#820: Dreams & Symbolic Language of VR: Stop Motion Innovations of “Gymnasia”

cylde-henry
Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions are stop motion artists at Clyde behind who wanted to deliver a dream while you’re awake. They collaborated with Félix & Paul Studios and the National Film Board Interactive of Canada on producing Gymnasia, which premiered at Tribeca 2019. I had a chance to catch up with Szczerbowski & Lavis as well as Félix & Paul Studios co-founder Paul Raphaël, and NFB Producer Dana Dansereau at the Tribeca Film Festival.

paul-raphael
Raphaël talks about how they used a miniature stop motion VR camera in order to create the unique look and feel of Gymnasia. The creators all wanted to escape the baggage of the medium film, and they’re excited about the possibility to innovate within the medium of VR. Szczerbowski talks about the history of new mediums, and how there is always artists who want to use the medium to capture more reality and then other creators who want to go into the mind and into the dream world. He contrasted Alfred Stieglitz versus Man Ray in photography, and Luminere Brothers versus Georges Méliès in film, and then talked about how they’re trying to push forward the more dream-like qualities of virtual reality, and modeled this experience after the experience of a dream.

dana-dansereauGymnasia was released on the day of the premiere at Tribeca, and is currently available on the Oculus Rift & the Oculus Go

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Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of Viera podcast. So Oculus Connect 6 is coming up this coming week and I wanted to get out a number of different podcasts before I go off to Oculus Connect. And there's been a topic that I wanted to talk about because there's this trend that I saw at a number of different film festivals over this past year, especially at Tribeca in Venice. And that trend is looking at dreams and dream logic as potential insight into the symbolic storytelling and grammar of virtual reality. So specifically, I'm going to be covering a number of different experiences that explore dream logic in different ways, specifically the key, which ended up winning the StoryScapes award at Tribeca as well as at Venice. Bodyless is another experience that dives into dream logic. I'm going to be starting off the series with Gymnasia from Felix and Paul Studios as well as Clyde Henry Productions. They're doing stop-motion animation within VR, very highly polished and lots of amazing technology and also has this dream-like quality that they were specifically trying to dive into dreams and that quality of a dream. Seven Lives is another experience that was at Tribeca that was diving into the symbolic spatial storytelling language of virtual reality. And then finally, Punchdrunk had a mix between immersive theater and VR. It was an experience that debuted at Cannes back in 2016 in collaboration with Samsung. They did another iteration of that, and they're actually touring around different places. The Phi Gallery brought it to Venice during the Venice Film Festival, so I have a chance to talk to Punchdrunk to talk about Believe Your Eyes. It's their first VR experience that they created, and to talk a little bit about dreams and how dreams relate to interactive narrative and try to you know, blur the line between reality and the dream world, something that I think is consistent through line throughout all of the work that Punchdrunk has been doing. So that's what we're covering on this series of the Voices of VR podcast. And when we were starting with talking to the creators of Gymnasia, a quick note before we dive into this first interview is that Gymnasia is actually available for $4.99 on both the Oculus Rift, the Rift S, as well as Oculus Go and the Gear VR. I don't see that it's actually available for the Oculus Quest just yet. I think that might be part of Oculus' strategy to try to offload specific media portions into the Oculus Go rather than Oculus Quest, but Hopefully at some point that'll change and they'll be able to be able to see this on the Oculus Quest as well. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Mattrex Hrabowski and Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions and Paul Raphael of Philips and Paul Studios and Dan Desereau from the National Film Board of Canada happened on Friday, April 26, 2019 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:03:03.391] Maciek Szczerbowski: My name is Maciej Szczerbowski and together with Chris Lavis here we have an art company in Montreal named Clyde Henry Productions. We're here with Paul Raphael from Felix and Paul and Dana Dancero from the National Film Board. They are the co-producers of this piece. And we made a virtual reality piece of about six minutes which we hope is an equivalent of delivering to you a dream while you're awake.

[00:03:30.228] Chris Lavis: Name is Chris Levis, co-director, animator on this project, theorist, co-theorist, and that about covers it.

