#742: “Traveling While Black” is a Healing Ritual of Restorative Practices through Immersive Documentary

roger_ross_williams_by_marc_yankus_copy_400x400Traveling While Black is the most powerful piece of virtual reality that I’ve ever seen. Director Roger Ross Williams in collaboration with Felix & Paul Studios and co-director Ayesha Nadarajah were able to capture a powerful story of the Green Book through the lens of Ben’s Chilli Bowl restaurant in Washington D.C., which has served as a refuge for the African American community for over 60 years.

They were able to tell the story of this place, but also create a very specific context of conversations that allows you to listen into the sharing of deep truths and direct experiences of what it means to be black in America. Some of these conversations only happen within the context of a safe container and having enough people with a shared experience together. VR is able to give you an inside seat for some of these conversations that would otherwise be inaccessible for most people. So this experience has facilitated the sharing grief and trauma that’s allowed for a level of emotional catharsis throughout screenings at Sundance New Frontier. As such, it’s served as a sort of healing ritual by providing access to these types of restorative practices of gathering people to be in conversation about their shared experiences, and it’s starting to reveal some of the deeper potentials of immersive documentary as a transformative artistic medium.

I had a chance to talk with Academy-award winning director Roger Ross Williams at Sundance where he shared his journey of creating Traveling While Black, how it received support from Tribeca, Sundance, Oculus the New York Times, and the MacArthur Foundation, the overwhelming emotional reactions that this piece was receiving at Sundance, and his own peak emotional experiences of discovering the power of the virtual reality medium throughout the production of this story. Williams is an elected member of the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for documentary, and so he’s a leader in the larger field of documentary and it’s likely that Traveling While Black will serve as a turning point to get more documentary filmmakers interested in exploring the new immersive storytelling potentials of virtual reality.

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Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So certainly the most powerful experience that I had at Sundance this year was called Traveling While Black. And it actually may be the most powerful VR experience that I've ever had. And the reason why I say that is because Roger Ross Williams, in collaboration with Felix and Paul Studios, as well as with Ayesha Natarajah, created this experience that was exploring different dimensions of race in America, racism, in the shared experiences that black people in america have within the united states and they go into these different shared experiences but they've created this context and it's really centered around ben's chili bowl and so he's going into the history of this place that is a bit of a refuge for the african-american community for over 60 years and has gone through many different iterations. And so he was able to tell the story of that place, but also bring people from that community into Ben Shirley Bowl to have these different intimate one-on-one conversations, as well as these larger conversations of people sharing their direct experiences in a way that is simply one of the most powerful things I've ever experienced within VR. And I highly recommend people to try to watch this experience before listening to all of the rest of this interview. I think it's a super powerful experience. It's available through Oculus and is produced in collaboration with the New York Times. So definitely go check it out and then listen to this interview with Roger Ross Williams. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Roger happened on Monday, January 28, 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:51.376] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah. Hi, my name is Roger Ross Williams, and I am the director of Traveling While Black, which is a piece based on the Green Book, which was the guidebook that African-Americans used in the 40s and 50s and 60s up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act to travel in America. And we explore the Green Book through a safe space called Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., an iconic location on U Street, which was the Black Broadway. And we explore it through stories and we connect it to the present because while, you know, times have changed, a lot hasn't changed for the restriction of movement for African Americans.

[00:02:33.209] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could tell me a bit about your journey into virtual reality, because you're coming from a film background, but using the affordances of VR and, like, the different steps as to why you decided to use virtual reality to be able to tell this story.

