Charlotte Mikkelborg is the series director of the Adventure series on Apple TV, which is shot on Apple Immersive Video and co-produced by Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions) and Apple. I think it has the strongest storytelling released by Apple so far, and it also has some of the most innovative and cutting edge shots that really show the power of the 180-degree format of Apple Immersive Video.
In this conversation, we cover Mikkelborg’s 10-year journey into working with immersive formats starting with 360-degree video, multi-sensory VR, and most recently 180-degree video. We also talk about the emerging grammar of 180-degree filmmaking, and the introduction of close ups, which I feel like work sometimes and other times feels almost too close or can feel a bit uncanny or jarring when changing scales or results in warping or other distortions. We also talk about some of the behind-the-scenes insights about the Adventure series.
One concerning thing that I noticed after watching all of the Apple Immersive Videos released so far is that many of these videos do not contain any credits for who worked on these projects. I did an audit of all 22 of the published Apple Immersive Videos, and I found that 14 of the 22 don’t have any credits at all,. Most of these are by Apple Sentity LLC productions, which is presumably Apple’s in-house production team. I found that 5 out of the 22 have partial credits, including the four episodes of the Adventure series as well as Man vs. Beast, which features DGA director Ryan Booth. And there are 3 out of the 22 Apple Immersive Videos that have full and complete credits including Submerged that features DGA director Edward Berger, and the Prehistoric Planet Immersive series, which is a co-production with Fairview Portals. See the table below for more information:
It is deeply concerning to me that only 3 out of the 22 Apple Immersive Videos seemingly have full and complete credits. Apple did not provide any comment about why this is or why some of these pieces have no credits, why some have partial credits, and why some have full credits.
It is nice to see at least some credits on the Adventure series, which is a co-production between Apple and Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions), but they’re only listing the director, executive producer, and key talent while all of the other key creative talent are not being credited. Atlantic Productions did not provide any official comment about why there are only partial credits, while a few other productions have full credits and many other productions have no credits. You can see find a partial a list of some of the Adventure series creative talent on IMDB, and episode 3 protagonist Ant Williams posted a partial list of credits on his Instagram announcement post.
I was able to get some additional context from Mikkelborg about the credits situation, and it does sounds like the co-productions likely have a bit more leeway in dictating what types of credits are shown. While the Prehistoric Planet Immersive series co-produced by Fairview Portals series has full and complete credits, and the Adventure series by Atlantic Studios only has partial credits.
The two Apple Sentity LLC productions that do have credits also happen to be directed by directors who are a part of the Director’s Guild of America (DGA). The DGA has specific credits requirements, “For feature films, the Director’s screen credit must be accorded on a separate card, which shall be the last title card appearing prior to principal photography. This credit shall be no less than 50% of the size of the displayed title of the motion picture, or of the largest size in which credit is accorded to any other person, whichever is greater.” The rules may be different for immersive productions or emerging media projects, but the director credits for Submerged and Man vs Beast seem to both meet DGA’s credits requirements for film. The DGA did not respond for a request for comment on whether they were involved with credits negotiations for these two projects.
Overall, not having proper attribution on all of these Apple Immersive Videos is a deeply troubling sign that the labor of creatives is not being accurately attributed. Credits help me do my job as an immersive storytelling oral historian to keep track of industry trends, as well as enable me to follow up with individual creators. But also if there are creative decisions in an immersive piece that I disagree with, then I do not have the full context for who may be responsible. But generally, credits and proper attribution has been a part of creative industries for generations now, and it hasn’t been until the introduction of Apple Immersive Video that we have started to see the erasure of proper attribution of the creative talent responsible for these immersive productions. It’s a dangerous precedent to set, and it is not fair to the creatives working on these projects to withhold the full and complete attribution in the credits.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I had a chance to speak with Charlotte Mikkelborg, who's the series director of the Adventure series that is on the Apple Vision Pro. So this is an Apple immersive video series that was done in co-production with Atlantic Productions, which has since rebranded to Atlantic Studios, as well as Apple. And this was the first opportunity that I had to speak to anyone who was in the behind the scenes and actual production of some of these different immersive videos. So Charlotte has been in the immersive storytelling space for about a decade. She's coming from the realm of 360 video and has also produced some CGI pieces. And so some of the language and grammar of 360 starts to translate over to 180. But there's also all sorts of new things that are opening up with the cinematic language and grammar for how to tell stories with this high resolution 180 degree video. So we talk about her journey into the immersive storytelling space and also just generally around some of the different kind of behind the scenes technical aspects of this kind of evolving grammar. One of the things that I also did ahead of this interview was to watch a lot of the Apple immersive video content. And so throughout the course of this conversation with Charlotte, I'm also bringing up some of my other impressions and reflections on what has been published so far. And then the other thing that I noticed was that not all the different pieces on Apple Immersive Video had full and complete credits, giving attribution to creative talent that were working on the different projects. Around two thirds of the content, 14 out of 22 of the Apple Immersive Videos that have been published so far, have no credits whatsoever and five out of the 22 have partial credits and then there's three out of the 22 pieces that have full and complete credits and so the ones that were produced by atlantic productions actually had partial credits but they weren't full credits and so i asked charlotte just to get a little bit more context about that and i'll have some more thoughts here at the end of the episode just kind of reflecting on there's something different with the apple immersive video where giving attribution to the creative talent that's working on it is just something that isn't happening and so i just wanted to also call that out and in my write-up, digging into a little bit more details, and in my wrap-up, have a few more thoughts on that. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Charlotte happened on Monday, March 10th, 2025, in Austin, Texas, during the Southwest Southwest Conference. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:36.883] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Hi, I'm Charlotte Mikkelborg. I've been an immersive creator since 2015. And most recently, for the last two years, in fact, I've been series directing a series called Adventure that was commissioned by Apple TV Originals. The commission went to Atlantic Productions, and I've been working with them to create it. MARK MANDELBAUM- Nice.
[00:02:54.711] Kent Bye: And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:59.545] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yeah, sure. So I first got into this space a decade ago when I was visiting Lucy Walker's producer in L.A. Lucy's a well-known documentary director of conventional sort of film. And I asked what she was working on and he said, oh, she's working on a 360 film. And I was like, oh. What's a 360 film? Hadn't even heard about it. And so I went and watched what Lucy was working on, which was a dance piece set in Cuba. And obviously it was basic in terms of the resolution because the headsets were basic back then. It was on a Samsung Gear VR. But I just immediately saw like the possibilities that existed in the space. Like, why are we watching our entertainment and documentaries on a sort of rectangular screen when we could be experiencing it in this immersive way so immediately it captured my imagination as a maker as a storyteller and yeah I just wanted to get into the space so then I was looking for all ways and means of doing that.