[00:03:40.174] Paul Raphaël: Paul Raphael, co-founder of Felix & Paul Studios. So we were basically the studio, co-producers with the NFB. We basically brought the technology platform, the VR technology platform, and creative collaboration, I hope. Some positive input on the piece.

[00:04:01.212] Dana Dansereau: Dana Dancerow, producer for the National Film Board of Canada, specifically the Digital Studio out of Vancouver, and been working with Felix and Paul and Clyde Henry for the last couple of years, building this beautiful piece, and just super proud of what we've made here, both the VR and the installation that we're showing at Tribeca.

[00:04:21.766] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that Felix and Paul has done a lot of 360 video, but there was parts where I was like, wait, is this live capture with animation on top of this? Is this completely computer generated? Maybe you could talk about this blend that you have.

[00:04:36.335] Maciek Szczerbowski: It's a dusty miniature with small puppets in it. You're inside of a stop motion set.

[00:04:41.599] Chris Lavis: I think for us a lot of it was we worked with Felix and Paul many years ago on the project Strangers with Patrick Watson and then we went back into our world of 2D filmmaking and puppet filmmaking whereas obviously Felix and Paul have explored virtual reality but really when coming back together again It was a question of if we could take the vocabulary and virtual reality that was a kind of the Felix and Paul vocabulary and bring that back into the miniature stop-motion world where we actually, the analog world that we've been exploring for the last decade with the National Film Board and sort of marrying all those things together.

[00:05:21.273] Kent Bye: I know you had a number of different time-lapse pieces that you've been experimenting with, starting back with Obama and Yellowstone and then the White House. But was there new camera technology you had to do in order to do stop motion?

[00:05:33.355] Paul Raphaël: Yeah. So I'm going to rewind a little bit, because the collaboration that we did six years ago now, that was the first thing we ever did, which was Strangers with Patrick Watson, with Patrick Watson as well, who's doing the music and all the sound design. We've obviously done a lot more development technologically and creatively since then. And this really is the combination of a lot of different things. So, for one thing, you know, the foundation of the stop-motion animation was indeed built upon the time-lapse technology that we'd built on the Obama projects. Last year we did a piece with Wes Anderson on Isle of Dogs where we did our first stop motion which we pushed even further here with Chris and Maciek. There is a bit of CG integration and that is stuff that we've developed through mostly the stuff we did on the Jurassic pieces and also we developed on Jurassic World Blue. a form of geometric projection of video that allows us to have images at the zenith and the nadir that are stereoscopic, which we also applied here. So this was like the convergence of a lot of things that we had developed independently, as well as some interactivity as well, the dreamer and some gaze-triggered stuff, all of this running in an engine that also optimizes the image, so a lot of stuff. This is really the first project that combines almost every

[00:06:53.304] Chris Lavis: I would say that working with bringing this project to them, we got to play with their Ferrari. This is a Ferrari that's been built for the last five years and we got every piece of it from exactly as he said, the CG department, in-house CG, the camera department who are amazing. Headspace the 3d sound recording that's a like a Maserati that Patrick Watson got to drive, you know I mean that's on the surface. We wanted a very Simple experience really it's memory. It's like it's very bare But it's the iceberg underneath that simple experience exactly of really the NFB what 12 years of interactive right like All this experience that's underneath this thing, it was a playground for us. And also, when we would screw something up, or let's say little transitions, we had all their experience of how to edit in this medium.

[00:07:46.092] Dana Dansereau: there was a lot of weird little inventions that came along in the way too like I remember one of my favorite anecdotes you guys told me about was when you're talking to the CG artists about core moments that the CG artists had to think like animators they couldn't think like CG artists they had to like imagine little sculptures the way these guys sculpt everything they had to think frame by frame and it's such a weird

[00:08:11.413] Maciek Szczerbowski: 24 sculptures per second rather than a flowing moving image. So we actually had to encourage the computer animators to corrupt the program a little bit, make it imperfect like we would inevitably do if we were doing it in pure stop-motion.

[00:08:28.942] Chris Lavis: That's true. Did you notice the puppet singing? Did you think about how that was done when you were watching it?

[00:08:34.454] Kent Bye: Oh, no, I guess I was confused as to what the underlying technology was. It was like I was in a space of not knowing what was even happening. That's good.

