THE CHOICE returns to SXSW with the latest Chapters 2 and 3, and continues to capture intimate testimonials of women and couples who make the choice to abort their pregnancies. Chapters 1 and 2 take place in Texas where abortion is now nearly totally banned in all but a few situations. The legal specificity of these exceptions is ambiguous enough that doctors often avoid providing reproductive health care for abortions because they’re afraid of being prosecuted or losing their license. This means that it is legal for doctors to lie to patients, which is what happens in Chapter 1 causing the protagonist to nearly die. Chapter 2 features a pregnancy clinic that turned out to be run by an anti-abortion religious group who tried to pressure her to not have an abortion. And Chapter 3 features an older Canadian couple who started to have some doubts, but ultimately decided to not carry the pregnancy to term. THE CHOICE features some really stereoscopic video effects combined with depth information to create a really realistic face-to-face conversation. As the viewer, you have the ability to subtly guide the conversation by choosing which questions to ask. But overall, it’s a really powerful example of how these types of simulated conversations creates an engaged way for people to hear the details of someone’s situation where they may actually change their opinion about abortion. Joanne Popinska and Tom C. Hall tell me that they have experienced being able to change minds with their first chapter, and they’re looking forward to continuing to spread the word with their 2nd and 3rd chapters that premiered at SXSW.
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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 special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from Southwest Southwest 2025, I'm going to start to get into some of the more politically themed projects that were there this year. And there's a new award that's being given this year is sponsored by the Agog Immersive Media Institute. It's called the Agog Immersive Impact Award. And The winner of that was actually In the Current of Being, which I covered in my first episode of this series. But there was a number of different projects that were in the running, and the press release listed both The Choice Chapter 2 and 3, which is what we're covering in this episode, but also in the following episodes, 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, Honey Fungus, and then Ways of Knowing, which is covered in the previous episode. And also Any War, Any Enemy, which I previously covered, and I'll include a link in my episode with Blade King Medina, where you can go check that out. So... Each of these were recognizing visionary creators who are leveraging extended reality to foster community, spark action, and to build a more just and sustainable future. So I can definitely say that The Choice is doing that as well, because what they're doing is that they're recording these oral history interviews with women who have decided to get an abortion. Or sometimes they haven't decided, they just have no other choice, otherwise they're going to lose their life. And so that's kind of what they cover in the first chapter, where someone has a complication. They can't get the reproductive health care that they need because she lived in Texas. And there's all sorts of restrictive abortion rights that are in Texas. At the time when this was shot, it's even worse now because there's been more and more of... those reproductive health centers being shut down, but also even more restrictions. One of the things that are happening in Texas is that there are some small cases where you can get an abortion. However, those haven't really been defined. And there's also a lot of really aggressive laws against doctors who perform an abortion where they could potentially lose their license or go to jail. And so you have this weird situation where the doctors, even if they're legally allowed to give an abortion, just don't want to. And so they end up lying to their patients and which is what is covered in the first chapter. Or you have this general context where you have all these kind of anti-abortion entities that are providing like clinic care and services, but they're really trying to pressure the people who are going in there to not get an abortion, which is what's covered in the second chapter. Also, just a couple of experiences that happened in the second chapter with different contexts and different times. And then the third chapter, it's a little bit different in the sense that the first two are covering the political context and more the legal implication. And then the third is featuring a couple based in Canada who decide to get an abortion when they're a little bit older. And there could be some potential complications. They had never really wanted children and they had got pregnant unexpectedly. And so they were faced with having to make a decision and they had some doubts and explore those doubts, but also the emotions and the impact that it had of that choice. And so This is a piece that first showed their chapter one back in 2022 at South by Southwest, which I had a chance to see there and do a previous interview with both Joanne and Tom. And they're back this year with their second and third chapters. So this is a really fascinating way that you're interacting with this experience. They're using some really sophisticated like stereoscopic volumetric capture techniques where they're using basically like an SLR camera, but also a depth camera. And so they're taking that information and projecting it out in this spatial representation. So you get this hyper-realistic experience that is honestly one of the best video experiences that I've seen using this combination of all these different things. Tom actually is getting a patent for this and he explains a little bit more detail of all the different things that they're doing. But you have this feeling that you're sitting across from someone and you're having this one-on-one conversation. And there are these different choices that you're making. Just like if you would be having a conversation, you may have a number of different things that come up in your mind in the course of someone else speaking that you then have to make a choice as to what direction you want to steer the conversation in. In this experience, it's not so much that you're really going down all these different branching paths. It's more flavoring your experience and allowing you to get a little bit extra contextual information about this person. But it's not drastically different from time to time that you're doing experience because it's mostly the same emotional beats that they're trying to hit. And so the interesting thing is that both Joanne and Tom have had an opportunity to show the choice to different people across the political spectrum and people who are anti-abortion. And it's actually able to change some minds, especially in the context of people who have no other choice. Their life is in danger and they need to have this reproductive health care, but it's just not available for them. And so that's Yeah, it's a really powerful idea that you could have these different types of immersive experiences that are simulating these one-on-one conversations that could actually be this vehicle for changing paradigms. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Joanne and Tom happened on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:05:25.954] Joanne Popinska: I'm Joanne Popińska. I'm a Polish-Canadian XR filmmaker.
[00:05:30.338] Tom C. Hall: My name is Tom C. Hall. I'm also a Canadian filmmaker with my partner here, Joanne. We work together on our projects, typically focused on factual documentary-style XR interactive projects.
[00:05:42.449] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:05:47.253] Joanne Popinska: My background is complex, but the simplest way to put it, I used to be a sociologist, then I immigrated to Canada and I worked on film on sets in post-production. And not that I hated this job, I was looking for meaning and then I saw VR, I saw some subjects that I was interested in and that's how I got into VR.