[00:02:47.283] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah. Wow. Well, it was a long journey. I'm a traditional documentary filmmaker, and about eight years ago, Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, who produced a play about the Green Book at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C., starring the late Julian Bond, approached me and said, you know, that she wanted to do a documentary, a traditional documentary feature about it. At that point, I was just tired of documentary, really. And I heard about this new thing called Transmedia at the time, is what it was called. Unfortunate name. And so I thought, let's do a Transmedia project. I had no idea what that was. I had no idea what I was talking about. And I started to explore it through, I think we got a grant from the NEH. And then Tribeca gave us a grant. We played with the idea of doing a game, we toyed with a number of things, and then it sort of became a multimedia project. I couldn't quite figure out exactly how to tell this story in a way that was exciting to me and that could immerse someone in an experience because the multimedia stuff we were doing was still sort of web-based and like it felt like people would be detached from the material and I wanted people to be sort of immersed in it. And then about two or three years ago, Shari Freelo from Sundance said, you should think about VR for this. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. And it was, you know, things were new. I didn't know anything about VR. I don't even know if I had seen VR, but I had read about it. And she gave me a grant just to explore. It was a New York Times MacArthur Immersive Storytelling Grant to experiment with sort of documentary storytelling and VR. And that set me off on this sort of crazy long journey that lasted maybe a year, year and a half, where I sort of started watching a lot of VR and talking to a lot of different creators. I mean, I talked to everyone. I met with everyone. I even went down the path with some creators of partnering. One partnership took me down the path of animation and I even did a presentation at the New York Film Festival with this sort of animated experience. And it didn't feel right to me because I felt like animation, I just didn't feel connected enough to the material. I felt like Animation, while I love animation, I made a film called Life Animated that was nominated for an Oscar. Animation, I'm passionate about animation. But in this case, I thought using animation sort of, in a way, let you off the hook. You didn't get to really experience what I wanted people to experience. So, after that, I had gone to, I think it was at Tribeca, Storyscapes, I saw The People's House, Felix and Paul's piece with Barack and Michelle Obama, and I thought, wow, this is really brilliant, and these guys obviously are really talented and know what they're doing. and the rendering, I thought, you know, I'm a documentarian and using real people to tell this story, I thought, that's the way to go. So when I connected with Fields and Paul and we started working together, I went off on another tangent because everyone kept saying to me, VR is theater. VR is like theater. Someone said to me, you have to throw out everything you know about documentary and really think about it as theater. So I was like, oh, OK. So I hired a theater writer to write a script with actors. The theater writer wrote this entire script with actors and I was like, this is totally not working and feels totally like fake. And I would have these calls with Felix and Paul and they were sort of going along with it and then they said, you know, this isn't really working for us. And I thought, oh, thank God, this isn't working for me either. But I didn't want to say anything because I thought, everyone keeps saying it's theater, so I thought this is what you do. But I knew it didn't feel right. And they said, what about sort of going back to who you are as a documentarian and using real people and actually basing this in real story? Just think about it like a documentary, but it's happening all around you. You're sort of immersed in it. So I came 360 back to my roots, and then I had this whole idea of this journey across America, which was sort of impractical and would have been really expensive, and visiting all these places in the Green Book, and I would journey from upstate New York to Charleston, South Carolina, and they were like, well, that's crazy expensive. And Oculus, who I ended up partnering with Oculus, you know, they weren't going to pay that kind of money. And so they said, but you know, we feel that if experiences are based in a space, in a place, that it could be really powerful. And I thought, when I was sort of researching and doing the multimedia thing, I had visited Ben's Chili Bowl in DC. And Ben's Chili Bowl was iconic because it had been two different locations in the Green Book. It had been the first black silent movie theater, the Minnehaha, in the 30s, which is like extraordinary. It had been a pool hall. And for the last 66 years, it was this iconic location where African-Americans gathered and hung out and had conversations. They even had their own in-house historian who once a week gathers people from the community and has oral history conversations. So I thought, oh my god, this is the perfect place to anchor this piece. And we can sort of go through time and the different iterations of Ben's And I thought, this is an opportunity for the viewer to be immersed in a space, in a community, if you're white, that you normally wouldn't get to be in. Because if a white person walks in the room, it's a different conversation. and they can sort of shed their skin. Someone said that who had done the experience. They said, I felt like I got to shed my skin and I got to experience something that I normally wouldn't be privy to. And for black people, it's a guttural, emotional response of All the trauma that we carry around with us every day, every moment that we move about in America, we are always on edge because we never know if we could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We get pulled over by the cop. We've seen now because of social media, we've seen so many videos. viral videos of black people being shot and killed and that's become almost like we've accepted that now. So for me, I've seen two extreme different reactions, not extremely different, both emotional reactions, but different reactions if you watch the piece as an African-American or as a white person.

[00:10:14.490] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that was really striking for me was that you were able to really focus it on that one location and set the context of all the history that happened there and even do some dressing of that set to be able to mimic what it might have looked like many years ago and jump back between those two. But you're able to have this context that you're sharing food with each other and in conversation and that it feels like you're almost eavesdropping or you're a ghost and you're able to just witness these contexts that you may not have access to and that you're able to form that context for people to slip into. So I think the fact that it was in that location, but it was like people having dinner conversations, that is a very specific context that you share with your friends and that this may be like the first time that I've seen a real deep dive into exploring those types of conversations that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