[00:08:42.799] Maciek Szczerbowski: I think that that was one of the most pleasing thing about this is that no one asked questions about method. They're more curious to know where we found the gymnasium.

[00:08:52.272] Kent Bye: I noticed the lighting the lighting was a cue for me because I knew that in order to get the lighting to be that Convincing that had to be some sort of live element But there's obviously things that were not live and I was like well they are they doing CG on top of something that's live but

[00:09:09.279] Maciek Szczerbowski: It happens one frame at a time. There is no live. It's like playing a guitar solo for 10 hours.

[00:09:14.583] Kent Bye: There's live photons, though. There's live photons, so the photons are actually live that you're capturing.

[00:09:20.166] Maciek Szczerbowski: Maybe that's true. If that's true, then sure.

[00:09:24.750] Kent Bye: Because I think there's something with the quality of light that I noticed from just by watching a lot of the films from Felix and Paul, there's a certain quality of light that your cameras use that I think is above and beyond what any other 360 camera that's out there. So I know that there's a qualitative difference. And I know that in digital light fields, I can get a sense of that quality of light. But I think that was the thing that was so striking to me was just the quality of light. And it sort of put me into this like, whoa, this feels really real, like way more real than most of the other things that I've seen.

[00:09:53.056] Paul Raphaël: Well you know one of the things we've done a lot of is think about how do you light a 360 scene not just technically and how do you hide the lights and all that but also how do you give directionality, how do you create a stage that feels natural but also that is directive enough to tell your story and I think that's another thing that this piece benefited from and since it was a real set we could apply it without having to jump through too many hoops trying to simulate that in software and in CG.

[00:10:24.715] Dana Dansereau: I think the team really nailed it here where in the piece you're both free to look around and guided in certain places where you just kind of get captured by sound, captured by light, captured by motion and things that just take you from moment to moment and it does a great job of making that feel purely naturalistic instead of being like come on look over here although you know there are some flashing lights but they're wonderfully attractive versus gimmicky, which I find, I mean, the whole team did a phenomenal job of bringing lighting, sound, you know, all of these components together, motion.

[00:10:58.041] Chris Lavis: Patrick was the sound designer and composer, Patrick Watson, really was a co-author with us and that entire basketball sequence began with him, we actually began with the sound design. So we went into a children's gymnasium with a group of people and with a number of basketballs and actually Pat He orchestrated that scene with the basketballs, and we have footage of him literally, it's like, you start here, you start there, and now... A gymnasium full of people holding basketballs.

[00:11:28.326] Maciek Szczerbowski: Yeah, imagining that 15 musicians were in the room, but their instrument was a basketball. Almost like, you know, he did a kind of like Frank Zappa kind of like...

[00:11:37.667] Kent Bye: Directing and conducting, yeah. For the listeners at home, there was a lot of conducting and directing there.

[00:11:45.031] Maciek Szczerbowski: But effectively, that ends up in a story that isn't actually based on narrative. The musical composition became a totally valid... co-director and a co-writer. Our composer actually is integral to the direction and composition of this piece, which is very fun because usually soundtrack comes in after to kind of either compliment or enforce or... This was, the music was baked in from the very beginning and as such we had to, as the official directors of it, we had to actually, it was like a crime scene we had to deal with, like that was not to be changed, this is something to now honor and deal with responsibly.

[00:12:22.052] Chris Lavis: Often when Paul's expertise came in is to know where to put that camera. Like we built the world and then we would be, how about here? And that would be usually the first thing Paul would go like, how about way over here instead? And how about we actually see the puppet's face instead of not seeing it? I know we're trying to save money by not seeing the face, but why don't we see it since that's the whole point? Yeah.

[00:12:48.891] Dana Dansereau: From our perspective, again, from the National Film Award, Felix and Paul threw their hearts into this piece. The staff and Felix and Paul, all the artists, all the animators, the programmers, just grabbed onto it and brought it to life, which we were just thoroughly impressed by.