[00:06:09.568] Tom C. Hall: Yeah, and that's actually how Joanne and I met. We both were in the ye old days of stereoscopic movies, and we were both stereographers. And then when that kind of went away, I transitioned into traditional flat camera work. I was a cameraman, cinematographer. And then from that, there was a planetarium project. So she was working as a junior colorist at a post-production facility. And there was this planetarium project that was about the 150th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada, which I understand the Americans are about to do their sesquicentennial. And that was my introduction to 360 video. And then even though we haven't really produced a whole lot of 360 video, just having contact with a lot of the ideas and the potential of the medium really got us excited. And then one day we just decided to quit our jobs because we were tired of working in commercials, you know, sweating 20 hour days to try and get a Tylenol commercial across the finish line. We'd rather do that for no money and do things that matter to us. And then we got started working on the kind of projects that matter to us. And one of the first ones was The Choice. We picked that one initially because we thought it would be the fastest one to kind of get to completion. And well, six, seven years later, yeah. And here we are at South by showing chapter two and three of it.
[00:07:24.397] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so when was the first chapter of The Choice showing? Is it 2021?
[00:07:28.418] Joanne Popinska: Yeah, it was 2021 at IDFA first. We premiered there and then at South by it was 2022. That was the first chapter. And what about it?
[00:07:39.803] Tom C. Hall: Well, I mean, when we initially started with that first chapter, like the intention was so The Choice is a documentary series of interviews with women in the new chapter, a married couple. talking about their experiences with abortion. And we'd filmed many different interviews with different circumstances and reasons behind people, why they're having an abortion. But when we had absolutely no money, we said, okay, well, if we had to do a standalone singular interview to stand on its own, we'd picked Kristen's story. And that's the one that we'd premiered previously. and it was very successful it had a really great response incredible reactions from people watching it and appreciating like what you can do with this medium and then of course doing that and like winning the audience award then we could get funding to do the others to complete them because the vision of the project was always multiple interviews to kind of have a broader view like so chapter one is a story about somebody who had a planned pregnancy that had complications that were kept from her and then she required a life-saving abortion so it's kind of a contradiction that it's called the choice but she had no choice because she would have died otherwise but then chapter two that we're premiering here with michaela she's a younger person also from texas and she had two abortions she had one that was just based on her life circumstance and she ended up in one of those like fake crisis pregnancy centers and then her second abortion that she had she had with misoprostol the the abortion pill And then the third chapter is a married couple over 40 that never wanted to have kids and they had to mix up with their medication. And that last moment to change their mind necessarily because there was no, you know, at that age, it's very unlikely they could ever get pregnant again. So for them, it was a very difficult kind of reconfirmation about their views, but as a couple working through that. So those three stories are very different and they show a broad perspective. perspective on abortion and why people have abortions. So together they become meaningful in their own way. And that's kind of where the project has evolved now.
[00:09:29.469] Joanne Popinska: And because some people ask us about it, we filmed all of them more or less at the same time. So Makayla chapter 2 and Kristen chapter 1, it was even filmed on the same day. It's just initially we didn't have resources to produce all of them, to finish all of them. And we agreed with the team that we will do the first chapter, we will see how the response will be. We will find, Tom already mentioned that, we will try finding resources to produce the remaining ones. and we have more stories but we decided not to do too many because we don't also want to overwhelm people and you know go into really really details of that so we were looking with the next two chapters we were looking which stories will complement Kristen's story and then on their own they will have something to say but also if you watch all three of them They're all about slightly different aspect of making this decision, slightly different circumstances, also different situation with the last one with being two people, not just one person. So we wanted this to give you big picture, be like a mosaic of stories, but also not to make too many of them as well.
[00:10:36.958] Kent Bye: Yeah. So I was asking about the date because there's been so much of this story that's continued to develop since I first saw the first episode of The Choice. And back in South by Southwest 2022 is when I saw it. And so, you know, since then, we've had the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We've had the total outlaw of abortion in so many different states, including Texas. And so maybe take me back to when you were first starting to explore this topic, why you wanted to cover this as a story, especially as it was a story that was continuing to unfold and develop and change so dramatically over the past two or three years, even since the six or seven years that even started it.
[00:11:18.188] Joanne Popinska: Well, so I'm Polish originally and my Polish government was attacking a lot of minorities. One of the groups that they attacked were women and they aimed into women's health rights and they were trying to ban abortion for a couple of years in Poland. and I was already living in Canada in quite progressive country so I was discovering VR. I thought it's a very powerful tool not just to telling stories because there's many powerful tools to telling stories but VR is different in the ways that it puts you there and you feel like you lived through those stories that you're experiencing sort of like dreams you know that it's not happening to you but you feel and remember as if it was happening And with my sociological knowledge, experience, I knew that this is something that I can use into changing the attitudes, maybe if it works, because of course it's bold to say that I achieved that. But this is actually something very powerful for me with the first chapter to hear actually anti-choice people coming to us, to attack us, to tell us that we're bad people because of the subject matter and how we approach it. But then watching it, crying, apologizing, telling us that they wish people talked about this subject this way. Because Kristen's story on its own was very moving, very powerful, but also the way we created it. So like it's an interactive conversation that you were a part of it. And it really stays with you. It really feels as you were meeting her and talking with her. But the reason was Poland and what my government was doing. And I was trying to figure how to approach anti-choice people. A lot of people that I know in my personal life are all on the other side, sort of. And I think they are clever. I respect them. And the fact that we disagree, like I was wondering why we disagree, why they think differently, what they know, what they don't know and what I can tell them with telling these stories this way. So that was the reason. And then the whole idea of using the volumetric capture to make it feel really realistic, really natural feeling, natural flow of the conversation.