[00:11:07.788] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah, yeah. You know, that was important. And it was also Felix and Paul, because I didn't quite understand, even though I had seen a lot of VR, I didn't know what a VR camera looked like. And when they explained to me that the camera, which is quite large, could actually be a person, So you are the camera. And so a lot of times, a lot of VR that I had seen, it was sort of, especially documentary stuff, working with documentary materials, they're sort of talking to you, like your traditional documentary where it's like an interview. And I was like, well, this isn't exciting. It's just someone just looking at you and talking to you. And how is that immersive? So we came up with the idea that you are just in a conversation, and you're just at the table. whether you feel like you're part of it or whether you feel like you're eavesdropping on the conversation, it's happening and you're in the booth. And all this kind of evolved because when we visited Ben's, originally there's a counter and there's stools at the counter and the stools obviously, stools swivel. So I thought, Oh, we can just put people at the counter and swivel and they can see everything that's going on around them. But then you weren't close enough. You know, you weren't having a conversation. And then Felix and Paul said, what about these booths? These booths here are a perfect way to like almost you're like surrounded and you're close up to the people in the piece. So that was from that happened when we scouted and saw the space and then you know you scout and you see the space and we just started brainstorming and there's a number of things that came out of that. The other thing that came out of that was there was a mirror along the wall of the booths and I don't know who it was. I think Felix was like, we can use this mirror as an interactive element instead. We were like, how are we going to shoot? Mirrors are like a nightmare in any show, especially I can imagine in VR. You don't want any mirrors. And we're like, no, we're going to use this to our advantage. This mirror is going to become part of the experience and reflect what Ben's looked like in the 60s and take you into some of the stories we're watching. So that was a... a massive endeavor, and it was a huge, grueling shoot. And I think I'd come off another shoot, I don't know where I was, in L.A. or somewhere, and I flew into D.C. and, I mean, it was really like a crew of like 80 people, you know, they're dressed in period. The art direction was really intense because we had to completely redress all of Ben's and take away all the modern things, like the modern, I mean, everything from cast registers. We had researched the old signage and what it looked like. And that took days to just bring it back to like 1958. So dressing that, and then we had real Ben's clientele, people who go to Ben's, but we had to have stylists and wardrobe people. They had to dress in the sixties. And then, you know, it was really like directing of a narrative feature film. And then we, you know, they had to be directed, you know, you're going to be doing this and we're going to have people moving about. So that was really fun and so we had long shoots till four in the morning, one all-night shoot and it was totally fun to create that. So that was interesting and eye-opening and challenging. Challenging for me too as a documentarian because I could manipulate the situation a little more in documentary. I'm interviewing someone so I can like lead them more. I can sort of take the conversation in a certain direction. And they're having a conversation amongst themselves. I'm not having a conversation with them. So I'm not there to sort of lead them. So I can just set the sort of parameters around it and they go. But people tend to go off on tangents. So people would go off on tangents and be like, talk about this or talk about that.

[00:15:06.741] Kent Bye: It was a long shoot. Well, there's one specific moment that I think was just really powerful for me to watch. And it really reminded me of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where you had people who suffered under apartheid were able to either speak their truths and be heard within the community. And then sometimes in that context, there would be the perpetrators that would be also there, perhaps asking for forgiveness or redemption. This wasn't necessarily about that forgiveness aspect, but more of just speaking the truth of direct experiences that people have had and to really bear witness to those experiences and to have them really be received by the community. And I felt that you were able to really create a context and a circle that really was starting to use the power of virtual reality to start to facilitate these types of truth and reconciliation rituals. I'm just curious to hear more about that.

[00:16:01.582] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah, I think that there's a lot of internal pain in the black community with what, you know, we've gone through in this country and continue to go through. And I think that there's not enough opportunities for us to really talk about that, especially intergenerational, which was really important when Cortland Cox is at the table to have a 10-year-old and he had, in that conversation when we had started it, the kid talked about Trayvon Martin and what that meant to him and how he was scared and Cortland, his experiences in the Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And as people began to sort of talk about it, I think That, in a way, facilitates healing because you get to sort of process it, you sort of bring it to the surface instead of keeping it tamped down and inside. A lot of times, I feel like, for myself, I can speak about myself, there's so much internal tension and anger. Because all day there are little microaggressions, whether it's someone following me around a store that I go into, or the many, many, many times I get pulled over. You know, I once was surrounded by six cops with their guns pointed at me in a hotel because I was helping a drunk friend. back to their hotel room a drunk German blonde friend to the hotel room and they thought I was like robbing him or something and the hotel called the cops and before you know it they're surrounding me they're pointing their guns at me and luckily at that time I was a journalist and I had a press pass and I reaching in my pocket to pull out my press pass was even risky because they could have shot me but I held up my press pass and I said I'm press ABC News and they put down their guns but those are moments that like leave a huge painful scar on you. And so to be able to talk about that, and there's an understanding when you talk about that with people with a shared experience. There's a powerful, powerful letting it out, others who kind of understand it, because we've all sort of been through it. I don't think there's a black person in America who hasn't been through or felt that sort of pain. And that was what the beauty of sort of being able to do that And I think what's been happening with the piece for people who've been experiencing it here at Sundance, it's been emotional. When black people watch it, they cry sometimes for, I mean, we had people would just sit there for half an hour and weep. And I was like, I didn't realize how much how much, how much people needed to do that. I didn't, I didn't, I guess, you know, you're making something and you're inside it and then when it's out in the world and someone experiences it, I couldn't even imagine how painful it was and how important it was for people to express and think about all that trauma.