[00:13:04.573] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it was the beginning where I was in that state of not knowing for the technical bits. But there was a sense of me being in this place, in this gem. And to see how the balls were moving, there was this kind of like almost a chill up my spine to see like, whoa, that's kind of creepy, just to see the presence of something that's not there. But to have that creepy, nightmarish type of feeling, it felt like a bit of a horror film, but not like a jump scare type of horror, but more of like, creating a creepy ambience.

[00:13:34.856] Maciek Szczerbowski: It was a room of ghosts after all.

[00:13:37.640] Kent Bye: But maybe you could talk a bit about your process of trying to create this world and to create like what emotion and experiences were you trying to cultivate in the person who was experiencing this?

[00:13:47.372] Maciek Szczerbowski: Well, we started with a kind of presumption, maybe a little bit of a conceit that the things that happened to you while you were in elementary school, especially those memories of the sort of ceremonial space of a gymnasium where gym class would happen, where magic shows would happen, assemblies, you'd be forced to be in a choir in front of people. So much of the history that every one of us shares in their past in the elementary school gymnasium has not been revisited. And if we're going to play with that idea of memory being something that every time you remember something, you're actually kind of recreating and corrupting a little bit. You're updating the memory and changing it, therefore. And so from that time of life, you know, you might have been on a bus, walked down a hallway, climbed a tree. You've done all those things since then. So all those things have been refreshed. You've been in a classroom before a thousand times again since. But the actual gymnasium seemed to us to have been a kind of secret repository of memories that have been buried and are actually not really so much accessible through the brain but they are accessible through revisiting the space. It seemed to us the conceit was that the space actually is where the memory is locked more so than in your head and being in contact with that environment again would, again according to our conceit, reopen those files. for a moment, and maybe even give you some of that extra information that got lodged in those files, which is the smells. We don't think about it consciously, but we remember the squeaks of the sneakers on parquet, we remember the rusty hum of the air conditioners upstairs, we remember the smell of the cleaning products in the hallways, you know what I mean? The dust even, and the sweat, and all that, gym socks. For us, there's a hope that on the neurological level, the brain actually goes in there so convincingly that it contributes a sense of smell, just to fill out the picture, to placate the brain.

[00:15:38.457] Dana Dansereau: I think at this moment, like as Magic was saying, it's both describing an experience, but VR, it's almost like commenting on VR itself. Like in VR is a dream. VR is this thing that conjures and yeah, and it's, they're really playing in this lovely liminal space that's created when you dive into a simulation and they wanted to truly simulate a memory and this almost universal memory.

[00:16:07.583] Paul Raphaël: What's really interesting is that in all the pieces we've made, if you look at them, off the top of my head, I think all of them are pretty much set in the quote-unquote real world. Some things are hard to categorize like Cirque du Soleil, but if you look at definitely all the documentary stuff we did, even when we were working with dinosaurs, it was set in a real world in which there were dinosaurs, not so much a mental space or an inner space. But what we did learn over throughout the years is that going in and out of this mental space in those pieces was a great way to create rhythm and flow transitions and really just keep you interested and it's almost like a break in a weird way. It's like our lives are not Fully one or the other usually you were usually if we're awake We're constantly going from what's happening to what we're thinking to projecting in the future or thinking in the past So we found that pieces that did not explore that at all that did not use that at all a kind of exhausting and dry you know, but with this piece for the first time we went all in and It's like a deep dive into that inner space. And maybe because it's relatively short, six minutes, we don't really need to go back out into the real. And I think, you know, that's the next thing I'd like to explore is, OK, well, do we get the opposite effect? You know, if we were to do a 20 minute piece that was entirely inner, would we get that same exhaustion that we do if we stay entirely in the real and, you know, as in our other work? But certainly it was exciting to deep dive into the inner world on this piece.