[00:13:32.265] Kent Bye: And so for each of these three chapters, how much footage did you shoot originally, and then how much is edited down? Because I know there's some branching that's happening, so you can have some choice. And sometimes those branches converge in a way that you're making a choice, but then maybe you'll still get both of the answers, and maybe it changes the order. But if you were to put in a timeline of all of the footage that you have in each of the chapters, like about how long would that be? And then an average run through the total runtime.
[00:14:04.150] Joanne Popinska: So how much branching is there is our secret, but how much footage? So like every interview is two, three hours long, more or less, depending on the person, because I think with Kristen it was four hours or something. And with Lee and Dan, so we filmed chapter three, we filmed two interviews separately and we edited together as if it was one conversation. and each chapter is more or less 20-25 minutes long depending on how you are choosing the questions so this tells you how much more or less footage there is so it's not that much more if you're selecting different answers it just goes to slightly different footage but I didn't want to because when we were editing Kristen I was trying to put together a few different pathways that you would go through. And then I started feeling that I'm losing emotional connection. It feels too much like visual Wikipedia. And my question to myself was, do I want people to know as much as possible about what happened to her or do I want them to be connected emotionally? And if I build story arc, emotional arc, I can achieve the second one, which is more important. So there's not that much branching. There's story arc, you branch a little bit, but basically we call it for ourselves critical path that you're always returning to.
[00:15:27.153] Tom C. Hall: And that's something that we discovered in the process of working on the Choice project and then the next project that we're working on that's using the similar presentation style is that people typically as a person, even when you interview them in real life, have like an agenda of what they're trying to tell you. So there's a natural energy that's going to bring you back onto the path. The intention of how these stories are presented, they're not open-ended. So it ended up making a lot of sense in that you have these questions that provide your reflection, like in the Lee and Dan chapter, that you can ask what Dan thinks of the same thing versus what Leith thinks. And they both talk about ultimately the same things, but from their slightly different perspectives. But then it goes back to what's the next piece of their story. so that inertia carries it forward which then carries it back onto the single path because they're talking about circumstances that happen to them in a particular way that happened in a particular order that had a particular cause and effect and then at the end there's a degree of a little bit more branching because then there's cert like in the lee and dan chapter in particular there's some particular questions that are more Dan-focused. Some particular questions are more Lee-focused that then have different responses. But ultimately, the critical path of the story and the main things that both we want to say as filmmakers, but also what the interviewees wanted to say to us, is expressed through that. And of course, there's a lot of editing in the cutting room floor of those multiple hours that are recorded. But a lot of that is about... And this is the same in any sort of interview... environment where you're dealing with people that aren't like media trained is that you end up spending a lot of time getting them to open up. So out of maybe three hours of footage, you really only have 45 minutes of where you really got the truth out of them or that they're comfortable in the environment that they're really able to express themselves. So it kind of it's like it's interesting when you think about it like that. So it's like you're talking in the course of the experience to the subject where they already have a relationship with Joanne in the interview process. They're already vulnerable and open. And like that is a degree of, you know, I wouldn't say ethical consideration, but it is something that it would not otherwise be possible. Like if you met this person in real life, it would be a period of like getting comfortable with each other, with your body language, with how you see the world. Whereas with the power of this presentation, that you're already past that in the course of the experience.
[00:17:45.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, my experience of this kind of interview format is it did feel very conversational in a way, and then there is, since I had a build of it at home, I had a chance to play through multiple times just to get a sense of the branching to see how it was converging or not converging. And so what it felt like was that there are these moments to get a little bit additional context around either the situation or their identity and to what degree is my curiosity interested on this additional contextual element or that one. And then it continues to progress through the story that's being told. But it does feel like, given the opportunity to make choices and to have that interactive component, the piece is called The Choice. So I think it matches that you're using an interaction design that the people that are watching it also are expressing their agency and taking different choices in different ways. So yeah, if you have any other elaboration on this parallel as the interaction design that is matching the themes of the story that you're telling.
[00:18:41.158] Joanne Popinska: Well, today I had a conversation with somebody who watched and asked me a question that I already forgot that people did ask the same question with Kristen. How do they rewatch it? How do they ask more questions? They were feeling that they wanted to talk more and they felt like, oh, can I go back? And regular person will not do that because they will watch it one time at some event or festival or something. but we are having conversation now. There are probably some questions in your head that you will not ask. I guess if you remember all of things happening in your head that you will be able to ask us, but normally when you have a conversation with somebody, the conversation has a flow and when somebody is talking you have some questions showing up in your head and then it passes because you asked about something else and the moment is gone the circumstances are changing you don't need that information anymore or you remember that you wanted to ask something when the conversation already finished And I really wanted to create the feeling that this conversation is natural, not naturalistic in a way like real humans in VR. I don't think we want to go that far. We don't want to pretend that it's really happening. We want to create the feeling that it's happening. and for that we needed to build in certain mechanisms into the flow of the conversation so for example not being able to go back and ask every single question also the rhythm of the conversation itself like how long or short their answers are sometimes you speak and speak and speak like me now sometimes you just give short answer so we wanted to build that as much as possible and the most challenging part from my perspective non-english native speaker as you can hear was to frame the questions in a way that they would feel natural for English speakers because in Polish we have slightly different style and grammar. That was a challenge but Tom helped me to smoothen it. So I was defining what I want to ask about and then Tom was helping me with the language of it.