[00:19:21.253] Kent Bye: Yeah, no, I really felt it as well as I experienced it and it feels like it's a piece that you can watch it and it almost feels like you're going through a ritual, a healing ritual as you're watching it and then as you come out of it, then I've imagined that this could be a piece where people either watch it together and then have their own ritual and sharing. It's a bit of an opportunity for people to share their own direct experiences and to create their own containers to be able to share their experience. And so you're creating a context under which it's allowing people to get attuned into a lived experience that so many people have that then when they come out of it, they're able to then take it to the next level with their own small communities.

[00:20:02.922] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah, and that's what's really important about what we're going to do with the piece is we're partnering with the Smithsonian and civil rights museums across the country and also with community centers and organizations and take it to communities so communities can come watch it together and then have a conversation and also deposit their stories. We're developing a way for people to actually tell their stories because every Black person who watches it, they all have a story, and they want to tell their story. They want to deposit their stories into the collective, and the collection of all those stories has immense, immense power. So we have been talking to the Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., the new museum, about setting up a way so that all those stories that are deposited, you can sort of, after you leave there, you can scroll through and read people's stories. And what I want to do with it is have different ways you can either videotape your story, you can write your story, you can speak your story, and it becomes a database, basically. It becomes a database, but I think that it's important that people have an outlet. after they see the piece which is why we built Ben's as an installation piece and that you can go to the counter afterwards and you can talk to other people who have just experienced it and you can write down your thoughts and your feelings and put them in the mailbox and so that you leave there feeling that you've sort of contributed in some way whether it's just solidarity or whether it's your own sort of story but I think you have to Interact and that was when I saw in a reaches piece What was powerful to me was after? Which is the piece about the crossing the border which is a carne a arena on a arena Then you walk down that hall and there's all the videos of the people who've crossed the border and their stories and that the entrance in and the exit out were like to me key to a piece like that that is so powerful and painful that you don't just throw someone out into the world and I think I mean I hope that we can, with this, also for people who are just, you know, at home watching it on the Oculus Rift, or even people who are watching it in 360 on the New York Times, that they can also have, we have a way that they can also connect to the audience. Like with the New York Times, it was released on the New York Times, it already trended up to the top 10 most watched things in the New York Times, And I started this morning, I was reading through the endless stories. Every single one of those was a story of someone who had gone through an experience, who had suffered, who had been thrown out of store, pulled over, held at gunpoint. And it was like, Endless and I was like, wow, this is so powerful all these people they have like an outlet to tell their story It was you could I mean you could read those stories and every single one of those stories was heartbreaking and they were like Finally I get to you could just feel it that they were like just so grateful that they could actually post their story on the New York Times and that people were gonna read it and

[00:23:29.700] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that is made really clear after watching Traveling While Black is that there's some topics and aspects of stories that we have that maybe not make great 2D film hero's journey type of stories or experiences. I think documentary tends to have a little bit easier access of breaking out of that typical hero's journey, but there's something about the lived experiences of trauma, of suffering, of pain that Within virtual reality you're able to create a context that you can actually explore those aspects of the human experience whereas I think it's just either harder or more dissociated if you're looking at it in the 2D screen that there's something that's different and I don't know exactly what but it's something about stepping into a full context and be immersed within a whole space that allows some of these emotions and experiences that we all have, but some people are these shared experiences. And so there's something about the medium of VR that's able to get at it in a way that's different. So I'm just curious to hear, because you've worked in both mediums, what you think that difference might be.

