Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica initially resisted and was eventually compelled enough to consider it, but she wasn’t convinced that film was the right medium.
She realized that the immersion that’s possible with virtual reality would be so much more effective in telling her story, and so she created Giant, which puts you in a basement with a family as there are bombs dropping outside. I had a chance to talk to Milica at Sundance about her personal story of growing up with war, the power of empathy in VR, how Giant went from an idea to having over 40 people collaborate on it, and finally how they blended live action 2D footage within Unreal Engine to immerse you within the scene.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. Today I talk to Milica Zec, who is a Serbian filmmaker who created an experience called Giant. Giant premiered at Sundance, and it was a really powerful piece that actually really did give me this feeling of being in a basement while there are bombs dropping. So, Melissa was really trying to explore empathy in VR and try to create an experience that gives you that feeling of what might it feel like to be with a family as they're going through a situation where they have to try to communicate to their young daughter what's happening when there are bombs dropping. So this is actually my last interview from Sundance. I did 21 interviews there, exploring all sorts of different dimensions of narrative in VR. And I'm about to head out to the Tribeca Film Festival next week to cover some of the experiences that are there. And then the week after that, I'll be going to SVVRCon. So if you would like to support me on these different travels, trying to bring you these different perspectives in VR, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:28.145] Milica Zec: Hi, I'm Milica Zec and I am a director and co-creator of Giant. It's a virtual reality experience that is actually right now being showcased and it just premiered at Sundance Film Festival at New Frontier. Giant was first supposed to be a short film but after like a few days of thinking I realized I actually want to make a virtual reality out of it because the story revolves around a family who is hiding in a basement from the bomb blasts. They're trapped in a war zone and it's two parents and a young daughter and they cannot tell a young six-year-old daughter that it's a war so they invent a story about a giant who is coming and approaching their building and wants to play with her. So everything in that basement becomes kind of like a fairy tale and fun, but at the same time we kept hearing certain rumbling and certain bomb blasts and they also go and experience fear, the whole family. At the same time it's playfulness. Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting how this whole thing began. I met the scriptwriter Lizzie Donahue, and I met her just as a friend, not for any reason of collaboration, and I told her about my life story. I told her that I grew up in a war-torn country, that I was living under the bombs, and during the 90s, my country was deeply affected by the war in Bosnia, then came the NATO bombing in 1999, And after I finished telling her my life story, she told me, Milica, this actually sounds like a movie. And I told her, this is not a movie, this is my life. And she's like, no, no, no, you should make a short film out of this. And I told her, no, no, no, no, no. I actually want to forget about this experience. I never want to talk about this through my artwork. I just want to move on. And then after six months, I guess it stayed at the back of my mind. I picked up the phone, I called Lizzie, and I said, Lizzie, let's try to do this. And I actually didn't know, I never read anything she wrote, and I told her, can you at least write a first draft so I can see maybe if I'm going to like it and if I'll be able to work with you. and I would direct it if I like it. And then we decided to transfer the family from Serbian into American family because we wanted to make it closer to the Western audience who never experienced any kind of conflict or war. So we wanted them to go through that same experience so they can relate more if they see someone looking like them. We want to create something opposite from the experience of reading about the war in newspapers when you see usually people who don't look like us, who don't dress like us, and we can't relate and we always think this is only happening to someone else. I just want to convey a point that this actually can happen anytime and anywhere, just like in a situation that happened to me. I was 17 years old and I was in high school one day, just like a regular kid, like anyone else, and our teacher told us, tomorrow you're not coming to school because the bombing is going to start. And I thought, no way that the bombing is going to start. This is a joke. I went home. Next day, first thing I heard is sirens. And sirens announced that the planes are approaching the city. And that means that we have to go and run into the basement or a shelter. And then I realized, wow, this is actually happening to me. This is real. And as I said, I wanted to forget about this experience. I live now in New York City and kind of moved on with my life. But knowing that this is actually happening right now somewhere else on the planet as we are talking or listening to this podcast, I kind of felt the responsibility to speak about these people, these innocent people who live in these conflict zones, who probably didn't choose to be inside those situations right now and I just felt responsibility to raise awareness about those situations and to alert Western people and to put them in the same shoes so that hopefully this piece can evoke more compassion or understanding about conflicts around the world. And then, Deleuze, when she wrote the first draft, I actually loved it. I mean, it was different than the experience you can watch