[00:17:41.354] Maciek Szczerbowski: And that's actually something I would like to just say that how fun it was to work on something like this at this moment in time. Because things will change. This medium will find its definition. But it seems to me that it hasn't yet. It seems to me that the ideas have been thrown up into the air and haven't yet quite landed. And so, you know, film, literature, they have they have rules that if you break them you're breaking them at your own peril and you'll probably make a shitty movie if you don't listen to these rules because they've been come up with good people who have done trial and error for years here it seemed to us at least that we were working in this blessed vacuum almost of being able to make any imaginable mistake without actually being wrong because there is no right yet and I'm sure that'll change and I'm sure that the future of people working in it will not have this strange lightness to it, you know, it's I feel like it's like moment for in technology where like Us growing up on radio. We're just given the television and now we have to kind of figure out what's different about this than radio How does it find its own personality and its identity? It's sovereignty. Let's say I'm sure we're working all everybody here is working towards VR sovereignty in one way or another. It's yet to be determined what it's really best for. And so it was just a joy to not know that and work wholeheartedly in something that doesn't have correctness in it. You know what I mean?

[00:19:03.440] Paul Raphaël: Honestly, that's the main reason I'm so interested in this medium and why I was drawn to it and why I even started the studio. It's the fact that you are not bound by anything at all. When I was a child, I always wanted to be a filmmaker and I studied film and that's how I started my career. quickly I was, you know, I just was exhausted by how much baggage the medium has, for better or for worse. Certainly there are a lot of, you know, it's a streamlined medium in the sense that there's no real technology to figure out. Yes, VFX are getting better, cameras are getting better, but you can grab whatever technology exists today and that will not be a limiting factor, unless you need tons of money that you don't have. But what that felt like to me was, Any idea you come up with has to be fresh in a way that avoids a hundred years of back catalogue, you know? And that to me was always exhausting because even if you have an idea which you think is yours and which you think is fresh, ultimately someone will tell you, oh that sounds like this and that and that other thing and how is it going to be different than that? Or the opposite, they'll ask you what is it like? And otherwise they won't give you money if you don't tell them exactly what particular mix of pre-existing things it is. None of that, just none of that in VR, which is scary, but in the most exciting and motivating way imaginable to me.

[00:20:29.145] Kent Bye: keeps coming up in this conversation and also previous conversations of a podcast that I just published was dreams and the symbolic potency of dreams and dream logic and the surreal nature of dreams, how they can be, the ones that are disturbing are actually better dreams psychologically than the ones where you're happy. If there's nothing happening, then that's not really necessarily a good dream to try to provoke you into looking at something that may need to change. And so just the.

[00:20:52.839] Maciek Szczerbowski: Tears for fears, the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had, right?

[00:20:59.490] Kent Bye: Exactly. Yeah, so there's this certain projecting your own life into something that could be traumatic, but that dream logic, there's a certain element of personal symbols and then collective symbols, but you know, there's these associations that you're drawing from the gymnasium. It kind of ends abruptly, you know, it doesn't necessarily have a linear structure where you're expecting like, oh, that's where it should have ended. It sort of just stops, which is very similar to like waking up from a dream and

[00:21:24.398] Chris Lavis: That was precisely the idea. We lull you in. That's the idea. It begins very slowly, and then we wanted to jerk you out. And in a way, that's the idea of, like, that's how you remember it. It's the dreams you get jerked out of, that there's three or four after images of. That was the entire idea. And that's why we kept it short as well, because it's like when you're writing down a dream, there may be three or four sentences that are left. And that's what this is. It's like, I was in my old gym, but it wasn't my old gym.

[00:21:54.803] Maciek Szczerbowski: The pursuit of the dream by artists throughout history works on the same trajectory. When, for example, photography came around, you know, you had, like, a Stieglitz would address it, and a Man Ray would address it. When film came around, the Lumiere brothers would address it. Oh, here's something which can make things more real. Let's give it to you the way it is. Let's give you, like, the presence of being at the train station. Meanwhile, same time, Melies goes, oh, film, that means we can go into the mind. We can get the dream made, finally. Forget trains coming at the station. I have no interest in that. So there's always been this, parallel helix line almost of these two currents. Whenever something new is invented, one spectrum of artists will say, oh my god, I can use this to finally make things more real. The other will go, oh my god, this can finally manifest dream. So we're actually, not to be hubristic about this, but we're on a continuum from that, I think. We're also being given a new toy and deciding to ignore reality, to actually try to see whether this is the thing that could

[00:22:58.893] Chris Lavis: Reproduce or somehow mimic dream which is something that I think we all want I think what matching I did we're there kind of bridge between the film board which is very much been in that dream world and Felix and Paul who have been in the reality world and I think that's the kind that makes sense.