[00:20:44.957] Tom C. Hall: Yeah, and thinking about the idea about the choice is also the idea that in the experience itself in that conversation is also the fact that having a degree of agency is like a reflection on their interviewees, their agency, even though they're saying what we pre-recorded and built into the Unity app. But like the reflection of the idea that these people have control over their own lives and the ultimate thesis of being like, well, this is why people should have their own choices about reproductive health. Right. But like to have this that your agency is represented in the course of the experience about how you interact with it. They're talking about how they use their agency to make these decisions for themselves, so it goes over to the broader theme of choice. Like, if it was just one continuous video clip, like a 360 video, or even if it was just, you know, sixed off but still uninteractive, like, it would feel like a presentation, and it wouldn't logically feel like, where is... decision or thought or reflection in that right like it feels like that would be absent in the presentation if it didn't have that ability of being like you have get to a point and you need a moment of reflection and like in a natural conversation like if somebody just pauses before they continue and they have an expression on their face like being able to reflect that and you the viewer through that interface of just waiting to make the next choice is all of that broader idea of having personal agency
[00:22:06.365] Kent Bye: That's really interesting as you talk around the associative links that pop up in your head as you listen to someone speaking and things to follow up on. And there may be multiple of those threads that get introduced and that it's kind of a natural flow of a conversation to choose one of those threads to go down. So I really can identify that as someone who does a lot of interviews and has a lot of things popping up in my mind all the time. But one thing that I did want to ask about is back in 2022, was this a PC VR or was this on the Quest?
[00:22:33.703] Tom C. Hall: We did a PC VR version because the pandemic and they had an online component to South by and working on that PC VR version of it reminded me why I hate PC VR just from a development standpoint of like, you know, even today we have a prototype for the next project, which is this Holocaust educational project and like windows. I booted up my little portable PC and I say, Oh, welcome to the new windows update. And then the sound stopped working. So it's like, the primary purpose of this project, because it's not a highly interactive game, is to make it as simple to operate as possible. So it's standalone, just on the headset. Even now, in this new update of it, there's no controllers, it's just hand tracking to make selections. The beginning of the experience tells you how to put your headphones on, sit comfortably, hold your hand here to start it. Everything is as simple as interaction as possible so that people with the least amount of VR literacy can get into it with the least amount of friction. And a PC version of it just doesn't fit into that paradigm.
[00:23:32.819] Kent Bye: And I just wanted to also do a follow-on in terms of the technology that you have, because there's a lot of innovative stereoscopic video type of things that you're doing that we talked around in the last conversation. But was there any special considerations in order to get everything optimized down into getting it to even run on the Quest?
[00:23:49.600] Tom C. Hall: No, because the efficiencies that were designed for the original version was made for the Quest 1, so we have a laughable amount of overhead. One of the things we were thinking about was, should we, for the chapter 2 and 3, up-res the video quality, spend more time doing cleanup of the depth map? Not that we would use any generative AI for material, but maybe use generative AI for synthesizing better detail in the depth data, you know, just to clean up things. And then we realized, no, it's better that it's cohesively, visually the same as chapter one all the way forward so that new chapters aren't significantly visually distinct from the others in like their presentation or production value or anything like that. because all three of them are supposed to be balanced with each other. So from a technology standpoint, it isn't so much of an evolution or a revolution, it's just a continuation of what we did in Chapter 1. For a new project that we're working on, there we've actually gone in and we've changed, like we have a new camera system that we've developed and a different rendering process, and that would struggle a little bit to run on. No, but actually we're working on that John Hopkins training thing, and that uses the new system too. And that one we have running on the twos and threes with no problem. And that has like photorealistic environment, you know, pre-rendered stuff that like assets that are happening concurrently. But that's the thing, like these mobile headsets have gotten a lot better with their ability in memory, especially. So you can have these large render target textures with high fidelity video on it in a real time environment and it doesn't suffer for it. So, yeah, that hasn't been a limitation.
[00:25:21.972] Joanne Popinska: One thing technology wise, because I'm not tech person in our team, but the one technical thing that matters for the narrative or like for user experience is hand tracking. And I was so against it with chapter one, Tom and our Unity developers that were trying to convince me that, hey, let's do it. I was against it, but it was really not working and it was causing problems. And I wanted the experience to be smooth. And with Quest 3, I didn't even realize that Tom gives me the Quest 3 with hand tracking already enabled and I'm just going through it and I'm like, oh, it's so smooth. And then I realized what I'm doing and what's happening. So that's a huge plus and it feels much more natural. And for a few years, not only with the choice, with some other projects, I was so hesitant to use hand tracking instead of the touch controllers. Not anymore.
[00:26:16.121] Kent Bye: Nice. And so getting back to more of the story elements and the different potential contexts under which that people are making the choice whether or not to abort or to not. And so wondering if you could also elaborate on the general intention that you wanted to find these different types of stories and yeah, just kind of like the story selection and curation process, even before you start to sit down for the interview, you know, you're kind of scouting and discovering of these different stories that you really wanted to tell.