[00:03:55.935] Kent Bye: And I know that you've worked on a number of other projects so you've been in this specific space for about a decade now what are some of the first projects that you started to work on?
[00:04:05.510] Charlotte Mikkelborg: So when I started, the United Nations was actually investing quite a lot in making VR content because I think they'd had quite a good response to the first film, Clouds Over Sidra, that Garbo Arora had made. And the result of some testing around that was that people were much more likely to donate after having watched that versus a conventional film, because I guess there was sort of more donor fatigue around conventional forms of content. And they put out a tender asking for somebody to propose ideas to create storylines around refugee camps again, actually, which is similar sort of subject matter to Clouds Over Cedar, actually, and around women living in these refugee camps. And so I started looking at those stories, came up with some that were interesting and pitched them together with a team who had obviously more experience than I had because I didn't know 360 filmmaking really at all at that point. So a guy called Ignacio Ferrando Marghelli, who's a Spanish cinematographer who's been working in 360 for a long time and even then had already been you know doing 360 photography and some cinematography for a few years in 2015 and a guy called Jeffrey Anderson over here in the States who'd been doing spatial sound and binaural sound recording for a while so that little team essentially was what I pitched the UN won that made a film called Born Into Exile about pregnant women living in refugee camps and the challenges of that and And then I went on to make another film, also for the UN, but for UNICEF this time. The first one was for UN Women, which was around a somewhat similar topic, really, I suppose. It was called The Journey, and it was the journey through childhood in three very challenging environments. that UNICEF wanted to highlight. So that film came here actually in 2018, and they were my first two forays, I suppose, into the space. And that was everything that I suppose I did for the UN, because I think that that was a period where they were investing quite a lot. And I wanted to explore beyond actually just the 360 filmic space. So my next project was a much bigger pitch to British Airways to make a story called Fly, which essentially took you on a journey, lots of journeys going on, took you on a journey through humankind's relationship to flight starting with a young Leonardo da Vinci dreaming in a field and ending up kind of a hundred years into the future of flight and it was kind of a wild idea when I pitched it to them I thought they'd sort of say no we want to make you know a VR experience about our latest business seat but fortunately they were really pro and we got a lot of creative license almost complete creative license to be honest to make what we wanted to make And that was a big sort of immersive installation as well in the Saatchi Gallery in London that I designed together with Neil Corbell's motion control team so that when you experienced the sections when you're actually flying during the experience, it is very much a narrative experience, but for example, In the sort of third scene, you become Wilbur Wright on the wing of the Wright Flyer, piloting that for the first time on Kitty Hawk Beach. So we wanted you to be able to feel those winds blowing in your face, to be able to feel yourself control that machine and take flight. So that was a lot of fun, totally different to the first two films, but enabled me to play around with sort of games engine for the first time. We made it in Unity. to play with motion control, to get involved in multi-sensory storytelling, which is something I love. Obviously, the latest series isn't that, but I had a lot of fun with that because you had scent, wind, heat, a degree of haptics, if you could call it that, in the motion control. And so, yes, there's more, but I feel like I'm talking about...
[00:07:36.263] Kent Bye: I was just going to jump in and say that I remember seeing your piece fly, but it was during the pandemic in a virtual conference. So I didn't have the benefit of seeing it with all of the haptic and heat and everything. It was just the pure virtual experience, which is still really well done, but nothing like I imagine what it would have been if I would have seen the full multi-century version of that. So it sounds like that you started with 360 video, got into CG, and then what are the other big projects before you started to get into the adventure series with Apple Vision Pro?
[00:08:06.169] Charlotte Mikkelborg: So during COVID, actually, while you mentioned COVID, obviously some of the conventional work had kind of gone away during that time. And there was a couple of funds being put out by UK government bodies. One of them was to come up with sort of an immersive experience idea around some of our cultural heritage, because obviously cultural heritage took a pretty big hit. with COVID and visitors falling to nothing. And so I pitched an idea and won some funding for that idea. And that idea became a game called Time Detectives, essentially, which was the first, as far as I'm aware, multi-sensory augmented reality game. So it was designed specifically around the Mary Rose, which was Henry VIII's favourite warship. And we have a museum, a very cool museum on the south coast of the UK where the remains of the ship are and all of the artefacts they found with her. and so you can play it in situ with a scent backpack that releases scent at different parts of the game. Essentially, the game turns you into a time detective. You're assigned by the king to discover what's happened and how his ship has sunk, so you're travelling back in time to the last few days and hours of the ship being afloat. to sort of investigate, interview people and find out what went on basically. So yeah, that was a lot of fun to make. Again, multi-sensory, but in a different way. AR was challenging because making for iPhone is perfect. That's the easy bit. Making for Android, much more difficult because there are just so many models. And I think in retrospect, although quite limiting for people, I might have just stuck to iPhone and just made the app be an iPhone app because it's difficult to control, especially a lot of museums in particular, they're run by volunteers. and sometimes older retired volunteers and it's quite difficult to bring everyone up to speed even if you feel like you've made a game that's super straightforward to play and to follow and to download and to do all of that the stuff you need to do it can be quite hard to make sure everybody's across that if you're not there on site and obviously after we've made the game we're kind of handing it over giving some training sessions and then hoping that they can sort of run with that. And I think I don't think I'm the only one to experience that. There are challenges in that, which is a shame because a great game is a lot of fun to play. And it won the Innovation Award here in 2022. Okay. Yeah.
[00:10:25.894] Kent Bye: And I had a chance to see the virtual version of that again. And I think that's maybe the first time that we had a chat for the podcast. And then we had another chat about the project that you did with the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Is that the next big project after that?
[00:10:39.600] Charlotte Mikkelborg: yes i think around that same sort of time i decided that rather than focus i think the way it's been for a lot of immersive creators is that you have to have your own company structure to pitch for all of these projects whether they be for the un whether they be for big companies or whatever it might be and so i'd been kind of forced in a way to sort of grow the company somewhat and do all that development and pitching. And we pitched a big project to London Science Museum, and I think there were 82 people pitching. I thought it was a great idea. It was around the Flying Scotsman train. And yeah, 82 bidders, we got down to the final eight, then we got down to the final two, and then we didn't get it. And, you know, we'd spent a good month on the pitch and it was really in depth and I thought it would have been a great experience. And that was just a bit soul destroying. And I was like, do you know what? I also try to support two kids. I don't want or need to be spending like months of my life on a detail pitch that doesn't then get commissioned. So I was like, I'm really good at what I do. I'm good at directing. Why don't I just see how it goes? Just being more of a director and not all simultaneously trying to build the company. And so the Escape to Shanghai, which was part of the trilogy you mentioned, which was telling the stories of three female survivors of the Holocaust, that was with East City Films. So they hired me as a director and also Mary Matheson and then Darren Emerson, who's obviously part of East City, directed the other one. And so that was my first sort of just as a here I am, I'm going to come and direct. And that was great. You know, I loved doing that project. It was obviously a really important project to have done. And It was just nice to be able to just do the creative work and not necessarily have to worry lots about the other aspects of the job. And then, you know, fortunately, it was actually Elliot Graves who directed the pilot of Adventure, which is called Highlining, which became episode one, who knew me and so asked if I'd be interested to come on board. Actually, first I came on board to help him develop another project, which I don't think I can mention, so I won't. And then he asked if I would come on to direct the Adventure series. And then I got the sign off, the tick from Anthony Geffen, who runs Atlantic, who were the production company or have been the production company on Adventure. And Off we went, basically. And it's been two years in the making.
