I got an update from Traveling While Black director Roger Ross Williams after he’s been traveling around the world at different outreach & engagement screenings. I did a deep dive discussion with Williams in my interview with him at the debut at Sundance 2019, and it continues to be one of the most powerful experiences that I’ve had in VR as it is able to provide a deeper context and provide access to a context and conversations that are hard to be shared with people who have not also had those same experiences of racism in America.
Williams talks about how Traveling While Black has been able to set a deeper shared context for people who have a wide range of experiences of discrimination. He’s been seeing some really powerful taboos being broken after group screenings that have a wide range of demographics. He also talks about how cultural influencers were able to originally see it at Sundance, and take it back to their communities for a series of community engagement screenings.
One place that screened it last year, was a Future of Storytelling pop-up in New York City where the CEO of Walmart had a chance to see it. He was so moved by the experience that he took it back to Walmart headquarters in Arkansas to show to his entire executive team.
I the early days of VR, Williams says that it isn’t always about having millions of people see an experience, but it’s more about having the right curators and cultural influencers who bring it back to their communities. This will continue to cultivate an appetite for more social impact experiences at these film festivlas, and regional, bespoke location-based entertainment locations and cultural hotspots. Then eventually as there are more headsets available, then there can be more direct distribution options for these types of experiences.
But seeing where Traveling While Black has been over the past year, and the impact that it has already have can be a model for other VR for Good projects to think about alternative distribution models that escape the hits-driven, economic monism of consumer VR.
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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 continuing on in my series of looking at the VR for Change movement, the second part, I'm looking at specific VR for Change projects. So in this conversation is an update from Roger Ross Williams. He did the piece called Traveling While Black, which debuted at Sundance in 2019. I had an extended conversation with Roger Ross Williams back in episode 742. If you haven't seen Traveling While Black, I highly, highly recommend it. It should be available on all the major Oculus platforms and definitely go check it out. It's one of the best 360 videos that I've seen and really quite impactful. I think it does a great job of using the affordances of 360 video. So I wanted to catch up with Roger Ross Williams, just to see what his journey with the traveling while black has been for the last year, as he's been traveling around the world, showing it to different contexts and different situations. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Roger happened on Thursday, January 9th, 2020 at the impact reality summit in Seattle, Washington. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:20.492] Roger Ross Williams: Hi, I'm Roger Ross Williams, and I am the director of Traveling While Black.
[00:01:28.354] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I got to see this last year at Sundance, and so maybe you could just give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into virtual reality.
[00:01:37.086] Roger Ross Williams: Yeah, I'm a traditional documentary filmmaker. I'd say traditional documentary filmmaker, 2D documentary filmmaker. And, well, I got into VR. This is my first VR piece. It premiered at Sundance 2019, I guess it was. Was it 2019? Yeah, it was last year, yeah. Wow, it seems like forever ago. And I got into it because of Sundance, really, because I got an immersive journalism storytelling grant from Sundance, New York Times, MacArthur Foundation. to explore VR and this is the result of that grant. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do and how I wanted to tell stories in VR. I did a lot of what I call VR dating and sort of worked with a lot of different production companies and a lot of different styles before I sort of landed sort of right back home with my sort of documentary instincts with real people, real situations, real place.
[00:02:48.017] Kent Bye: Well, I wanted to catch up with you because we really did a deep dive last year at Sundance when I had a chance to see it for the first time and unpack your process and your journey making the piece. What has happened since then? I know that it's been almost a full year now that it's been out in the wild and just curious like what has happened since then?