[00:26:44.690] Joanne Popinska: So the initial idea was to just interview people who did decide to have an abortion. That was one thing. So we are not analyzing various choices about pregnancy. We are walking you through the decision to have an abortion. So that was one thing. The other thing was to have people who tell it for the first time publicly. So not just to family and friends. because we wanted it to feel natural, feel not worked through, because if you tell the same story a few times, it stays honest, it stays real, but the way you tell this story changes, so I really wanted to capture that honest, raw, friend-like conversation. and we started in Canada and we filmed few interviews in Canada and then I discovered that I am in this progressive country that I already mentioned and this became a problem that's positive thing but became a problem so those stories are only about the personal aspect of the decision not about systemic oppression not about barriers So it was just people sharing the situation in their lives, their morality, their recognition of their own situation, ability of being or wanting or not wanting to be parent. Stuff that you should think about and nothing else. And it didn't work because my main target audience was anti-choice people and I thought that to them it's too radical and I wanted stories that would tell you what happens if somebody else forbids you one way or another from making the decision. And that's why I looked south to our neighbors in the US. I knew that I will find the stories there. I was also thinking about Poland, but also I needed stories spoken in English, so the project would be more universal. And this is how I found Kristen. I just put the information out there on our very small social media channels and Kristen reached out. She was ready to tell the story for the first time. We were heading as a part of Canadian team to South by Southwest 2020. And Kristen used to live in Austin, Texas. So I thought, okay, we are going to South Bay. Let's record the story with her. Let's find other interviewees in town so we could record with them without traveling much. And this is how I found Makayla. This is how I also found like eight other interviewees. And then, I don't know if you remember, there was pandemic, South by cancelled. We still decided to come here and we landed on some weekend and we received a phone call from a friend in Ottawa who asked, hey guys, did you go to US? Because they will be closing borders in two days. So we have to rush and come back. And it was the worst nightmarish Sunday of my life because we were trying to reschedule the interviews, select which interview I'm selecting, who has good story. We had really interesting and variety of stories, but who will be good on camera, who will have good chemistry with me and who will have time the next day to day time of work. with studio shout out to originator studio in austin they allowed us to use their facility for free they actually rescheduled paying client from the monday that was coming and they allowed us to just come and film on the next day and this is how it happened this is how it happened with kristen and michaela and canadian stories we already had filmed before okay
[00:30:12.489] Kent Bye: Yeah, I could see how the first two chapters are really reflecting different aspects of the culture and the laws and the things beyond someone's personal agency. And that third chapter seemed to really get into much more of the personal emotional decision and the turmoil of the surprising ways that it was much more visceral and emotional than either one had really been expecting. So, yeah, there is this larger political implication that are in those first two chapters that have different aspects of how the government is intervening. And so when you think about the sociological perspective and the lens of how minds are actually changed, it sounds like you were referencing some research. You said something along the lines like you knew that. this is a type of technique that you could use to change minds. And so what kind of like research are you leveraging for how minds are actually changed? Because I'm just very curious to hear a little bit more context about that and how that was applied to this project.
[00:31:10.583] Joanne Popinska: Less minds, more attitudes. So I was doing research how the conversation around reproductive rights looks like, what are the stereotypes, what are the biases, what are the thoughts that anti-choice people have about women who do have abortion. And there is one element that was sort of obvious when you start analyzing it, but I needed to find the reason why and then answer how to address it. So when you look at the percentage of people who have abortion and you analyze it from the perspective of their worldview, religious view, the political view, the percentage is similar. So I checked, I don't remember how it looks in the US. It's more or less the same, but more or less 30% of people women have abortions and then when you analyze them from the perspective of their worldview, it's similar. Catholics, non-religious people, atheists, progressive, conservative. There is some difference but not big enough, small enough to realize that people have abortions no matter what their views are. So why? If they are against it, why do they have it? And the situation now, like I was looking for the answer and I was analyzing, talking with abortion providers, with activists and talking with them about that. And there's one phrase that keeps repeating in various versions. My abortion, the only, I don't remember the exact quote from.
[00:32:39.054] Tom C. Hall: I can't remember the author of it, but it was the only ethical abortion is my abortion.
[00:32:44.495] Joanne Popinska: And what it means is that it's either my abortion or my daughter or my friend or the person that I know. And then the accompanying phrases are, but her situation is unique, but she's very clever girl and this is just a mishap and she has to move on with her life. So you see a person, not a cause. And when you see a person, this is becoming important and you can put your views on hold and then of course go back to them because why not? But you're making an exception for the person that you know personally. Like once I identified this, I wanted to recreate the situation that you are meeting a person in VR and I'm using like here are all the mechanisms that she's sitting very close to you in your personal space and there is something like, Your psychological space reflects the physical space and the other way around. So like with Tom, I can sit very close. He is my spouse. If we are meeting each other with some people, there's like two meters distance. And then the closer you are, the better you know people, the closer you allow them. And so I wanted to use VR to recreate not just hearing the story, but creating a feeling as you were talking with your friend, close physically, close emotionally. And that's why the whole story of Tom trying to figure out how to film it, I told him what I need. I needed volumetric to feel the presence of a person in space and to be able to put this person in your personal space, which is around one to one and a half meter. So for that we needed volumetrics, but I didn't want to make it feel like you're talking with a ghost or hologram, but real human. And this is where Tom figured that if we combine stereoscopy and volumetric, this will give you the texture of her face, of her skin or her eyes to feel real. So, yeah.
[00:34:35.856] Kent Bye: Nice. That's a good segue to do a brief recap of the technological things you had to do in order to create this really what feels like volumetric capture but is actually like a stereoscopic with the combination of 3D. And we talked about this previously, but just to recap some of the technological things you had to do in order to get this very unique look and feel that feels like you're really sitting across from someone and having this conversation.
[00:34:57.762] Tom C. Hall: Well, yeah. Shout out to Canada Media Fund because now it's patent pending so I can really go into detail. So basically, it's a left and right image. So when we film the interviews, we have a stereo setup of a left and right RGB camera. And the interactional distance is about human vision apart. And that's enough that you have disparity of reflections. You have disparity between occlusions of like hair and teeth. The highlights on skin are reflected in parallax or in disparity in that they look different in each eye. And then those are projected onto a depth map that's also co-captured at the same time. And that depth map is then brought into compositing software, originally Nuke, but now Fusion because I hate the foundry. And it's put into a point cloud, which is then eroded, and then we create a general geometry shape. And then that general geometry shape, we then rectify the RGB cameras and project it onto the geometry. So that it's kind of like you're reverse projecting the color cameras as they captured the space back onto that geometry. And then we take a single vantage point and then we re-export out a single view of the left diffuse texture, the right diffuse texture, which now has the disparities but very little amount of parallax. And then we re-render the depth map. And then that's taken into a video file into Unity. And that depth map then moves vertices back and forth on the axis of a concave sphere from the eye box of where the cameras are projecting from. And then we have a left texture. And then on the next pass of the renderer, we have a right texture. And that creates the effect that the position of any piece of color data is displaced in space. but it has the disparity on that surface. So if you're within the eye box area of like the general, you know, like half meter of where the camera was capturing, it looks incredibly lifelike. And now, of course, if you come off axis or you get up and walk around, the illusion completely falls apart. But that's not necessary for what we're doing because we're really trying to make eye contact, direct conversation with the subject. And that process of the big advantages for us is one, it's cheap for us to do. We just throw a black cloth for the case of the choice. And then with our new system, just like throw it on a green screen. light it like you would another interview Joanne sits behind the camera you know just below the lenses so that they kind of make eye contact with the camera lenses and she just talks to them and we just hit record and we do one hour take two hour take you know we'll do a session in an afternoon and then we edit the footage like we would anything else and at the end of it we take the selects of that footage and we run it through the pipeline and then we drop it into unity and we're good to go
[00:37:32.790] Kent Bye: Amazing. That's a lot of black magic wizardry that you have to create this. And so just a quick follow on that is that in terms of file sizes, doing this method, does it end up being a lot smaller for file size? Or is it about the same? Or is it bigger?