[00:13:01.909] Kent Bye: And so when you started to work on that project, had you seen the first episode? Had it already been released? Or is this a parallel co-production of things like what was already existing by the time you came on board?
[00:13:12.421] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yes. The first episode, the pilot episode, High Lining, was already in advanced post, pretty much finished. There was sort of VFX and such like still going on, but there was a picture lock to cut, basically. So I did get to see that. So I had a sense of where they wanted to go with it. I also had a few things that I wanted to do in addition. that i then got to do on parkour and subsequent episodes but yeah i was already able to see that to see the incredible sort of visuals that elliot had obviously captured on that set in norway and get a sense of sort of the potential of the device and that kind of thing so it was really helpful
[00:13:47.594] Kent Bye: And so as you're coming in from more of the 360 realm and starting getting to this cinematic 180, I'd love to hear some of your first initial thoughts for how you started to make sense of some of the unique affordances of how you would go about shooting the second episode of Adventure, the first one that you worked on called Parkour Rock.
[00:14:05.242] Charlotte Mikkelborg: So I had a slight advantage, which was that I ran or helped run. I was one of the key sort of tutors on a course that Google and YouTube ran called the 180 creators lab, which took place immediately pre COVID. So a few years prior to my coming on board with adventure. And so we were literally training really successful YouTubers. I think you had to have more than a million followers to apply. in how to make 180 content because youtube were very keen to kind of start transitioning some of their bigger names or at least getting their bigger names to try out you know more immersive forms of storytelling and 180 felt like a comfortable sort of bridge for them rather than going full 360 and it's also a bit easier on the platform so yeah so i'd had a lot of time to think about and play around with 180 during that what i love about 180 actually is that because it is a little closer to you know conventional forms of 2d storytelling You can take advantage of some of those things, like cutting from something wider to a close-up. I think it works in 180 in a way that it wouldn't in 360. And we do that, obviously, in Adventure. And I think it really helps us to form a more intimate bond with our characters. And the other clear advantage is that, I mean, Apple have this incredible sort of resolution feature. camera that we shot on and obviously a very high resolution headset compared to everything we've seen before and by keeping it in that front 180 I mean knowing that the percentage of people who do look behind them is much lower than all of us who'd be making 360 would like and keeping all of those pixels kind of in front of you there is quite a lot of sense in that if it means that you don't then have to half the resolution effectively of what you're looking at in your full 360 so I really liked that aspect of it I know that there were 360 purists out there who would like everything immersive to be 360 but yeah I'm not I'm not among them and this form of storytelling really you know was really fun to work in and also obviously production teams and don't need the same level of hiding and we had quite big teams so that was also a handy uh handy thing so
[00:16:14.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had this conversation with Adam Lissagor. He is of the Sandwich Vision. They have an app called Theater App. They're showing a lot of dome and planetarian content on the Apple Vision Pro, but they're also showing some stereoscopic 180 video. And Adam is a filmmaker, and so his perspective was that Apple made the right decision with this because this is going to start a new renaissance and that everything that came before with 360 video was essentially what he referred to as VR filmmaking for gamers who are able to look around and that Here you're able to really focus on the attention, use a little bit more of the cinematic techniques. But there's also this aspect of VR, filmmaking, 360 is like telling the story of a place, of a physical location. And then for me to extrapolate that, when you go to the more 180, then you can start to focus on the characters and the people more. and the emotions and other things that you can direct the attention that isn't always having that full context. There's a couple of pieces that are 360 here at the South by Southwest program, Ways of Knowing as well as Shelter. And I think both of those are telling the stories of locations and places Really trying to preserve that full context and then if it was framed in 180 you would be missing like there's scenes and shelter where you're in the basement and People are sheltering and you turn around and you see oh they're in a parking garage If you were only focusing on the people you wouldn't know the full context of where they're at and so in some ways That same piece wouldn't work as well if you're only doing it 180 because you're cropping out essential context that is adding to the full story that is really about that story of a place that you're getting through 360 whereas With 180, I feel like you're still able to take us to these places, but you're able to do a little bit more with the people in those scenes. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on some of the differences that you've seen between those.