[00:23:17.418] Dana Dansereau: Absolutely I mean we have this long history of both well both doing hyper real documentary and detailed things, but also looking artistically at how to represent ourselves, our culture, and our mandates to kind of represent Canada. And to do that, it's to represent it both artistically and to represent its stories. So we're always working in that, and that's what attracted us to these guys in the first place, and why they've made a bunch of stuff with our organization.

[00:23:49.480] Kent Bye: You mentioned that the National Film Board's been doing interactive narratives for 11 or 12 years now, and then VR is kind of on that continuum, it sounds like.

[00:23:56.624] Dana Dansereau: Absolutely. You know, it's a natural extension of what can you do with technology to tell story, to make art tell story, to create experiences. And so we've had this long history of trying to do this. Our studio was started in 2008, two different studios, one French, one English. and we've just been kind of trying to tell stories with all these different media and you know VR is another and AR and everything XR is just exciting to us.

[00:24:25.672] Kent Bye: Well, one of the other big things I'm going to be taking away from Gymnasia from a phenomenological perspective is just the music and the haunting music at the end. It was so striking, so different. I don't know if it was the chord or the way it was being sung, but it had this surrealistic context and creepy context of all the things that happened. But there was something also about the quality of that song and how it sounded that seemed to be different. Maybe you could talk a bit about that music that was there.

[00:24:53.104] Chris Lavis: It's an original piece by Patrick Watson, and our only mandate to him was to create something that felt like the crushed version of every song you ever sang as a child, every Christmas song, every playground song, and put it in a hydraulic press of symbolism and, yeah, phenomenology, and see what comes out the other side, which was an impossible task. And even to write lyrics for that, which are evocative but not specific.

[00:25:22.654] Paul Raphaël: One thing that I think really makes it special is the song is evoked at the beginning so that by the time you hear it, it already sounds like you've heard it before. And then when it comes back at the end, it sounds like that memory of when you wake up from after a dream of it. And I think that's what makes it almost instantly like a classic of some kind. I mean, I don't want to project too much, but it just sounds in your head like something that's got so much depth and history, much like the visuals, which were completely fabricated. But they give off that sense of being lived in and just being old and ancient, really, almost.

[00:26:05.940] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you each think the ultimate potential of virtual reality is, and what am I able to enable?

[00:26:16.044] Dana Dansereau: Big one.

[00:26:17.385] Maciek Szczerbowski: I mean, say empathy.

[00:26:22.547] Paul Raphaël: That's a loaded question. To me, its potential is simply to augment almost everything that we do today with anything related to the digital world, whether it's entertainment or computing, communications. What we're doing today are sort of the baby steps towards what's going to be all pervasive very soon. That's just going to change everything. It's going to change how we see reality, how we interact with reality, because the digital world, which has already changed us so much, is going to take a shape that resembles our reality, but makes it magical and infinite in possibility. And so, you know, the reason we've done such a diverse set of projects, you know, we've touched on so many genres, and it always feels like We know this type of genre, we've seen it before, but what is its translation once it becomes volumetric, immersive? And that gives you clues not just on that genre, but on virtual reality itself. Because you get more clues as to what the equation of what the transformation, the chemical reaction is between something you knew and its manifestation as an immersive entity. So for better or for worse, I don't know whether it's going to improve the world or make it scarier. All I know is it's definitely going to change it. And this is just the most fascinating exploration right now because you know it's coming, you know it's going to change things, and it's so fundamentally different than anything that there's just so much to discover. It's just like an infinite source of discovery and potential.