[00:37:46.127] Tom C. Hall: So the file sizes are actually, it's a funny thing with the current build. So the video clips are very compressed for the choice because we don't have an alpha channel, like we're not keying them for this. We just have like a 2,272 pixels by 1,280 pixels vertically. So that's divided into 40%, 40%, and then the depth map and the mask are quarter resolution. So the render of the actual person is actually not that high, like the overall texture, but we tilt the UV projection so that about 40% of the image is of the face. So that the density of pixels falls off over the course of the image. So most of the resolution is in the part that matters. And then those clips are rendered at like... about the equivalent of what HD video would be on YouTube, or like high quality HD video, so like four megabits a second. So the overall video content of over an hour of stuff in the experience is about two and a half gigs. And then the sound mix that Skywalker gave us is the other six. Because when you're working with Skywalker Sound, which the new chapters we're working with officially, before it was just the working nights and weekends, the sound quality is not compressed. So the APK and the OBB files are gargantuan. But that's not our fault. That's not the video's fault. That's the sound's fault. But yeah, and that optimization means that we're not... Don't say sounds Paul, we love you guys. We love you Kevin and Mike and everybody at the Skywalker team. But please, just a little bit of compression in the files next time. But that low file size and lightweight means that also we're not using a whole lot of memory when we're rendering it. So for the choice, because the quill illustrations that Zoe Rowland did are very, I don't want to say simplistic, but very impressionistic with a lot of white space or I guess black space. They don't take up a lot of memory. So we end up having very good performance. So for the next projects that we're doing, we're going to be doing a lot more sophisticated visuals to go along with the volumetric video. But it's as lightweight as a 2 and 1 half K video would be to play back.
[00:39:44.506] Kent Bye: Yeah. I saw in the credits Skywalker Sound. How did you get to work with them?
[00:39:48.323] Joanne Popinska: So, years ago, I was at GDC and I was listening to some guy talking about working on Alejandro Iñárritu's Carnegie Arena and it was Kevin with some other guy, I'm sorry, I don't remember the other name. No, no, that was a different person. Anyway, so I approached Kevin, I told him how much I appreciate what I just heard because they were talking about how for Carnegie Arena they were recording the sound in a way that you could feel that it bounces off objects and like normally for sound design for flat mediums you just simplifying you make it louder or quieter with spatial sound and storytelling you really feel that it goes like through the bush or it bounces or something because your body your brain knows it throughout your whole life so when you're in VR you really start taking these clues and reading them and they were re-recording the whole sound on set, like they had the whole set rebuilt just for sound, and I found it incredibly interesting, just the whole idea, so I approached Kevin, we started talking, I started asking him, and I was alone, and I was texting Tom that, oh my god, I'm chatting with this guy he's having so many cool suggestions and tips and stuff what next question is what next question to ask him and tom was like quickly texting me what i should be asking and we've been talking for like two hours and i asked kevin hey can i keep asking you those questions and he said sure and i said but you know my budget is not for skywalker sound And he said, don't worry, I like your project, the idea, so happy to just keep chatting. And we kept chatting for the three chapters and then for the last two chapters we officially worked together with the whole team. And it's funny because if you look at the credits, our left side is for the main team and the right side is Skywalker team and it's that long.
[00:41:44.978] Tom C. Hall: a lot longer yeah yeah yeah yeah because actually to call it all the really great people that we've had for the chapter two and three is that we brought back our illustrator zoe zoe roland who's also an accomplished vr filmmaker herself and then we have janelle beckhold is a composer who's actually in south by with us this year and then we have hannah estes who's actually here with two projects as our unity developer and then michael brinkman from skywalker on the first chapter, he was just working like moonlighting. So as a sound designer from Skywalker and then on these two chapters, we got him to do the final sound design with a single revision. of the Daniel Lee chapter about six hours before I had to get on the plane to be here. So he hold in one, it got it a hole in one. It was all our notes from the discussion before he, we heard a single bit of note. I just, I get it into audio kinetic, like the white software. I hit generate sound banks, get it on the plane and it sounded great. And then of course we've got, I feel like I'm forgetting somebody.
[00:42:43.123] Joanne Popinska: Ryan Kota and Kevin Bolland, dialogue editing.
[00:42:46.567] Tom C. Hall: Yeah, and then I guess me and you are the other. This really is a small team. Yeah, because Becca Little, she was a developer on the first chapter where she helped with a lot of the base technical code, but she's since gone on to work for Meta and probably took some of our video magic when it comes to dealing with making video run. Because it's the exercise app. It's like how to make video run without using too much memory so you don't run the battery down. Which is a big consideration for us because like our headsets, we don't want to have any big headaches. We don't want to constantly be short on batteries. Because that's another problem is that standalone is really great, but the worst thing that can possibly happen is somebody can be in the experience and then halfway it powers off. So that's been something that has been a core focus for us. And then I mean we have tons of other people that have helped along the way. But yeah, going back to the question from before about being lightweight, a consideration I think a lot of people don't think about is the battery life. Because when you're doing direct to consumer, you know, people who have, sickos like us who have their own headsets, like they can manage their own batteries and like awareness of the headset's limitations. Like you even see it at South by Here, like booths that are like, oh, you know, we can't show it to somebody. And like for a regular movie that's unheard of that, oh, we can't, you can't go see this art film because the projector battery is dead. Yeah. Right, so then also not using things just for the sake of maximizing the capability of the device, having considerations for the actual presentation of it as well.