[00:03:06.313] Roger Ross Williams: It's played a lot of festivals. We've worked with a number of organizations. Right now it's up at Salt Lake Film Society. The Salt Lake Film Society recreated the total exhibition and I actually didn't have the opportunity to go to Salt Lake to see that but They actually, I saw a train, like a commuter train, and the whole side of the train was Traveling While Black. It was huge, you know, like the whole train becomes an ad for something. And it was all Traveling While, it was like a Traveling While Black train, which is so cool. It's amazing. And I was at Venice and various places. It's just been great to get it out into the world and figure out how to continue to reach more and more people with it. We're putting together sort of a more of a traveling, well-backed traveling version, like more of a kit. and working and putting together a tour of various museums and educational tour and working with various partners that we met at Sundance. We did a two-month pop-up with Future of Storytelling in New York. So, Future of Storytelling did a pop-up in Chelsea, in a space. There are about eight works there. We recreated the experience at Sundance there, and that was really successful. And that was great because, you know, I live in New York, so all my friends and colleagues got to go, people who don't have the privilege of going to Sundance. What was interesting is that was, I don't know if this is common knowledge, but that pop-up was sponsored by or paid for, at least, by Walmart. And the CEO came, saw Traveling While Black, and was in tears and blown away, and invited us to take it down to Arkansas and show it to the leadership of Walmart, which is really interesting, the power of VR, really is an example of that. And it continues to travel around. Where did he see it at?
[00:05:10.612] Kent Bye: The Future of Storytelling pop-up in New York. Okay, so he saw it there and then he decided to fund it?
[00:05:15.574] Roger Ross Williams: He funded Future of Storytelling pop-up, the entire pop-up. He saw it when he went to check out the pop-up and he was so blown away he invited us to come down to Arkansas.
[00:05:28.178] Kent Bye: Okay, okay. It sounds like he was so impressed that he needed to show this piece to other executives and that sounds like that there is this reaction that people have that it's a really moving piece. It gives a visual experience of, I don't know, how do you describe that? Is it like an empathy piece or is it like just trying to share a part of your experience or I felt like as I was watching it that there were certain conversations that as a white person, if I was participating in that circle, it may actually change the whole entire dynamics. And so it allowed me to, as a ghost, slip into a context that I wouldn't normally be a part of. And so it's almost being able to listen in to people who had a lot of shared experiences talking about something that is not part of my experience. but yet it allowed me to have access to it in a way that was broadening my own context of what African-Americans go through as they travel.
[00:06:23.572] Roger Ross Williams: Isn't that what the power of VR is all about really? You can drop in totally immersed into a world and experience something you wouldn't normally have the opportunity to experience. And I think that with the subject matter of the restriction of travel, VR is a perfect medium to use to really tell the story. And I think that, in a way, I feel like traveling while Black opened a whole can of worms, especially around discrimination and racism, and a way to give you a sort of a, almost like a different perspective on it, because it's hard to empathize If you're not immersed in someone's reality, it can be hard for people, not everyone, but it can be hard for people to empathize with the situation and that sort of pain and trauma that goes with racism. think about it, if everyone had to see, was forced, the other side, let's say, the people who do not feel empathetic towards people who've suffered discrimination and racism, if they all were forced to watch pieces like Traveling While Black, or about a Muslim American, it may sort of change their perspective a little bit. So maybe that's the power of VR and maybe we just need more of it. We need more pieces like this created and we need even bigger and broader ways of distributing it. You know, that's my thing is like, how do I get people access to this, to see this? People who don't have an Oculus headset. You might not have one or you might not be able to afford one, but how do you still get to experience work like this? That's a big challenge.
[00:08:11.337] Kent Bye: Well, I've last couple of years went to Amsterdam, the IDFA doc lab and talking to a lot of documentary filmmakers and theorists and talking to a lot of people about the definitions of documentary. And, you know, there's like creative treatment of actuality. How do you define what documentary is? And I'm just curious if that is shifting from your experience of working with 2D documentary and immersive documentary and VR.
[00:08:39.774] Roger Ross Williams: I don't know if it's shifted because what Traveling While Black is is an immersive dive into real people and real life stories and real situations. That's what documentary is, it's just the difference is that you are completely immersed in the story in VR and when you're watching a 2D film you're sitting in a theater or maybe at home or maybe even at your computer and there's lots of distractions. But I think with documentaries is we're sort of taking on the reality of the world where we are packaging them into stories that change our perspectives and the way we experience and see the world. For me, there's nothing more powerful than a documentary filmmaking.
[00:09:37.403] Kent Bye: I've been drawn to the documentaries for a long time. I don't know if it's about making it feel like it's opening up what is happening in the world and giving me a deeper context because I live in my personal context but to try to connect to the larger context and to try to see, I guess, you know, as we're here at the Impact Reality Summit, it's trying to see how all these different projects can somehow make us more aware of this deeper context. And I feel like that's something that Traveling While Black was really able to do, is to kind of reveal a deeper context that's a reality for people's lives, but yet may be invisible for a lot of people, and to just allow you to have an experience of that. And As we're here at Impact Reality, how do you make sense of that impact of what's success for an impact project? Or how do you know what you're doing is landing? And what's your theory of change for what happens step by step? How do you bring about this deeper change through art and through storytelling? But then what? How do you make sense of that?