[00:18:00.683] Charlotte Mikkelborg: yeah i mean i haven't seen those two pieces actually i'll go and check them out but yeah i agree with the idea of course there's times when you do want that entire context of sort of complete immersion in a place i do feel like adventure though does manage to give you not the parking garage context that you've just given an example of but you know in each case we are in a very distinct physical location for the challenge that our athletes are taking on and I do feel like those locations can be beautifully and very cinematically represented or not beautifully, you know, depending on the location. We had a very grotty, you know, spiral garage in Parkour, which was brilliant in its sort of dilapidation. But yeah, I do think you can still get a sense of place in 180, but What you can also do, I think, is just play with the cinematic form a bit more. So one of the things I wanted to do in the series and did, starting from Parkour and then again, you see it maybe even slightly more in Ice Dive, the third film in the series, is to do top-down shots. I'd seen a beautiful film, I'm trying to remember the name of the filmmaker now, but about Johanna Nordstrom. I hope I've got that name right. I might have her surname wrong. Anyway, she's a famous ice freediver. And there's a beautiful short made about her. And in that, which is a conventional 2D documentary short. And in that, they use this sort of top-down shots to beautiful effect with the sort of triangular holes in the ice and her kind of walking through the forest and things like that. And I thought, well, why can't we do that in 180? And I thought, let's try, you know, let's give it a try and see whether in the 180 format, in a way that I expect you could not do in 360, we can make it work. And so we've got these incredible shots in ice dive where you're looking down at this lava field and this sort of exploding or erupting rather volcano. And it's just this incredible sort of black lava with this sort of bubbling red hot lava coming through. And it's almost like painterly in its aspect. It's not... almost doesn't feel like live action, but something we've kind of placed in front of you, just a beautiful kind of piece of CG. It is all live action. We were just very lucky in terms of like the volcano chose to erupt the days we were shooting, but you know, and also we were able to, you know, somewhat, copy that 2D film in a couple of the shots in Ice Dive where we are looking down on those sort of triangular holes in the ice and tracking up them. And yeah, and we just kept pushing the boundary. I think, you know, one of Apple's key goals right from the beginning with the Vision Pro had been or has been to just make sure that there is the least motion sickness sort of possible. Like that was a really key remit from the outset. And so right from High Lining, which Elliot had made, He tried to push that, you know, and he did push it. You know, he used a helicopter and he had a crane, a telescopic crane, which was no easy feat given he was at the top of a mountain. And so he'd already used some subtle movement. But with each episode, we kind of just tried to take it a step further, take it a step further. and see what we could do and still feel comfortable. That was a lot of fun as an exploration as well, like how could we get cinematic movement and how far could we take that and have people still feel really comfortable in headset. Because that's the only downside of this resolution, which isn't a real downside, but the resolution is so high that actually the propensity to motion sickness I think is probably higher. because you see every tiny thing, you know, in your field of view. And so if that's kind of wobbling or whatever, then that's really very uncomfortable, more so, I think, than if you're in a lower res. So, yeah, it was important to be careful with that. And we also developed on the series, largely, you know, off the back of some of Elliot's early work, we developed different grip solutions for each of the episodes in turn. So, for example, with Ice Dive, we developed an underwater rig with this sort of pretty large camera system that we had for shooting. You know, we had to get it into this big underwater housing and anything went wrong with the camera, everything needed to be broken apart again, obviously, because it's all got to be watertight and we had to sort of balance so that we could effectively move a sled through the water with a degree of stability and a lack of rocking that would make sure that that felt really comfortable in a headset. And then just to push the boundaries even more, I wanted to see if there was a way that we could sort of mimic those top-down shots that we get with sort of bottom-up shots, which is challenging, especially on a rig that is essentially designed to balance on the horizontal, obviously. So our underwater cinematographers kind of went above and beyond to make those shots happen. That was probably the hardest part. of the shots that we've got I think that put the most strain on the camera operators but you know they got it it was probably only half an hour of their lives at the end but it was an intense half hour yeah
[00:22:58.058] Kent Bye: Yeah, in preparation for speaking to you, I went back before I came to South by Southwest and rewatched a bunch of the Apple Vision Pro spatial video content. And it's really striking to me some of the difference between written narratives versus documentary. I feel like some of the forms of documentary, you don't tend to have multiple shots that happen, like over-the-shoulder shots. When I see that in a piece like Submerged, I'm like, ooh, I don't know how much of this grammar is necessarily translating. there's moments where it was if I have a close-up and there's someone behind me like I feel like claustrophobic like there's someone behind me I I feel like I'm in the middle of someone where I want like in film I don't have that same feeling but in the more immersive version of it I feel like the camera ends up being like a proxy of a body and that there's this proxemics where I have zones of comfort of where I'm comfortable seeing things or I tend to want to maybe be a little bit more seeing the full context of two people speaking and being able to see them in my field of view as if I were in the room rather than if it was a film and a camera that's kind of have the more standard of how you're cutting between them so there's little grammar things that I was noticing so then I was like well maybe we shouldn't have all these close-ups because it's like this feels weird but then in your piece with parkour there are these moments when these athletes are about to make this jump and you have like a close-up of their face that showed the intensity of the motion of that moment and so you know this is something that you mentioned that you don't typically see a lot of close-ups in the context of 360 video just because you know you could be looking anywhere and it could be somewhat disorienting and plus the stereoscopic effects start to break down once you get too close to someone so there's all these other technical limitations but just from the grammar it kind of makes more sense to focus on the place rather than focus on the people so having these close-ups mid-range and long shots i'd love to hear any of your reflections on starting to play with things like a close-up and if you see that there are differences of like how some of that film grammar that is usually works okay in 2d When I see a piece like Submerge, I'm like, oh, this feels like this was made by someone who's never made an immersive piece before and they're coming from a film background and they're pushing the edge of what the film language is, but I'm not sure if it works. But I don't know if that's just because I'm used to this other way of it and I need to accommodate or if there's like 2D people need to learn some of these other best practices for what's going to be a good middle ground for what works in the spatial video.