now. We worked a lot on it, but I immediately saw a potential. And then, as I said, I went home and I started thinking, I don't want to make just a 2D traditional movie. I want to really immerse the audience into this. If I want to convey this message, they should then feel, and everyone is saying virtual reality is a tool for empathy. And I've been already watching a lot of, I mean experiencing a lot of virtual reality works. And I kept thinking that what was missing in virtual reality is a story and a good content. I've been watching a lot of gimmicks or showing off certain effects and I thought this is such a powerful tool. Why don't we say this powerful story? And then we started working, then I called my longtime collaborator, Winslow Turner Porter III, who already produced interactive documentary, virtual reality documentary called Clouds that won Tribeca Transmedia Award. And he immediately, like I just told him about the project and he immediately said, I'm in. Let's do it. and then we applied to New Museums Incubator program in New York City and we got the space. It's like an incubator that is only for artists who work on intersection of art and technology. We applied with this project, we got our space, we got a place to actually create it. We were assigned with mentors like Mike Woods who is a pioneer of virtual reality. He was helping us a lot. Then we found other collaborators in that space. We just expanded our team. We ended up with a team of 40 people. And we kind of merged the filmmaking world with the video game world.
[00:07:27.293] Kent Bye: I've experienced a number of different traumas in my life. My wife actually committed suicide, and so I created a VR experience about it. And so I know that there's this process of getting into really deep, hard stuff that you've been through, and you get into the creative process, so buried in the technology that sometimes it takes a while before you can really just sit down and watch the experience and take it in. And so for you, what was it like for you to create this experience, recreating those sirens and the bombs, and to actually get to the point where you could really just sink in and take it in?
[00:08:08.712] Milica Zec: Well, I feel like once I said, yes, let's do this project, things shifted kind of. Until that moment I just wanted to forget about it and never think about it, never talk about it. But since I've been spending now past nine months of my life working probably 12 hours on this project every day, It just became such a normal part. I just accepted it. Yes, I do come from a war-torn country. Yeah, my growing up was very different than my American friends or Western friends, and that brings good and bad with itself, and I kind of decided to embrace both. So this, in a way, it was helpful for me to speak about it, actually, publicly, as opposed to being... Before, I was, I guess, afraid of speaking about it, even to myself. So it just helped me not suppress something.
[00:09:02.178] Kent Bye: So what does that look like? Is it like an emotional cathartic experience? Or talk a bit about what it was like for you to actually go into the medium of virtual reality and kind of re-experience this bombs dropping.
[00:09:16.784] Milica Zec: Because it took nine months to make, it's every day, I'm listening to this bit of this, bit of this poem, bit of that, so it became just normal. I just embraced the fact I was in that situation and I just was able to speak normally about that from that point. There was no cathartic moment or anything like that, it just became acknowledgement, this is me, this is who I am, and let's go on, let's move on.
[00:09:47.547] Kent Bye: And so, what has been some of the reactions of people seeing it here at Sundance?
[00:09:52.489] Milica Zec: Well, just now, before you approached me about this interview, I was standing with a girl who actually came out of the room crying. And unfortunately, we still are not so prepared. We don't have tissues near our installation. she was crying for 10 minutes. I hugged her and she said that she has an eight-year-old daughter and because we have a six-year-old kid in the experience and many people who have kids they tend to experience this even harder like more it's more emotional for them because they imagine their kids in that situation which brings me to another point that the inspiration for this piece also came from how my parents handled this whole 90s I was actually eight when the war in Bosnia started. My sister was one year old. And our parents had an eight and one year old kid, and there was a war. And I only now, from this perspective, can see what they did for us and how hard it had to have been for them. And that moment when I was a kid, that was my reality, so I couldn't really see how difficult it was for them. So that's why I wanted to devote this piece to actually all the, I would say, good mothers and fathers of this world, because they would also do anything to protect their kids, you know, and put their kids in the first place. Because in the piece, when you're experiencing, you're going to see that they're hiding their reactions, they're hiding their fear from a little kid, so she can be comfortable and happy. and they are just behind her back communicating about how afraid actually they are and that was the situation in my house I was always protected inside my house and outside it was like a different situation but inside topics like this were not brought up anything about war we just lived like a New York family you know like a regular family actually so I'm grateful to my parents that they
[00:11:55.239] Kent Bye: managed to give me this peace of mind during that growing up and Yeah, I'm very grateful for that And what do you think it is about the medium of virtuality that you know you chose to go this path rather than doing it a 2d? What do you think it brings out in the experience that you couldn't have done in any other medium?