[00:24:29.689] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah. Well, I wasn't even myself prepared for the power of VR with this. I think when you're watching a film, a 2D film, even if you're watching it in a theater, which is a shared experience, You're surrounded by the people who are watching it next to you and you're affected by that, whether someone's opening a wrapper or eating popcorn or has to go to the bathroom and you have to let them by. And there's always a certain amount of detachment. And a lot of documentaries, I think most, are not watched that way. They're watched on a computer screen or on your television screen at home where there's 10 million distractions. And I think the power of VR is that you can't escape. There's no escape. You can't, you know, you're not gonna, in this piece, I mean, you're not even gonna take it off, you're not gonna take it off halfway and go to the bathroom. You're immersed and you're taking deeper and deeper into it and you are confronted with the story in a way that is not possible yet in any other medium. You're confronted by it. And being confronted by it, you're confronted by the pain as well and you can't turn away from it. And I think that's why people are just, sort of floored after because they can't escape it. And that was important for an application like this because we can't escape it in our lives. We can't escape being black, the color of our skin and the way we are treated and the history of being black and slavery. And we can't escape that pain. We try, you know, in many different ways. There's a lot of trauma and many different ways in the black community that we try to escape it, sometimes with anger. So it was important to me that the viewer can't escape it in the same way that we can't escape it. Even for just for 20 minutes, they can't escape it. And that's, there's no other way you can do that except for VR. That's just not possible.

[00:26:36.927] Kent Bye: Well, I know that in the process of creating some of my own VR experiences that explore grief and the aftermath of suicide, that there's a process by which you have your own experience of that trauma. But then as you're creating a VR piece, you go through these different phases of having to do all the technical bits of having to actually create the piece of media. But then I found that there's these moments where I just drop in and really tune in to the full emotion of the experience. I'm wondering if you had that, either in the process of producing and shooting it or editing it, if you were able to drop into the full emotional weight of the content?

[00:27:16.456] Roger Ross Williams: Oh God, yeah. You know, as you're sort of prepping and casting and figuring out, like, you know, who's going to be part of this and how we're going to pull this off, you get sort of, you know, in that head. But there was a couple moments on set. There's one moment particularly on set where we were all devastated. We weren't prepared. I don't think we were prepared for Miss Rice. And she had never spoken before, and she had never talked about Tamir's death. And when Ayesha Nadarajah is the co-director and has worked with me for a while, she's like, I think everyone should stop and just listen to her. It's like the community almost like, and you're going to get me, make me cry. The community needs to embrace her, almost hold her and protect her. and give her a safe space to like talk about I can't imagine anything more traumatic than losing your child in such a cruel and painful way where you can't even touch your child or your child is evidence and I mean the way she was treated. So when she was telling that story and was crying we were all in tears. I mean, we couldn't even do the technical, we couldn't even focus on technically, like, capturing it because we were, like, all weeping, like, and I think it was because of all the work and it was late. I mean, everything just, we were just, like, heaving, crying. And then afterwards, we were, the crew, we were just, like, holding each other and, you know, it was an intense, emotional moment. that I don't know if I've ever experienced on a set before. And I've, you know, done a lot of varied things with people who have gone through a lot of trauma and I've certainly filmed with people who are crying. But there was something about Because it was VR and because of the nature of that room, you know, I'm not in the room. I'm in another room and I'm watching it on all the monitors. And they are in the room having this shared experience. I mean, they were all in, all the people around her were all in tears. And there was an energy in that room, a power in that room that was undeniable. It was crazy. And then, you know, Felix and Paul sort of take all the material away. And I don't really, and you know, like, I'm not, I don't even understand all the endless technical stuff, you know, how they're rendering it and all that. It just takes forever and ever and ever. But at various stages, you know, as we're working through the script and stuff and figuring out what we're going to use, that's like all sort of like, you know, you're like detached. And then I, there was like, for me, the most sort of, the other most profound moment was when I, saw the full rendering for the first time, and that wasn't even in VR, it was on my computer, because I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, part of the time, and I was in Amsterdam, and I remember I called up Aisha, and I was hysterically crying, like she thought someone died. So I was like, Aisha! And I was like, I was like, and I couldn't speak and I was like, I just watched it and she's like, what's wrong? Someone died? Someone died? And I couldn't get the words out. I couldn't get any words out. And I was like, I was, and I, and I was, and that's when I realized, that's when it all hit me, the power of it. And I, because The rendering was so beautiful, you know, and so powerful that that moment was like, that moment was intense, you know. And I hadn't even seen it in the headset. That was just on a, you know, on the screen. So that was, those two moments were really, really, really, really powerful, powerful moments. And now watching people react is another thing that is so just amazing because Yesterday, Norman Lear, who I admire greatly, went to see it. And today, his producer, a person who works with him and brought him to see the piece, said, Norman sat there, cried, and said it was the most powerful VR he has ever seen in his life and wants to have dinner with me. So I get to have dinner with Norman Lear. I was like, he's like a hero of mine. I was like, no way. And, you know, and yesterday Tessa Thompson saw it and cried for 40 minutes. And she's like, Ryan Coogler's here and Jada Pinkett and I'm bringing them tomorrow to see the piece. Everyone has to see this piece. I am going to help get this out into the world in such a big way. This is the most important thing. It was just amazing. And those reactions and that sort of support is going to really, I think, help people to be aware and see the piece and get it out there in a way that I couldn't do, you know, it's the power of celebrities, but the power of someone I admire, like Tessa Thompson or Norman Lear, who are just powerful voices in the culture, is just, my mind is blown.