[00:44:09.439] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I noticed in the credits you had no generative AI was used in the creation of these projects, which was something I don't see in every project, so that's nice to see. Yeah, Zoe Rowland, I saw her perennials at Venice a couple years ago, and also her work on illustration. But, you know, this kind of sparse, impressionistic, really painting out these architectures or really highlighting different objects or moments in the piece, I thought it kind of breaks up the visual monotony of just sitting across from someone, and it really transports you, especially in the first story. I think it's really affecting to have that story told and be in this special context as it's unfolding and getting all those little bits and details. And so... Yeah, I guess as you were working with these interviews and seeing what the topics were, just wondering how you worked with Zoe in terms of helping to craft these more void spaces that have these impressions of different moments that you really wanted to highlight.
[00:45:00.971] Joanne Popinska: The process of working with Zoe is that you tell Zoe what you want and she just does it and does it like 10 times better. That's the process of working with Zoe. And I fell in love with her approach to spatial storytelling when we were looking for an artist a couple years ago. And I remember Goro Fujita, he was showing some of her short works. I watched that and I really liked the lines, how she's using light with that. That was really impressive. And then I watched some short story. I don't remember the details of the story anymore, but it was something that you're looking in front of you and the story unfolds to the right and takes you in the circle and suddenly you're looking at the same point as at the beginning but now the whole story already happened so spatially chronologically suddenly you were in different spot despite the fact that you were in the same spot and i was like oh she thinks spatially and i need somebody like that so far zoe is not only how beautiful her artwork is but also that she's using spatial storytelling for storytelling But the process is really that. I tell her what I want from the scene, I tell her... We set this process with Kristen, that we were thinking which scenes needed a lot of additional, not volume, but additional something or where we need... It was collaboration always, like me, Janal and Zoe together. We were thinking how much space we need for emotion, for visual, for music. and what Kristen is providing with her voice. And then we were designing it together, like where the animation is taking over, where the music is taking over. And with Zoe, it's like, as I said at the beginning, I tell her more or less my idea, then she provides me storyboard, and I'm like, wow, that summarizes it.
[00:46:53.904] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so I'm curious to hear what some of the reactions have been like here at South by Southwest.
[00:47:01.880] Tom C. Hall: I think it's been, we were a little bit, I don't want to say cynical, but we were a little bit concerned that like, oh, it's not new. It's like, it's new stories, but there's no innovative technology. It doesn't, ZimZang is not on the blockchain. But the thing that was really refreshing is that all the comments from people, especially if they had seen chapter one. is always about the content of the story. Like the form has been transcended by the message and like the connections with the people, the interviewees. So like a lot of the feedback has been just like with Christian's story about people talking about, you know, this particular story is close to somebody that I know or it's in some way related, not directly or maybe in part in a life experience that they've had or in the process of going through. And then they've immediately wanted to talk about the human element. And like the aspect of the illustrations, the sound and the music and the technology and all that stuff is secondary to that fact. And to be having that conversation at like such a technologically focused event like South by, you know, it's even more sophisticated than many other film festivals in that way. It's been really, really satisfying to know that like that is the intention of what we're doing here is to not make it about the technology and to have that feedback and response from people after the experience has been really satisfying.
[00:48:12.150] Joanne Popinska: And I wanted to say that when we were thinking together with Blake how to show it, should we show first chapter and second and third or just premiering the second and third? And he said, guys, you're premiering second and third. And I was wondering if people who will watch only the new ones, will they have enough context, enough knowledge what the project is about to put it into context. And I'm really positively surprised because we had a mix of people. We had people who watched the first chapter at some other festival or at home and they already knew the story. So for them, the usual comment is that it really builds the bigger context, the bigger story, adds all these nuances and more deep meanings, as was my plan and hope. But from people who watched only second or third one, They had emotional reactions to those ones and the stories stand on their own. I would love to, of course, for everybody to watch all three chapters because they correspond to each other. They tell different parts of the bigger story about making this decision. but they also stand on its own. And I also like, especially with chapter three, Dan and Lee. So the whole project is pro-choice. My idea is to have pro-choice conversation with not necessarily pro-choice people, but Dan and Lee's story is unique in a way that They had doubts about their decision. They were very emotional about it and they tell it themselves that they feel like there is not enough space for conversation like that because then it's very easy and that's my additional theirs. That's very easy for anti-choice to tell you, hey, if you have doubts, then this decision is wrong, but you should not be making it. which is not true. And we had many people relating to this story because they had similar doubts. They still went through the same decision, but just having doubts is used against you. So I'm really happy that the audience recognized it. I didn't need to explain that. People were coming to me and telling that, oh, that's cool that you're telling that they are sharing, that they are making themselves vulnerable and open about this aspect.
[00:50:31.465] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found that really emotionally moving to hear that story. And yeah, you could really see the emotion that was coming out as they were telling it. There's a part of me that really wished that you could film it at the same time so you could see real reactions, because there's a bit of a building up of emotion that happens. And then when the other person goes into this kind of looping It's the type of thing that, as a viewer, I would have liked to have seen them progressively being shot at the same time. And I don't know if that would technically be possible or what the kind of limitations there were. But even independent of that, it was still really powerful to hear those stories, which I felt was a real kind of emotional core. Like, that was the one that moved me emotionally the most, I think, yeah.