[00:25:22.526] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yeah, I think obviously you used the example of Submerged and I think we know that obviously Ed Berger, who made Submerged, is new to the immersive space. And I think that he's obviously a brilliant filmmaker, no doubt about it. But I think that when you are Ed Berger or any other renowned filmmaker coming into this space, I think that... There's not an obligation on you. That's too much to say. But I think that the right way to approach it, right, is in that mindset that we all come to things as children of, okay, there's something completely new here. This isn't what I've done before. I need to just watch a ton of content, right? Watch and see what works, see what doesn't. I mean, it's always good to see the new things coming out. I mean, I enjoyed to watch Submerge, not least because I wanted to see, well, what did Ed Berger do with the medium? you know, a few things and it did work for me. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. You know, I wouldn't necessarily have tried that because that's not a typical thing you do. Like you say, there was a lot of use of close-ups. I remember particularly like one, I think on the floor, is it like a cockroach or something running into a grate? I'm not sure. Do you get cockroaches on submarines? I think that's what it was. I generally found in immersive filmmaking that anything super close to the ground, I find really uncomfortable. In 360, that's definitely true. I can't bear it when a 360 camera's really close to the ground. That particular shot, I didn't find terribly uncomfortable in submerged, interestingly. But I found a lot of women actually say to me that the one that they found most uncomfortable was the one where the, I can't remember if the missile comes out from where your sort of stomach should be or goes in, but I haven't heard any men comment, so it's so funny. But, you know, I think we can every single thing that comes out, we can learn from. Right. Because it is still a medium that has that excitement of it is expanding. New people are coming in and yes, they might do some things wrong, even if they're brilliant. But there'll also be some things that they try because they're coming from whichever medium they're coming from. And that maybe then gets you thinking and gets you able to incorporate something into your next project. So. But, yeah, I think just. If you are that person, that famed director coming in, like surrounding yourself with people who... Watching lots of content, but then also surrounding yourself with people who've been in the space a little while, which is really just what I did when I started out as well, was just make sure everyone working with me knew more than I did because I didn't know very much yet myself. So, yeah, I guess that's sort of the key things. But where close-ups, I think, are so important in adventure, as you say, was... particularly when we're introducing characters. So what I tried to do, because it is a series and actually I was quite new to serial storytelling, I wanted to make sure from episode two onwards that we had something of a format, not a sort of brutally like kept to format the way you would have with reality TV, but a format that people to some degree knew what they were getting. And so that format that we followed was first the cold open that introduces you to just, you know, the excitement of what's to come, then the introduction to character, the introduction to the challenge, then preparing for the challenge and maybe taking a practice go at it, and then finally kind of the main attempt. And all of these things were things that our athletes had in mind that they wanted to do. I would say Parkour was a little bit more contrived than some of the other episodes, just in that... We had to shoot across Paris, central Paris. And obviously that's a really difficult thing to do. And there's a lot of location permits and such needed. And so there wasn't really a way to make them actually have an organic journey starting from point A and finishing at point B. And so they did want to do this kind of like parkour journey across Paris because it's the the birthplace of parkour. So that means something to them as a team. They'd done bits of it before, but not tons. And we were coming up to the Paris Olympics. It looked like maybe parkour might get incorporated for the first time. In the end, it didn't, because the body that organizes it said no. So, you know, for all those reasons, it was kind of this journey from, you know, where it was born in the suburbs as a way to escape the police to the mainstream, right? And so they traveled from those sort of grittier suburbs through to the center of Paris, that big roof jump. But yeah, so that journey was a little more contrived. But, you know, our ice diver, he had become the deepest man under ice. He really wanted to become the furthest man under ice. So we wanted to kind of film his attempt at doing that. And, you know, our deep water soloist, which is the episode that came out more recently, He's an incredible climber. I think he got his first world record when he was 12 or 13. So quite a prodigy. But he also had a really bad experience of deep water soloing when he was, I think, even younger than that. And so ever since had just not wanted to do it. He generally, as a rope climber, is not a free soloist. And so he wanted to just see if he could get over that fear by taking on this very challenging deep water solo route in Majorca. So there is organic narrative to each of these pieces, but they did need quite tightly storyboarding. quite careful planning and so we also needed to in that process work out okay how can we do that all of that process that's necessary because we've got big grip and we've got a lot to organize crew wise etc but also make the athletes feel very much like we're as absent as possible we are just following them on their journey whatever that might be so um i sort of got away from the point that you asked me and that is obviously like about the use of close-ups and such like and i think that both in introing each of our characters, and in capturing those moments, as you say, on the roof before the big roof jump, or before Aunt Williams goes under the ice in Ice Dive, to be able to just really hone in on that emotion to see whatever it is actually and you don't really see the fear he's got this amazing ability to kind of like mind over matter but just to see like to try to grasp what they are feeling in those moments i just feel like you couldn't have done that without the close-ups so that's why i feel like even if the medium doesn't naturally lend itself to close-ups necessarily they work really well in those sort of moments yeah i think
[00:31:19.744] Kent Bye: The times where close-ups felt weird is when it was more of a narrative context where there's someone behind me or someone that was also occluded or I couldn't see both people. So if it's just one person, then it felt like it made sense. And now there's a concert for one with Ray. Again, a lot of super intimate close-ups. And I was like, I don't know if this is too close. This feels a little bit too dialed in, too high resolution. I want to have a little bit more distance. To me, it honestly feels like that kind of proxemics of what's a comfortable distance and that Sometimes like a super intimate close-up that starts to get too close, that starts to violate what would be normal proxemics for people would be comfortable with being that close to another person. And yours wasn't like as intimate or close-up, but it was in the context. It was having like an emotional beat that made sense in the context of the narrative. So anyway, as I was watching stuff, I was like, what is it about some of these specific things are not working or not working? So anyway, I don't know if you have any other reflections on that.
[00:32:15.483] Charlotte Mikkelborg: I think just that you're right I mean there is such a thing as too close and other than in some other kinds of VR experience which this interview is not about I just think yes we're too close I felt too close to Ray in the example you're giving and I loved other aspects of what was done with that piece and you know I thought the studio setting worked great I love the use of like the graphics which I felt like they were in her personal hand I don't know if they were but So there are some elements of that experience that are brilliant. But like you say, I just think the close-ups were just a bit too close. You do feel like you are now in her very intimate space. And who knows, for some real insanely intense Rey fans, that was probably just close enough. But I think for the rest of us, it was just like, oh, I don't know her. This is now a bit too close. So yeah, it is a careful balance. I think that we found... I think the closest I went, physically speaking, and we had a different rig, a mirror box rig for the close ups versus the main rig that we used. So we could also get some depth of field with that, which was great because that also just helps you dial it in and dial in the emotion because everything is not as crisply in focus everywhere else. I think that the closest we got was probably about 90 centimeters, something like that in terms of actual proximity. And that would have been on like a 12, 16 mil sort of lens. So, yeah. And that would, I say, be about the limit.
[00:33:29.569] Kent Bye: we might have got slightly uh we got slightly closer than that but it's about there yeah yeah one of the other things that i really appreciated with both of your series that we've seen so far in the adventure series with parkour and the ice diver is that there's quite a lot of like drone shots that are establishing like a deeper spatial context that for the parkour example there is a journey and you're having these little infographics that are coming up and saying how close you are to this destination that you're going so you have this broader spatial context and then you're kind of zooming in and it is allowing to do that wide establishing shot and then the more close-ups that you have for each of these different contexts and so orienting us in space and time and also with the ice diver being able to again establish the spatial context where he's going to be swimming underwater for a certain amount of distance and here is what's at stake in terms of you know measuring out these two football fields and just giving a sense of scale that we wouldn't normally get if we were just like looking at it but Each of these shots are operated on a drone, and so I'm just curious to hear any reflections on what was it like to produce these kind of more cinematic aerial shots in your pieces?