[00:33:04.402] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's what I mean, that this experience feels like a real healing ritual that you've created and that both in the process of the authentic expression of grief and emotion and the community attention that was there, just the quality of listening that you were able to create in the experience is modeling the quality of listening that you go through as a listener. And I think that, yeah, there's just something about as an experience how you're able to, even if you haven't had those direct experiences, you're able to witness them and see them. Or if you have had them, then it sort of takes it to the next level that then you are able to then share it with other people. Because it's a shared experience now that people have that is now a point of conversation now that they've had a shared experience, even if they haven't had the direct experience. Now they have a shared experience that they can start to have these conversations.

[00:33:53.745] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah, and you know, I can't walk anywhere around Sundance without people stopping me on the street, people coming up to me saying everyone... I mean, when Jahan Robinson, who's the producer, was checking in, getting her badges, they were talking about it at the headquarters. The volunteers were like, oh my god, Traveling While Black is the most incredible, like it was just, and I mean, Cooper pulled me aside the other day, John Cooper, and said, this is the most powerful experience, he just, he had such beautiful things to say about it, and some of the board members of Sundance, the trustees, were like, coming up to me and they said, we had our board meeting the first day of Sundance, and they said, if you see anything at Sundance, see Traveling While Black. which is amazing. And so the reaction has been humbling. And I'm just so happy and grateful and thrilled. And I hope it's just the beginning. I want to take this far and wide all around the country.

[00:34:59.279] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality is? And what am I people to enable?

[00:35:08.127] Roger Ross Williams: Well, I think that documentary is just beginning to explore virtual reality. I think that when Shari and Hussein approached me and said, we'd like to give you this grant to study and experiment, I took on the challenge because I always want to be challenged myself as a filmmaker, as an artist, but I wasn't prepared for the power that virtual reality has. two documentary filmmakers, and I'm the governor of the Dock branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which makes me sort of a leader in the Dock community, and well-known in the Dock community, and I've been talking to a lot of documentary filmmakers, and they don't really understand virtual reality, and they don't even go to New Frontier, and they're like, well, where is that? Like, how do you do that? How does that work? Do you need a ticket? How does it work? And I'm like, you should go and experience New Frontier. And I think as documentarians start to explore the possibilities of using this medium, it's going to be a whole new explosion for VR that no one is prepared for it, because I think, for me, the best use of VR is in the documentary format. You know, the experiences that I've done that are sort of game-based or that are based in, like, CGI or animation, I always feel slightly disconnected from it. I just, I don't know. But working with real people in real situations and powerful stories is, to me, that's the future of VR and I think that it's just beginning and I think that this is a beginning here at Sundance with this piece I hope and I hope to like encourage and inspire other documentarians to begin to really use their powers of storytelling and translate it into this medium in a way that is true to who they are as filmmakers. Because for me, it was a 360. I thought, oh, it has to, I have to learn about technology and it has to be like animated or do have all these tricks. But no, it's a simple, basic storytelling that is tested for thousands of years. And that's the power that you can harness with VR. You can bring someone into a simply beautifully told story in a way that you can't in any other format.

[00:37:39.621] Kent Bye: OK. Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much.

[00:37:41.382] Roger Ross Williams: Thank you. Thank you so much. This is so great. And thank you for supporting the piece. And it's great to be on your podcast. So thanks.