[00:51:11.800] Tom C. Hall: It's funny that you mention that because the way that they came about is that we'd filmed with Lee by herself and then Dan came to pick her up from the studio and then they had Joanne and Lee and Dan had the conversation that, oh, you know, maybe his perspective would be good too. So it's one of those opportunities that then blossomed into like completely fundamentally changing the aspect of the production of like what we're trying to do with their story. but it's one of those things and like still trying to navigate like is it better that they're present even though they're just kind of in that loop frozen sort of like slightly dim state so they're there to communicate clearly that they're not co-present in the interview but they also were co-present in the process of doing it like it's one of those ethical considerations that you don't really have to think about in any other medium in that way But yeah, that's something that is one of the things that we're also, you know, because this is the first showing of the project, still in the process of evaluating our decisions about how we present it and maybe tweaking that. But at the same time, there are other people who appreciated that they're always present because they felt that in their story that because they're supporting each other so much that to have one of them be absent would undercut that theme. And so it's like all these sorts of considerations to balance.
[00:52:23.399] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was looking at more like the emotional flows of waxing and waning and just be curious to see those emotional reactions that would be happening. Because usually when you do documentaries, you don't film the people off screen, but in VR you could see everybody. And so there's a new opportunity for in the documentary form to see like reaction shots in a way that we normally wouldn't be able to see. So anyway, it's just something that as I was watching that chapter was coming to mind as well.
[00:52:48.522] Tom C. Hall: I have a good friend of mine who's a documentary editor and he says the exit to any confusing part of a talking head interview is you cut to slow motion people walking. And you can't do that in VR. You don't have that easy visual out, you know, where you're just like some vague conceptual energy thing and then you slip in a different piece of dialogue from a different day and then you cut back to them. And that's something that is a challenge about this medium, right? Especially when we're not dealing with 360 video. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, in order to make an apple pie, you have to invent the universe. And considerations like, oh, did we get enough reaction footage? Because Lee was the very first interview we did, we didn't even have the idea of reaction footage yet. So I think we're using her static frame is from when we were doing Room Tone. So it's like all these sorts of considerations about the mechanical process, which ultimately the audience doesn't need to understand or know. They just see the end product, right? Like the audience does not see 100% of what you don't show them. So all of these aspects and considerations are really outside. So it's like navigating that and then seeing how they respond to it and being like, okay, well, was our solution the right solution to take?
[00:53:53.737] Joanne Popinska: But also I think, so first of all, when we were filming with them separately, we thought this will be separate individual chapters. So that's why I didn't even think about it. The other thing, when I came up with an idea of making their episode as double episode with two of them, I told it to Tom and he's like the same reaction as me telling him what I need from the footage. He's like, oh shit, I don't know how, but let's think how. And then a couple months later, figured it out.
[00:54:23.821] Tom C. Hall: No, because it was a very short production timeline for Chapter 3. Very, very short. Which we were very appreciative to Blake at South By that he got to see it. But it was very, very last minute to get it together.
[00:54:36.724] Joanne Popinska: But this aside, technical challenges and also planning it differently initially, I'm not sure if I would get the emotional response from them if they were filming together, because I think a lot of what's very interesting in their episode is their individual vulnerability and how they were opening in front of me. And I'm not sure that they would do it if the other person was in the room.
[00:55:04.521] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those questions we'll never really know, but yeah, for sure. I do have to run off to my next interview, but I did want to kind of wrap things up, and I wanted to do that by asking kind of a dual aspect of love to hear any other additional anecdotes or ways in which that you've seen your project be able to change minds in the context of the larger potential of VR as a medium. It feels like you're tapping into something that's very specific in terms of like a paradigm shifting approach modality where people can interact and engage and be present and everything together aggregating up into actually changing minds, which I think is really quite powerful. So I'd love to hear any final thoughts on that idea.
[00:55:43.266] Tom C. Hall: I think one of the most interesting things talking about changing minds is Some of the people that reach out to us long after they've seen it that's been the big surprising thing like I've had and more Joanne but there's some people that have reached out to me as well like a month two months later and be like hey I've been thinking about your project again just out of the blue and being like you know it really stuck with me and this certain thing and then I'm thinking one in particular like this similar situation happened to me and I felt like I was better prepared because having seen the project and And that has been something to know that, like, I don't, it's hard to, you'd have to really do a proper study to evaluate it. But it's like the fact that this sort of process of hearing the stories in this way sticks with people in a way that lingers in a way that I think a traditional image does not. And the fact that they would recall it enough to then reach out to us to tell us about it tells me that that's happening on a broader level than we can really evaluate. And that's very, very incredible.
[00:56:39.017] Joanne Popinska: And with this in mind, I would love this project to find a life after, outside the festival circuit, because traveling for two and a half years with Kristen's episode, now already having powerful answers, responses from the audience. I see amazing opportunity and it's sort of lost. Like personally for us as artists, it's amazing to have this response to awards, nominations, stuff like that. It's wonderful. but I would love it to be used by others and let's say organizations that are doing grassroots work, that they are having that discussion, the conversation themselves. We had some presentations at university with not progressive universities that invited us and like students just watching the episode and then having a conversation, sharing their own views, their own experiences and just having this as a conversation starter, I would love this to happen.
[00:57:35.990] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Tom and Joanne, thanks so much for creating the choice and to put all these stories together in such a unique way that I feel like is really quite powerful. And to me, it really shows the potential of the medium to change minds. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing other ways that this type of approach could be used on any number of projects because there's certainly no shortage of ideas or concepts to really be exploring. This is just one topic that You're really doing a deep dive on and showing like three very different types of stories or you could even say four because there's four people. But, you know, three main themes that are being explored here throughout your project. So, yeah, just really appreciate it. And thanks so much for taking the time to help break it all down here on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:58:18.836] Tom C. Hall: Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.
[00:58:21.598] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