[00:28:10.493] Dana Dansereau: And I mean, what Paul said is it. I think I'd like to redirect the question slightly into talking specifically about stop motion. I think the work that's been done here, you notice that there's very few stop motion pieces. I think there's one by us and one by just Felix and Paul and Wes Anderson that really stand out in VR and 360. I think that medium and the ability to work at really radically changed scale, like without being in a real environment. Imagine if camera technology got small enough that we could put an interocular distance at two nanometers and what the world would look like and how wonderful. Felix and Paul will be doing that for us. I can see it happening. and to, you know, see these guys take us and shrink us down into this roughly one-third scale world and convince us it's real. Imagine the same thing growing, like putting us in outer space and putting two cameras, interferometer cameras, you know, a hundred miles apart and seeing planets move and having that in 3D. You know, like, there's something about transforming what filmmaking is and transforming the way we perceive the world that VR lends itself to and these animators have like harnessed part of that which is I think pretty not even enough to say unique. It's a step we need to take and not enough people are and I think these guys are real pioneers. I've always regarded them as the most anachronistic but most advanced anachronistic creators in the world. where they're just using the simplest tools to do these crazy inventive and forward-thinking concepts that are turning out really... obviously.

[00:30:00.486] Maciek Szczerbowski: The pure conjecture, you mean? Okay, probably completely wrong, but probably medicine. I imagine that there will be, I think the context to use it to help people recover from trauma or depression or whatever that might be ailing them, paranoia even, loneliness perhaps even, will have a massive effect on people when it's brought to a salient point. Maybe entertainment as well, but we have so much entertainment. There will be other things for us to be entertained by as well. There's still dance and running and all kinds of things that we'll do to have fun. But I think it will be... I don't know, I'm very interested in how this will work neurologically. I think it'll be about the brain.

[00:30:56.579] Chris Lavis: Well, for me, I think what's exciting about the potential is because, as we're saying, it's such a young medium, the people coming into it are cross-pollinating it with all the mediums that they come from. So for us, we worked early on in theater in Montreal and then stop-motion. And so I feel like with the little genetic splicer, that's what we brought to the table. And in that way, that film has endless potential to tell stories. It's amazing. But it is, in terms of that, it's calcified a little bit. you're working within those limits. And the fact that this medium still, it's like the protoplasm is still wet. And you can bring, I mean, who knows what, exactly, like, start bringing medicine with theater. Like, anything can still fit and work. And I think what's exciting for us is to see that what we just did here become, look very primitive. Like, one of the things about looking at Amelie's film right now is you're looking at it and you're like, why the hell just one close-up? just turn the camera around. There's no theater audience anymore. You don't have to do that. And so it's, in some ways, they're hard to watch because you see him stuck. And it'd be interesting to see if Gymnasia in 40 years has that same stuck feeling as Amelie's because the medium has gone so much further than that.

[00:32:11.738] Kent Bye: Awesome, great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?

[00:32:17.466] Dana Dansereau: I just wanted to say thank you, Kent, for recording this stuff and bringing us deeper into VR and understanding it. The work you've done kind of comprehending all this work, especially Felix and Paul's work, is great. And keep up the great job.

[00:32:33.319] Paul Raphaël: I'll second that. OK.