[00:37:50.710] Kent Bye: So that was Roger Ross Williams. He's an Academy award-winning documentary filmmaker, as well as the director of Traveling While Black. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, the moment that really sticks with me was the moment when the mother of Tamir Rice was sharing for the first time on camera. her experiences of learning about the shooting of her son, a 12-year-old Tamir Rice. And it shows footage of a police car driving up super fast, the cops basically jumping out and almost instantaneously shooting this boy who they had heard that he was carrying around a gun, he had a toy gun, and they basically just immediately just like shot and killed him. And just to hear Ms. Rice talk about her experiences of learning about this, and then she wasn't able to actually interface with her son because they said, oh, he's evidence. And so they didn't even allow her to sit with him in the ambulance. And it was just like this heart-wrenching story. And the quality of listening that they had been able to generate with this context were First of all, they're in Ben's Chili Bowl. So this is a very historic place And so the place itself has this context that allows people to openly share these different experiences that they've had and on top of that it's got this community of people from that area listening to this one talk about her experiences for the first time in public about the police that had killed her son and And it was this container, this circle, that people were just listening, being absolutely devastated. And to hear more of the backstory from Raja Ross Williams in terms of, you know, Ayesha Nataraja had suggested that people turn around and form this semicircle around In some ways, it feels like they've created this real restorative practice of the speaking of the truth of these direct experiences and getting a critical mass of people that have had a shared experience in a safe container allows you to go to places in a conversation that they wouldn't normally be able to go. And so you're able to really use the affordances of virtual reality to allow yourself to kind of slip in there as a ghost and bear witness to these conversations that the context just changes if it's not the right sort of dynamic of people that are there. And it allows you this distance to really just be present and to bear witness to these conversations that would be just a different context if you were there physically. So, to me, I could see why Roger Wallace-Williams is saying that he really sees that documentary has this huge potential to explore what the potentials of storytelling are within virtual reality by using real people, real situations, and real stories that are using these ancient storytelling practices just telling these stories within these new mediums and there's something about the abstractions of technology and CGI where yes, you can get more agency and making choices and taking action and be able to locomote around in a space but that's great for video games, but for storytelling I think there's a certain element of just crafting a context in an environment where you don't actually need to locomote or move around but if you're not moving it allows you to sit within your own sense of your embodied presence and listen to the emotional stories that are unfolding in front of you. And I think he's right that both the 360 video and 180 video and documentary filmmaking is like the affordances of VR are more well suited, I think, for documentary filmmaking than it is for the narrative fiction actors. And he tried to do like these theater actors and people told him it was like theater. And yes, there are certainly theatrical elements to VR, but in terms of actually capturing these types of stories and creating these types of contexts and to allow you to kind of slip into these aspects of what's happening in life, I do think that both the 360 video and 180 video is going to be this huge potential And I think Felix and Paul, because they've had so many experiences of exploring all the different theatrical elements of what it means to create a sense of embodied presence and to treat that camera as a body within these experiences, that they're subtly exploring and collaborating with these other creators that are bringing these other aspects and having access to these types of stories, which I think is really hitting into some of the sweet spots of what the affordances of this spatial storytelling medium are. And part of it is that you are there and you're bearing witness and you can't escape. The project that I keep coming back to and referring to is Zohar Kafir's Testimony VR because what she was able to do is take these videotaped recordings of women sharing their experiences of sexual assault and to create a virtual reality container that allows you to get into this context and this environment to be actually be able to bear witness to those experiences. And I think what I learned from that is that you're able to create this very intimate context to be able to cover content that may otherwise be a little bit too intense to be able to really talk about. And I think in this specific VR experience, you're immersed within this 360 virtual reality video where you're in the context of Ben's Cheerly Bowl and in this community of people that are sharing these stories that you ordinarily wouldn't have access to. And Roger Ross Williams is like, you can't escape. You can't escape the reality and the intensity of some of these stories that are being shared. So for me, I think that they're tapping into some really deep, powerful aspects. And I think some of the key aspects are the place and the history and creating that context and having these groups of people that are coming together with these shared experiences to be able to tell these stories to each other in this more conversational way. And it sounded like that if you get enough people just kind of talking to each other and you're in the back, then they may go on these very different tangents and you have to interject and guide and direct either through topics or questions. And there's one experience that I saw at the doc lab in Amsterdam called Frankenstein AI, where we had these group conversations around a table and then we were all wearing these headphones. And then this AI would be listening to our conversations and then be suggesting different questions. that the AI is wanting to know about what it means to be human. And so then this AI would ask us a question, then it would guide us into this whole conversation. And so there's a little bit of that, I think, in the production of 360 video, where you kind of have to let the people have these different conversations, unless you're deciding that you're going to be the moderator in the context of you being actually in the scene and really