[00:34:33.647] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yeah, I mean, I felt so lucky on this series. Honestly, it was a filmmaker's dream, basically, or an immersive filmmaker's dream, particularly, because working with a decent budget, not being restricted, not that there was no restrictions, but not being overly restricted in terms of what grip you could use. So obviously, like you say, in the Paris episode, we couldn't really have done without it, especially because it wasn't actually that organic journey. We were having to, in a way, partially reconstruct it to have those drone shots and to be able to give you that context of where they were going and from and to even if it wasn't in one consecutive line was immensely helpful and I do just want to shout out that the department at Apple who does the graphics are great you know they're very precise and they want everything to be just so but you know they're right because it It means a piece that is the live action quality of content is so high. You know, you want the graphics elements to be as high. And they did a brilliant job on that. The football field in Ice Dive was actually our exec producer at Apple's idea. And we were all like, really? We're not sure about this, like contrasting the two sports. But actually, like you called it out. And so I think it works for just, you know, making people realize just how far he is going, which was an insane sort of distance on a single breath under the ice. Like, I just don't know. How do you bring yourself to take that on? But yeah, so we used actually three different kinds of aerial photography or cinematography in the episodes. And we didn't have all three, just to be clear. Budgets weren't that unlimited for each episode. We had to pick and choose. At times we used a helicopter, so for example the lava shots in Ice Dive are captured with a helicopter. We also used a sort of regular heavy lift drone and we also used a special drone system where the rotor blades were sort of timed with the shutter speed. so that you didn't then need to take out the rotor blades in post, which is a more expensive system. So we needed it in certain places where there was a lot of things above you potentially. But for example, I didn't use it in Iceland because mostly what was above you was open sky. And so we just used the sort of regular heavy lift drone. It's still a very nice piece of equipment. But yeah, couldn't really have done without them, I don't think. Some of these locations, or most of these locations, were such dramatic settings that not to have been able to give you a little bit more, a little bit wider, more cinematic view would have been a great shame, so...
[00:36:56.840] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I was watching parkour, I was wanting to ask, like, the mechanics of how you were shooting some of, like, the climax of the piece, the roof jumping, because there's a close-up of the face that you have to do. Then there's, like, the shot where they're jumping off and then doing it from, like, from behind. And then there's the shot of them landing. So you have, like, these different moments where they're jumping two or three or even ten times to get the shots to put it all together in movie magic. What order of shots did you do in order to do that? Because obviously, you're not seeing the camera. So I'm assuming you shoot it multiple times. But there's also a drama of the story of them doing it for the first time. So what angle do you want to get for it to get into these shots?
[00:37:37.879] Charlotte Mikkelborg: So, no, it's a really good question. So essentially, even though, as I say, the pieces were very tightly storyboarded, we knew exactly what we were doing in each location, we'd sort of tech-recce-ed it to the nth degree, I knew that in terms of the parkour episode, because we weren't going to get a lot of organic, documentary and interaction between the guys that it was going to be really important that that main obstacle, that main challenge was completely organic. Like I didn't want any of it to feel like constructed. And so Stora as a parkour team, there's seven of them in total. We chose three for the episode, but one of the other guys came with them and we got him to come and look at the rooftop, you know, assess that they would be able to do it, that we weren't obviously giving them a challenge that was unachievable. but we didn't let them see the rooftop until we were totally ready. Because they've worked together for years, they know each other's skills and what they're capable of almost better than they know each of them themselves. They know each other very, very well indeed. So we set the cameras up in terms of the main 180 cameras. We set two cameras up simultaneously and we just let that scene play out organically. Then we did obviously have to do some VFX work to then remove one of those rigs. What we didn't do in that episode, which was a learning for me, and it's interesting that you say like you feel that stress on his face. So those were picked up. So even though luckily they don't feel like they were, they were because there wasn't a way to get that rig onto the rooftop in the same time. So we did the main shooting on those 180 cameras, then actually I can't remember if it was a couple of days later we came back and did the close-up rig. But for me as a filmmaker, even though luckily that did work in the edit, I was very much like, I need to find a way to make this more organic. So later on in the making of the series, we were actually able to capture all of those close-up moments at the actual moment of filming. the attempts so that made a big difference i felt even if only because i know that that is all the completely organic emotion on their faces you know and and that's to a degree true in ice dive i'm trying to remember what the director did with deep water solo possibly also deep water solo but in parkour it was captured separately
[00:39:58.396] Kent Bye: Yeah, because I guess I knew that if you have that much of a close-up that you wouldn't physically be able to do the other scene, so then I just assumed that you redid it, but it sounds like you just had two camera rigs and then erased out one of the cameras in post, it sounds like then.
[00:40:11.222] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yes, for the main rigs, yeah. Okay.
[00:40:13.883] Kent Bye: Okay, and then at some point you have the fourth episode that came out that you did not direct, but you brought someone else to direct. Just talk a bit about that process of what was your role in the fourth episode then?
[00:40:25.257] Charlotte Mikkelborg: So I was literally talking about it for International Women's Day that we're so few still female directors. I mean, actually, we're not so few, but we're so few in terms of the female directors that get recognition for their work. And so I wanted, if I could, to bring in another female director as I was going to bring in one or two directors maximum. So this lady that I brought in for episode four, Dionne Bromfield, she'd done a lot of directing of adventure content. So she hadn't done any immersive, but she had done a lot of adventure and she'd done climbing films before. And so she came in and she had obviously this very steep learning curve with having to learn how to shoot for immersive. But, you know, I and a couple of other members of the team who sort of know all the ins and outs of shooting for Immersive was able to just download in portions all that sort of knowledge to her. And, you know, her first film in Immersive, she did brilliantly. And she's a very sort of. very lovely easygoing for a director very lovely easygoing character she's very cool calm and collected which you know obviously is is also a is an immense skill to have on a sort of slightly bigger set with lots of personalities and whatever else so yeah she did a great job my role was really sort of mentoring her making sure she felt equipped with The skills she would need, in addition to the skills she already had, the extra skills she would need on set. I went in just for the last couple of days. She couldn't make the last day or two, two days of filming. So I went in and just did those last couple of days of filming and then got a bit involved later on in post with that process. But yeah, otherwise it was just trying to enable her to...
[00:42:05.376] Kent Bye: do her job and i think that she was pretty you know thrilled to get a chance to you know do something in this new medium so it worked out all round i guess one of my critiques of the overall series of sometimes when i get to the credits it's very sparse in terms of who gets credit for different things that work on so that's a whole other separate because it seems like there's a lot of other people that are likely involved in working on it that are that are not being credited so
[00:42:28.115] Charlotte Mikkelborg: I absolutely 100% agree with you. It was a source of huge frustration to me that more people aren't credited because you're right, it's a big team, most of whom we could not have done without. Let's none of us joke that the director, the exec producer and the talent are the only important people in this show. Clearly not. So I just, yeah, it was a great shame. My understanding of it was that When Apple makes internal content, they don't credit people because Apple have a rule that their own people don't get credited. That's part of the deal, you know, when you go to Apple. But because this was, you know, being produced by Atlantic Productions, but in collab with Apple. So there was some Apple, you know, key Apple stuff working on it. There was some Atlantic stuff working on it. It was this hybrid. And the people who were involved early doors, which wasn't myself, negotiated that they could have a handful of key credits. And they were the ones that got negotiated. But I know it has been a source of frustration, you know, for people like our DPs or, you know, our editor, who's insanely great. Yeah, it's frustrating. It must be hugely frustrating to them. And all I can say is, you are amazing. Our technical supervisor is amazing. Yeah, so many of the people on it were just, yeah. mind-blowingly good.