[00:12:14.798] Milica Zec: So, when we were writing the script, we had to actually think in a different way than if it would be just a regular short film script. We had to think about the whole environment where we are placing the audience, I mean the viewer. The viewer was placed in a basement of the house where that family lives. So, for example, when there is a bomb blast, we created the window explosion, so you can see it, you have to turn around. Then we created the dust particles falling from the ceiling, so you can turn around and see them all around you at one point. Or we created a certain game that the family is playing. They're looking for certain objects in the basement, so you as an audience are playing with them, you have to find that object. These are these moments when they're trying to distract their young daughter from the sounds outside. Then we also used directional sound, which was so helpful for this project. because we would have like, I don't know, bomb blasts coming from your left and siren coming from your right, so you would be turning around the space as you hear the sound. And yeah, we placed 3D objects around so you can actually be exploring the environment. And it felt, it really felt, I mean people who are now coming out of the experience are telling me that they really felt like they were in that basement with that family and the experience of majority of people as I'm understanding here at Sundance New Frontier is that they did feel something while watching this, which was my biggest wish for this project, to evoke certain emotions in people. and understanding about this situation. And a lot of people came out telling me, yeah, you really made me think that this is actually happening to someone else. I wanted to bridge this. Yes, this is a narrative, it's a fiction, but I wanted to bridge it into our reality right now and to speak about that, to open that conversation.
[00:14:10.885] Kent Bye: And so what do you think VR can do in terms of empathy?
[00:14:15.310] Milica Zec: Wow, it's a big question. I mean, because our piece, we just premiered yesterday, so I can't really say what is going to be the impact of this piece. But I can say about certain VR pieces that I watched, which are Clouds over Sidra and Waves of Grace that were done for United Nations. I'm mentioning them because They are also kind of like talking about certain disasters in this world, either Syria or Ebola. And I experienced them both and they did evoke in me certain compassion and understanding and emotions at the same time. I was placed in the shoes of these people. I was right next to them, watching them around me. I was in a Syrian refugee camp. I was on a graveyard where people who died from Ebola are buried. So that moved me. It was powerful. So So now it's not as I said, it's not anymore a headline in the newspaper. I'm reading It's actually I saw it with my own eyes and I experienced it. So That's why I think people call virtual reality empathy machine because it does have that power to evoke empathy because you take the user out of their own reality out of their own room and you place them wherever you want to place them and So you have a lot of responsibility as a virtual reality maker or content creator. You have a lot of responsibility in your hands. What are you gonna do with the viewer? And I hope people use it for good reasons.
[00:15:52.083] Kent Bye: So maybe you could talk a bit about, you know, how did you actually mix this live action with a game engine then?
[00:15:58.791] Milica Zec: Yeah, we decided to go a little bit non-traditional VR route. Usually a majority of people I think would be using for this kind of piece with actors 360 degree rig, camera rig. But we decided to use one camera. So we used Epic Red Dragon that was shooting 5K. We placed actors in front of the green screen and then we positioned Microsoft Kinect version 2 next to the red camera. So Kinect was recording the depth and camera was recording the video and then we merged the depth video and alpha channel together. We keyed the actors out of the green screen. We placed them in Unreal video game engine. We worked with the wonderful developers, Jack Caron, Todd Bryant, Omar Shapira, Uros Otasovic. And they created this basement and placed 3D objects. We had to go, you know, to shop all the objects that we, you know, like, because it's a basement, so we had to think like what people don't need anymore in their apartments, like boxes and stuff like that. So we recreated like American basement and yeah, that's how it was done. We mixed live action with video game environment and we really, until the end, we didn't know how it's gonna turn out and if the actors are gonna pop up because they're not full 3D obviously, but they do have certain depth because of the Kinect. We didn't know how they're gonna blend But at the end, I think, I mean, you can still notice that they are not really 3D, but it's not such a huge difference. They kind of blended with the whole environment, which we were relieved. We were very relieved to see that this method worked out for us. Yeah.