[00:32:35.540] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you all so much. Thank you. So that was the creators of Gymnasia, including Maciej Sierpowski and Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions, where they were the co-director and co-theorist and animators on the project. And then Paul Barfael, who's the co-founder of Felix and Paul Studios, one of the co-producers and the creative collaborator, as well as Dana Dassereau. He's a producer from the National Film Board of Canada with the Digital Studio based out of Vancouver, Canada. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, as I watched this experience, the quality of light was such that I felt like it was captured with a camera, but also the experience was so surrealistic that I was like, this has to have some CG. And I was actually kind of confused as to how they actually created it. didn't realize that they had actually created an extension from some of the camera technologies that Felix and Paul Studios has been working on with time-lapse and then to Miniaturize it to a certain way to be able to have like a 1 3rd scale of this whole gymnasium And it just looked like you were transported into this world it was really quite striking to me at least to see the quality of light in this piece and the effect that you get of seeing this stop-motion and And to be in this spatialized context I think is something that's going to be a very compelling aspect within virtual reality as we move forward. There's another stop-motion animation piece that I saw at Venice Film Festival called Passenger. I had a chance to talk to those creators as well and they were using something that was more like a Ricoh Theta camera that you could do a 360 very small, self-contained, but a lot of manual ways in which that wasn't necessarily designed to be able to do stop-motion animation. It sounds like that Felix & Paul Studios, in collaboration with National Film Board, helping to support the generation and cultivation of a lot of the underlying technological pipeline to be able to do full scale stop motion experiences. And this I think was maybe arguably the first one that was out there. There may have been some other ones that predated it, but in terms of like a genre and where this is going, I think it's very, very, very interesting to see where this goes, because I think there's just a lot of different stories you can start to tell with this specific technology that just gives you that dream-like quality. And it sounds like, like Maciek has said at the very beginning, that they're trying to deliver a dream while you're awake, very much inspired by dreams and dream logic, trying to slowly lull you into this experience and then kind of jerk you out of the experience at the end. kind of like a dream and they wanted to use this gymnasium which they were saying that they're really trying to tap into your memories and that if you're into a space especially a space that you may have a lot of formative memories as a child going through lots of different shared experiences of different gym classes or whatnot then trying to kind of tap into that by putting you back into this gymnasium but also kind of have this creepy ghost-like feeling to it to then use your associations of whatever positive or negative memories you may have about being in these gymnasiums and then to be able to kind of play with that with these associations. And there was this interesting little discussion about how the development of new media, whether it's photography or film, kind of has this spectrum between the real and the more artistic, surrealistic, dreamlike quality, whether that's going back to like the Luminaire Brothers versus George Mele's or Alfred Stieglitz versus Man Ray, having more documentary style versus more surrealistic artistic style. And to see how in this way, they're trying to play on that polarity point and to go more into the mind and more into these dreamlike qualities. And just also got the sense that all the creators that were working on this project are really excited about working in virtual reality as a new medium, because there's not all the baggage from film that in order to like create a film these days, you kind of have to say, well, it's just a combination of everything that's been done before. So to really either break new ground or to experiment, it's a lot more of like the grammar and the rules around both. Film as well as in literature are very well set and if that you don't follow those rules Usually it's because you're deviating from these best practices that it's ultimately not gonna end up creating a good quality product But right now in the realm of virtual reality those rules have yet to be written there's a lot of freedom to experiment and a lot of opportunities to kind of push the boundaries to see what's even possible then to see what works and what doesn't work and Also, there seems to be this process of going to these different film festivals and to show these different experiences and then to reflect upon what's new. And the people that go to these film festivals and see these different experiences, there's a kind of a calibration process that's happening across all the different people that are seeing these experiences. They'll see these experiences and then they'll talk about them. They'll talk about their own direct experience of them. And that also helps the process of not only talking about your own phenomenological experience of something, but it allows the creators to be able to also cultivate the language to be able to talk about their process. And so I think that's a big part of me going to these different film festivals to talk to these creators and to talk about their process, but also to talk about my own experience. And there's a little bit of a weird chicken and egg problem right now within these film festivals where, you know, I've gone to Sundance and Tribeca and South by Southwest and Venice just this year, recorded nearly 100 interviews across these four different festivals. But yet it's kind of like a dilemma because not all of these experiences get launched out that you can actually see and experience. Gymnasium is an exception because as soon as they launched at Tribeca, they were launching it publicly. on the okla store so that you could have access to it but a lot of these experiences they'll only be shown within these film festival contexts maybe they'll go off and have a location-based entertainment experience at a museum but either you're there and you see it or you don't get to see it at all as the case for a lot of these different Experiences that you see and so as a journalist or an oral historian going there and capturing it There's a little bit of a dilemma because my preference obviously is for people to be able to see the experience before You listen to a podcast about it but again without the media coverage to see what's out there then becomes a part of People not being aware that these are available and then the distribution doesn't happen So I'm just wanting to kind of dig into a little of the different experiences that I saw just these five that I'm dipping into from this film festivals that I went to this past year, and to kind of dig into these themes that I see specifically around dreams and dream logic as a cultivation, the evolution of the language of storytelling within VR, starting to dip into more of these metaphors and symbols from dreams. And in this case, it's a little bit being inspired by a nightmare, but in some of the other podcasts I'll be diving into, we'll be diving into other ways to use metaphors and dream logic within the spatial storytelling language within virtual reality. 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 supporting member of this podcast. I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. Just $5 a month is a great amount to give and just allows me to continue to do the work that I'm doing to travel around and capture this real-time oral history of the evolution of the medium of virtual reality. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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