[00:43:46.931] Kent Bye: Yeah, as someone who sees a lot of immersive content, I tend to be the type of person who looks at the credits. And the credits just help me get a sense of the ecosystem. And as an oral historian, it helps me just keep track of things. I notice names. There's people I don't know. But it just seems like a part of attribution that's been a part of the industry that just feels like a weird corporate decision that is erasing the talents of people that are involved in creating stuff. So I protest.
[00:44:13.937] Charlotte Mikkelborg: That's with you. 100%.
[00:44:16.400] Kent Bye: So anyway, I think they should change that. We can watch the credits. It reminds me of things like Netflix that they skip out of the credits so quickly to the next. It's part of that, perhaps, mindset that we've got with the streaming. But I did want to ask if you had a chance to see a piece called Currents that is here at South by Southwest.
[00:44:34.082] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Not yet. That's on the Vision Pro though, right? Yeah, it's a 180.
[00:44:38.784] Kent Bye: I think that there's certain music video type of grammar and things that they're doing in currents that I think that just works really well and wouldn't work as well on 360. And so yeah, part of the larger discussion I'll be having with people that are coming from the 360 realm and looking to see like, oh, this kind of experimentation with the grammar of 180, I feel like that's a piece that may open some minds in terms of understanding the differences of the different affordances. So anyway.
[00:45:02.796] Charlotte Mikkelborg: That's great. I'll definitely go check it out. Yeah, I'm always just looking for interesting ways to expand that grammar, as you say. And just, you know, you just this is why I come to these festivals. You know, you see it might just not be an entire piece. It might just be one little thing you see that just like feeds into your next project as people come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas and experimentations. And I think festivals are the places to see those quite often, aren't they? See and experience them. Yeah.
[00:45:27.828] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I just also want to make a comment on the Man vs. Beast, because as I was watching it, I was like, some of these, it felt like super close up, but all the depth of field was like blurring the background, but also some felt distorted. It felt a little like I was in this altered state or somewhat distorted, or they were doing something different that the look and feel of some of that piece of Man vs. Beast. Again, maybe it's coming from people that are coming from this 2D background and having a way of pushing the creative aesthetics that When I saw it, I was like, I don't know if this is really working for me, for some of that. I don't know if you can articulate more of the sentiment of what I'm speaking about, or if you know what I mean, or technically you know what they might be doing that is different.
[00:46:08.908] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yeah, I have only seen Man vs. Beast once. So I probably need to watch again to give a proper critique, if that's what we were looking to do. And I did certainly see some shots in there that worked. But like you say, there was also at least a couple of shots in there that I remember just being too close. So, yes, I completely agree with you on that. I think that was the main thing that I noticed. But there may have been others to do with depth of field that, like I say, I'd probably have to go back and watch again to really give any useful insight on. And that's just it's just another case, I think, of a very talented 2D filmmaker coming into the space, probably wanting to, you know, experiment, push boundaries. But there's another piece, though. I don't know if you saw The Weekend. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, yeah. So I think the director's name is Anton Tammy, and I think he did a really good job. I think he spent a lot of time, and I know also from having spoken to a few of the people who worked with him on it, that he did seem to spend a great deal of time researching what could work, what wouldn't work, And I think that he nailed it. And that was his first, as far as I'm aware, that was his first foray into immersive. So I think you can absolutely make the leap and even just make it in a very stylish way that doesn't involve it having to look like your first immersive film. So yeah.
[00:47:24.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, and like you said, it's like this kind of experimental time with all this pushing the edge of everything. Well, great. As we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of this type of spatial storytelling and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:47:40.245] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Oh, wow. That's a big sum up. I mean, ever since I first watched that 360 film in 2015, I've believed that the future is here, as in the future is in this space in terms of the future of entertainment. I don't think we're there yet. You know, I don't think any of us working in the space thinks we're there yet. But the leaps and bounds that the Vision Pro has brought us on, which is now obviously getting mirrored by other technological advances, innovations like we've got Google with their project and Samsung with Project Wuhan and and a couple of really interesting Chinese headsets as well I think just getting to that stage of resolution is is has been a game changer because now we genuinely feel like save for the multi-sensory elements like when I'm in ice dive I don't feel freezing whereas when you're there you do but but you know I think you do feel genuinely there in terms the the both the audio and the visuals And I think also, just talking briefly about audio, what Apple's achieved with the headset in audio terms, I think is very clever, especially given how good it is even without headphones, which is rare. But yeah, we've still got so far to go. I mean, obviously these headsets need to be affordable. because we want you know the masses to be able to see the content we need to have something that's lighter generally speaking i think there's probably still a fair bit of research needs doing on like how good it is for us to have like screens this close to our eyes or what sort of precaution needs to be put in place around that or whether ultimately the medium is going to evolve beyond something that is you know head wearable and becomes more of a kind of immersive experience in in your living room or however it all plays out or AR glasses. I don't think we quite know yet and I'm not enough of a futurist to try to project that, but I just think that the space is a really exciting one and I think we're going to less and less look to our conventional streamers on our laptops and phones and more and more to these new forms. So I'm just excited to see where that goes. Yeah, sorry not to have more.
[00:49:35.093] Kent Bye: No, that's perfect. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:49:40.049] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Let me have a think. Yeah, I think that something that Adventure did, and I know I was really lucky to get picked for that, was it started to sort of move the medium. It's not the only project to do that, but it's one of the projects to really start to move the medium into that sort of more mainstream world. And I do think that, you know, there's some incredible one-off pieces and there's some incredible sort of digital art pieces and all of those absolutely have a place. But I think getting towards the sort of what feels like more what we expect from an entertainment series, for example, with adventure, where you you know what you're getting, you go back to get, you know, if you like it, you go back to get it in the next episode. Sure, it's a new person. It's a different story. It's a different challenge, etc. But you kind of look forward to it. If you liked it first time around, you look forward to it because you know what's on offer. And I think that we need more things like this where the narrative bar is high. You know, Apple TV held us to a very high narrative bar, which was brilliant. You know, it's very rare you work with a client and you feel like every bit of feedback they come with actually elevates the project. But that was pretty much true across, you know, Adventure. And I think the more that people like Apple TV Originals and other shows, streamers with high narrative bars can be getting involved in the space commissioning helping shepherd projects and making sure those projects repeat like you know this was season one of adventure i certainly hope there'll be a season two three whatever but even if not that there could be other series coming out that have that repeatability because i think that's what we need as a sector we need a lot of great content well not even a lot of great content but a sort of critical mass of great content that also is comes in serial form that'll just kind of keep people coming back and not just be like that Flash in the Pan, that was a great piece, but now it's sort of gone, or I don't know where to find it anymore, which is certainly true of a lot of my pieces in the past as well. So yeah, so that's what I'd like to see, just more repeatability, I suppose, so that we can just get more and more people, and more affordability of headsets for sure. And for those that are making more affordable headsets, to make better affordable headsets.