[00:17:53.047] Kent Bye: So how did you fund a project like this then?
[00:17:55.913] Milica Zec: We got support from Comcast Ventures, NVIDIA, HP, Microsoft, and Framestore, and Hello World Communications, and New Ink, that is the new museum's incubator where we created the project.
[00:18:12.768] Kent Bye: So you've kind of created a system to take live action, take it in, you know, 3D actors and put them into a virtual space. And so where do you plan on taking this in the future? What are some of the next projects that you have in mind?
[00:18:26.869] Milica Zec: We have in mind to make a trilogy, so Giant, that is now at Sundance, would be part one. Giant speaks about atrocities humans do to each other. Part two would be speaking about atrocities we do to Mother Nature. And part three would be showing that there is still hope, that there is still something bigger than us and we can still do something about it. It's not all dark and grim as in Giant and the next one. And we are hoping to really make happen these other two VR projects, and we would be using totally different VR techniques in them. We are still debating what exactly, so yeah, that is hopefully our next project.
[00:19:07.672] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:19:15.570] Milica Zec: Well, VR is still in pioneering stages, and it's a lot about trial and error right now. And I think it's very important for all of the VR experienced creators to connect to each other, share what they learned, and teach and educate each other. That's what we want to do. We are very open to share with anyone how we managed to combine live action inside a video game engine, Unreal. Yes, one application of VR is in entertainment, but I'm fascinated with applications of VR in medicine actually. That's what's very intriguing and interesting to me in psychology and psychiatry. I can't speak much about it, I don't know a lot, but I feel like there is a lot of potential in other fields than entertainment.
[00:20:04.906] Kent Bye: Awesome, well thank you so much.
[00:20:07.627] Milica Zec: Thank you so much.
[00:20:09.715] Kent Bye: So that was Melissa Zetz, who directed the experience called Giant, which premiered at Sundance. So some of the things that were striking to me about this interview and this experience was that using VR to deal with trauma, and in this case for Melissa, it seemed to be a trauma that was pretty well dissociated, and she didn't really want to even think about it or deal with it. And just by creating this experience allowed her to start to even bring it into her awareness that yes, in fact, this is something that she went through. And it was also really interesting to hear that parents were the ones who were really emotionally moved by this experience. It features heavily the relationship between how would a parent tell their child what was happening during a war and a lot of parents in the United States never really had had to think about that because we don't have bombs that are dropped here in the United States and so it allowed people to really step into the shoes of what it might be like to be a parent in a war-torn country. they also had a really great use of sound in this experience where you're sitting in an installation and you're kind of sitting on these subwoofers that as the bombs are dropping you really start to feel it in your entire body viscerally because the interesting thing about sound is that the low frequencies are non-directional so you can basically just Put the low frequency subwoofer anywhere in the room and it's still gonna have kind of this visceral tactile experience and so seeing giant installation like this with really good sound makes a huge difference and Made it so much more immersive And the other last point that I'll point out is that the distance of the characters in this experience were pretty far away. You could just imagine being in a room with someone standing probably about 15 feet away or so. And I'm not sure if that was part of the technical limitations because they are shooting this on a 2D camera and they're using the Kinect depth sensor camera. it's so far away that that's kind of at the range where you stop seeing really any stereoscopic effects and so because of that the distance of where the action is happening in this experience is so far away that it kind of creates this detachment from what's happening but yet at the same time you're really immersed in the center of this basement and because it was put together in Unreal Engine, you're kind of sitting in this environment that feels like it's CG. I mean, it doesn't feel like it's photorealistic. You kind of know that these are objects that are moving around as the bombs are dropping. But it's sort of mixed with this live-action, high-fidelity characters. And so to me, it had a little bit of a, my brain was not completely fooled or tricked. But I will say that overall, it was a very emotionally touching story that I hope to see a lot more of. So yeah, if you do enjoy these podcasts, then please consider becoming a contributor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR.
