer. And it was a big risk. But they took that risk because they could see the opportunity. the opportunity for doing something brave and new, but also perhaps shifting the dial and changing the audience perspective a bit on their venue. And that definitely worked. The surveyed audiences, 60% of the audiences that came to see In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats at the Water Hall in Birmingham Museum had never been to the museum before. And 60%, just a little bit over, had never done virtual reality before. So they weren't coming because it was VR. And they weren't coming because it was the museum. They were coming, I think, because of the subject matter. And then we did really well in terms of going back to press in Birmingham. So we had national press, which we didn't think we'd necessarily get, including the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the BBC like three times, Sky News. It went really well. So straight off the back of that, we then opened the ticket sales for Brighton and then Brighton sold out before we even opened. And so that strategy feels like it's really paying off. And what we're doing with the subsidies, we're using the subsidy as a catalyst to get us into the venue and help subsidize the beginning of the operations for the venue, because there are significant operational costs to running an immersive experience almost always. And then they extend the run and then over time they recoup the expenditure they had to put in and hopefully they get to a place where there's surplus or it's at least broken even. And we're doing that across these seven cities. And halfway through the tour, if multiplayer is ready, we use multiplayer on the tour to make it more secure and de-risk it more for the venues because then you're increasing your capacity. But yeah, I do spend a lot of my time in spreadsheets and then trying to talk venues through spreadsheets and trying to persuade them Someone said yesterday in the round table, what we really need is just to be generous. Like this community here right now, this community of immersive people in festivals, they're so generous. We just need the venues to equally be generous at the beginning of these conversations. So just believe that saying yes, how do we, rather than yes, but how do we? You know, there's a little subtle difference there. That's what we need from the venues. And that's still the struggle I have, I think.

[00:33:50.811] Kent Bye: And one of the things you said yesterday that I thought was really interesting is that there's a difference between how the venues consider something to be a pop-up event versus something that is coming from their own internal programming, where there's maybe more funding than that available, or at least there's a different implication that comes, whether you're an external or an internal project. So maybe you could just elaborate on what that means.

[00:34:10.129] Dan Tucker: So being a programmed project and being part of a year-long program or a season or part of the core plan of a venue is different to being a project that gets put into a project space for a window of time, a bit like a pop-up. I mean, not a pop-up like they've popped up for a day to sell donuts. We pop up for quite a period of time. But the goal, I think, for us is to start the conversations as early as we can. So it's the former, so that we're part of... like either a programme season or just a programme piece of work, which then means there is a plan to resource it internally within the venue with staffing, with marketing, with ticketing. Because we have had some long conversations with venues where we've had to walk away once we have finally, finally had access to a budget which includes all their costs, where everything gets loaded back onto the project budget and then it just blows the opportunity. I mean, we bring subsidy, right? So we also sometimes need the venue to use their subsidy, presuming that it's a venue that already gets public sector subsidy. But so far, it has worked. We're on the verge of announcing all the venues for this seven-city tour. Did you say 70? Seven cities.

[00:35:26.785] Kent Bye: Oh, seven.

[00:35:27.125] Dan Tucker: OK, seven. I just wanted to clarify. So seven city, yeah. Thank god it's seven, not 70. Seven cities. But you know what? The duration of the show in these cities is different. But it has worked. The model of like, OK, we support the first 10 days. We really help you out the first 10 days. And now we also leave one of our technicians for the first two days of public opening. We help with that catalyst of public funding. Then you extend. So, you know, Birmingham was 45 days. Brighton is 18 days. Belfast is 30 days. The London show is going to be 80 days. So when you get to that scale of time. then it's kind of better to do that than to do 70 cities for the pop-up of three days or a week and also just be so costly. And then when this tour ends, we have a moment again to reflect, having finished the multiplayer, hopefully starting our new project. But to say, what do we do with Beats now? And I think the thing we want to do next is find a home. Not necessarily one home. We could have a home in London, a home in Birmingham, a home in Montreal, a home in Taiwan, in Kaohsiung or Taipei or whatever.

[00:36:30.971] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELBACHER- Sort of like a Sleep No More type of thing in New York City, where they had like a one space.

[00:36:34.453] Dan Tucker: MARK MIRCHANDANI- That would be nice. I mean, yeah, I guess it would be nice to kind of try and replicate that. I don't know how we do it without serious investment. But I don't think it's out of the realms of possibility. And when things aren't out of the realms of possibility, then you have the opportunity to make something happen. And we have done all of this ourselves. We haven't used a distributor. We talked to some of the distributors, the small pool of distributors early on. But we just found that in the end, because we know the project so well, and I suppose also because I have a big network, having worked as a curator of a festival and a producer of immersive projects, that just doing it ourselves has been a bit easier than devolving it and having someone not quite understand how the project works.

[00:37:19.099] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality immersive media might be, and what it might be able to enable?

[00:37:27.775] Dan Tucker: Yeah, the future casting is difficult. I mean, I'm so interested in virtual reality, at least anyway, as an audience experience. I like it. I've got a lot of headsets at home, a lot of which are gathering dust underneath the bed, right? And it takes quite a lot for me to put a headset on. I don't do spatial computing at home. Whenever I've tried that, found that to be... Harder than just a laptop or my phone so I don't use it for that. I don't use it for fitness I sometimes use it for gaming, but I mostly use it to engage with narrative content Pretty much always much rather do that at a physical space with other people So that's where I really like the technology AR is slightly different I think and mixed reality yeah i'm just not sure i mean maybe when everything is super lightweight spatial computing will just be a part of everyday life all the time like it's my glasses right now but in the interim where it's still a bit of an oddity i think it's great when we can use these odd devices to make meaningful experiences for public audiences. That's what I'm really into. And I suppose that comes back to the fact that I've worked at the BBC a long time, you know, I believe in public and audience engagement. I want audiences to come, be surprised, be delighted, be emotionally affected. And of course, I recognise that a big part of that is the form. Like, you know, I understand that it's like an embodied experience about youth is very powerful in VR. And I'm really thankful to VR for that. The hardware is a pain in the bum, but I'm still really thankful that we have this new medium that can affect people like this. And I just hope we keep using it in these imaginative ways to entertain and emotionally affect audiences.

[00:39:16.474] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:39:23.057] Dan Tucker: Just keep sharing. That's what I'd say. We've managed to not slip into the situation you sometimes see with film and music and games where it's quite proprietary or territorial. Just keep sharing amongst one another and learn from each other. Definitely spend time learning from each other.

[00:39:47.073] Kent Bye: Yeah, we're definitely still in that blue ocean phase of having people share information and build up the network. And it's a benefit of everyone to be open with all this information. I just want to thank you for taking the time to not only share it to the broader DocLab community yesterday, but also in this conversation today to get a little bit better sense of kind of a vision of the future where you can actually make this work out in terms of creating these immersive projects and have them have a life beyond the festival circuit. So yeah, thanks again for joining me to help break it all down. Thank you. Thank you so much. 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 1500 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 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 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.

More from this show

Menu

#1517: LBE Lessons Learned from 20-Venue Tour of “In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats” with Producer Dan Tucker