[00:51:47.734] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Charlotte, thanks so much for joining me here to break down a little bit more of your journey into this immersive space and some of your other projects, but also specifically all the work that you've been doing on the Adventure series. And, you know, after I had a chance to go back and watch all the different pieces, it's also made me really appreciate all the amazing work that you've been able to do so far on these two episodes that I've seen that you've directed and very much looking forward to continuing to see where you take it all here in the future. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[00:52:11.207] Charlotte Mikkelborg: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:52:13.823] Kent Bye: So that was Charlotte Mikkelborg. She's the series director of the Adventure Series, which was produced by Atlantic Productions, which has since rebranded to Atlantic Studios, as well as Apple. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, what was great just to hear a little bit more around Charlotte's journey into this space and I do think that working in 360 video and CG and VR does have a lot of transferable skills for how strong the adventure series is. After watching all the different series, I do think that the adventure series stands up in terms of the stories that are being told, the technical achievements and pushing the boundary. I really think that it's the best series that Apple has released so far. And my second is the wildlife pieces. And talking to Charlotte, one of the things that I realized is that with the 180 video, there is different camera rigs. She called it the mirror box rig that is able to do these really intimate closeups and that blurs the background. I think one of the things that I noticed is that when they're using the normal camera, it looks like you're a person and you're seeing the view like you were there. But when you start to have these other camera lenses and you have these like super intimate closeups, first of all, it's not normal for how you would normally see things. And you also are super like intimately close to be like, if you're standing just a few inches away from people, that's what it would look like. And so there's a sense of when you're in these immersive story pieces that the camera ends up being a bit of a proxy for the body. And so having these kind of shifts and scales in some ways starts to break the presence. Like you're actually transported into these places, but also it just feels like you're too close to people. Like you wouldn't be standing that close to people and you wouldn't see that intimate of a closeup. And so that's, there are these different uses of the close-up through a number of the different pieces and apple immersive videos that to me just feel too close but there's also within the man versus beast after re-watching it one of the things i've noticed is that there's just a lot of experimentation of doing like these super close-ups of these bowls but they're super far away and so it ends up creating this distortion effect where you normally see like a bar that was straight but it's bent out of shape and And then it has this kind of depth of field that's all blurred out. It just doesn't feel natural in the way that you would normally see it. And so there's a lot of these types of creative decisions that are being experimented with that I'm kind of split on what's working and what's not working. At this point, there hasn't really been like a broad critique of a lot of these different pieces. And so I'm just opening the larger question as to, to what degree do these closeups work or don't work? I actually think they work really well within the adventure series, but then in some of these other pieces, like the concert for one or, Even the Metallica close-ups or the Man vs. Beast where they start to do this kind of mirror box from a long distance away, do these close-ups of these bulls, but then it ends up distorting everything and making it feel a little bit more uncanny. And I had difficulty articulating that during this interview, but I think that's sort of what's going on. I did want to mention a little bit more around the credits, because this is something that bothered me as I was watching a lot of these different Apple Immersive videos. In this past week, I did an audit of the 22 videos that have been released, and 14 out of the 22 of the videos that have come out on Apple Immersive Video have no credits at all. And a lot of those have the copyright of Apple Sentity LLC. I believe that may be the copyright holder that Apple is doing within their own internal productions. and there were actually two apple sensitivity llc productions that did actually have credits and they happened to also be pieces that were directed by directors that were a part of the directors guild of america the dga the dga actually has very specific rules for if you're directing and involved in a project you actually have to have like the director give their own credit title card and submerged by ed berger actually has full complete credits And the Man vs. Beast by Ryan Booth has partial credits. And I don't know if those partial credits was inspired for what Atlantic Productions was doing with that partial credits. There are a couple other copyright holders in terms of the Apple Video Programming LLC. And that seems to be the entity that when there's co-productions where it's maybe partly Apple, partly other entities. There's the Prehistoric Planet Immersive that was co-produced by Fairview Portals. And then there's the Adventure Series that was co-produced by Atlantic Productions. The two pieces that were by the prehistoric planning immersive have full and complete credits, and there's only partial credits that are listed on Atlantic Productions. So I reached out to Apple to see if they had any comment. They don't have any comment. I reached out to Atlantic Productions and didn't hear back, so didn't have any official comment for them. And so for me, it's just a little bit concerning just because this is a brand new area of production. these immersive filmmakers. And as an oral historian, I can't get access to who's even produced these different projects. If I don't have the credits, I don't know the creative talent. And it just seems like attribution is a part of the creative industries. And we've had attributions on all the other previous content for the last 11 years that I've been watching. It hasn't been an issue until like Apple comes along and then suddenly we don't have like full credits of the creative talent that's working on these projects. And so to me, that is the most concerning thing It just seems like a dangerous precedent to not credit the artists. That just seems like a fundamental thing. And it's also very curious that the two that are produced by Apple Sensitive LLC actually have DGA directors where they actually are pushing back to have full credits. And so it just seems like a very weird decision and something that I completely and totally disagree with. So I just think that all the artists should be credited. It helps me as an oral historian to start to track the industry. And also, I just think it's a good thing for artists to get credit for the work that they do. And I don't understand why they're not being credited. So that's my kind of rant around that and just feels a little concerning. You can see in my write up a little bit more details to this audit of these different pieces that are out there. And I guess just some other thoughts. I'm actually really happy that Apple is getting into the immersive storytelling angle with Apple TV. And they've got a whole entity that is concerned around good storytelling. And so there's a lot of really strong stories that are out there. And they're in this kind of experimental phase. Some of it's working for me. Some of it's not working. I think it's in the narrative form where it just feels like there's more experimentation. And sometimes it just doesn't gel, especially when you're doing from... medium range shots to close up, you're kind of changing the scale in which you're perceiving the world. And hopefully at some point in the future, I'll be able to speak in more depth to some of these very specific projects to dive into more details to some of my thoughts and reflections on what's working or not working. But just saying that here, just because it's kind of the first opportunity that I've had to cover anything within the Apple immersive video from someone who's on the technical and creative side on the back end. But the Adventure series, I think, holds up in terms of all the other pieces that have come out so far. I just think it's really strong storytelling. It's done very well. Technically, I think they're pushing a lot of boundaries for different types of shots that we haven't seen so far. And yeah, just overall, that's my favorite series they've been doing so far. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