being a group facilitator. Otherwise, you're going to have to have these different mechanisms to either pose questions or have suggested topics to help guide and direct the process of these different types of conversations that they were starting to capture within Traveling All Black. And the other thing that was really fascinating to hear from Roger was just the amount of buzz that had been generated within this project, especially in different communities of documentary and also the African American filmmakers and, you know, other or television producers like Norman Lear or volunteers. There's this thing that happens at Sundance where you're just taking random samples of people to cure what experiences and movies that they're seeing and what's the buzz. And then based upon that, then you may have just like a random person tell you something and then you go see it and you have an amazing experience. And so there's this kind of like ethos that happens at Sundance where people talk about these different projects. there seemed to be this buzz where you know the board of directors were told like if you're going to see one experience at Sundance definitely try to see Traveling While Black which to me I think is an amazing testimony to this piece amongst all the other different films and experiences that were possible that that was what the Sundance organizers were informing their board as to one of the the keystone experiences that were happening at Sundance this year. and that this really was born out of a number of different grants and support and it had gone through many different iterations from transmedia to a video game to this whole theater and fictional aspects within VR and then eventually came back to this roots of collaborating with Felix and Paul after Roger had seen Felix and Paul's documentary about the White House that was premiering at Tribeca. And Shari Freelow of the New Frontier was able to give Roger a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and New York Times to be able to do this exploration of what does it mean to use the documentary format in the context of a virtual reality piece. And because Roger is an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker, he's on the board of governors for the academy. And so he's a leader and influencer when it comes to the documentary community. And I think that after people have a chance to see what the power of what's possible with virtual reality and documentary, I do see that there's hopefully going to be much more of these documentary filmmakers starting to use the VR medium to tell these stories that I think actually are easier to tell without having to kind of recreate everything in this CGI film and that there's a certain aspect of within the VR community there's been a certain because the center of gravity has traditionally been in this video game realm there's a whole realm of people that say like well 360 video and 180 video is like the worst thing to happen to VR because like the true nature of VR is that you have to have full agency and be able to navigate into a volumetric space and to be able to like freely move around And I think, yes, that's certainly a huge strength, but I think there's aspects of storytelling and character and narrative and plot and your sense of embodied presence where you actually don't need to move around in that there's so much reality that's happening in the real world that oftentimes when I go to Sundance, I'd like to see a lot of documentaries. And it's those documentaries that are actually connected to the deeper strands of what's happening in the world right now. And in terms of the VR experiences this year, like this piece traveling while black was tapping deeply into these deep issues that are happening in our society. And they were addressing it in a completely new way in this piece of art that we're giving people new access to be able to connect to their own stories and to connect to their own experiences and to connect to their own emotions. To the point where when they're coming out of this experience, they're breaking down and crying for 30 to 45 minutes, just hanging out in this installation and decompressing from all the grief and trauma that they've had throughout their lives. And I think that there's this tendency that the authorship that's happened within stories is, you know, thinking about like, what is this authored experience we're going to give to people? And I think a lot of it is shifting into this more generative aspect where you are having an experience, like when you watch traveling while black, and if you are an African American or minority in America, you're going to come out of the experience with your own stories and your own experiences that you're going to want to share with other people. And so I do see that there's going to be like this movement, both in this collaboration with Smithsonian, as well as the African American museums that Roger Ross Williams and his teams are working with, that there's going to be opportunities for people to watch this experience in groups, and then afterwards, be able to either debrief with each other and share experiences within the context of a group. or to be able to record or videotape or write their own stories and then share it into this archive and database that's maybe going into the Smithsonian or these different archives at these African-American museums so that these stories could be like this living story that we're able to get this sense of, okay, this is a phenomenon that actually is pretty universal within the African-American community. And so there's something going on there in terms of the way that our society is structured, that this is somehow going on and that there's different aspects of these stories that we're blind to. that this is a piece that we can have a shared experience around and then start to have these different types of conversations. So for me, I think this is absolutely revelatory and that restorative practices and these principles of truth and reconciliation, and this feeling of almost like being this healing ritual that you're able to watch this experience and then to be able to hear other people talk about their lived experiences. And then as you come out of it, you want to share your own experiences. And there's some aspect of that that has this fundamentally transformative and healing quality. So that's all that 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 my Patreon. I am an independent journalist and I rely upon donations from my listeners in order to go to festivals like Sundance and to capture these types of stories. And so if you enjoy that and want to see more, then please do become a member and support the podcast. You can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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