[00:10:41.060] Roger Ross Williams: Um, I don't know. It's a tough question. I think, I mean, I think with VR, it really has to be about the influencers. I think that what happened at Sundance was that all these sort of influencers, these very powerful people, saw Traveling While Black and they took it back to their worlds, their companies, their spheres of influence, and they've distributed it, they've talked about it, and I think that that's, and it started this sort of conversation. I think that's a way to use VR. I think that what people need, they need to know what to do after they've watched a piece, and that is something that has to happen in the sort of outreach and engagement around a piece, and that is a whole other world that is very much part of the conversation in documentary filmmaking. Outreach and engagement. Okay, you've seen this piece, you're moved by it, what do you do now? And in my documentary films, I've created many outreach engagement campaigns where we give people different levels of sort of things they can do. You know, there's the simple thing of, you know, whatever. Signing a petition, but or you can go deeper and deeper and deeper as deep as you want and you can end creating guides and educational materials in case you want to take a deeper dive into the subject matter and you can go as Deep as you want. So it's really like when people step out take off the headset and What then and that's something I think in in VR that you know, that's what this where we are So this conference is about and that's something that is still a work in progress But there has to be a way to take that that momentum of the person who's just finished watching a piece and turn it into some sort of action and some sort of change and I think there's a There's it's a big discussion going on right now
[00:12:49.420] Kent Bye: Well, I like this concept of having shared screenings of mixed crowds of people who are black and people who are not black and having this experience and then talking about it afterwards. I don't know if there's been anything like that over the last year or...
[00:13:04.925] Roger Ross Williams: I've had many, many, many screenings. I've done a number of screenings with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. We had screenings in New York during the Tribeca Film Festival. I had screenings in London. I'm about to go and do a series of screenings of Traveling While Black at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam. I'm also doing it around the Netherlands in The Hague with Movies That Matter, some festival there. And that's really amazing is when we have like 50 people with a headset and they take it off and it's all a communal reaction and conversation that happens. And that's always really, really, really powerful. And we've done a lot of this and it's been incredible.
[00:13:57.382] Kent Bye: maybe you could describe a little bit of what they have been like or what type of topics come up or because I can imagine there's people that are so overwhelmed with emotion that they've had those experiences because I know that when we talked about it it was like there was a recognition and then there's another of being introduced to this whole world and then what type of trends did you see in the different topics that came up as people were unpacking it in conversation?
[00:14:21.220] Roger Ross Williams: I think a lot of it, people had conversations with each other because they had different people in the audience. So there were black people in the audience who were completely devastated, traumatized. There were white people in the audience who were like, oh my god, I had no idea how traumatic and how, you know, and so they would... It lasted. So they would talk to each other. They would talk to each other as part of the, you know, like there would always be like a panel or a conversation with me and maybe some others. But what was amazing is that after that panel conversation, they would stand around and they would talk to each other and they were having that connection, that human connection that was like, it was just amazing to see.
[00:15:06.417] Kent Bye: Well, I feel like it gives like a contextual grounding that is like almost like this shared experience and then it's like being initiated into this experience that maybe you hadn't been a part of and now maybe for the first time people who are black are able to maybe talk about things that they've never been able to talk about before.
[00:15:21.953] Roger Ross Williams: Yes, it gives them permission to talk about it because I think that as Black people, we don't always feel, and with each other we do, but when we're outside of the context of our own communities, we don't always feel like we can talk about this or that people would even understand. So then people, so it was like, if you were not black, you, you're like, oh my God, I, I, I understand. And then you can have that conversation. It opens up the space to have that conversation. And that's, that's been incredible and incredibly powerful. I mean, I still continue to be amazed by the deep connection all audiences have had with this piece and the conversations and how it lasts, it sticks with people. So people will write me days or weeks later and they're still having that conversation and that's what's really incredible about it.
[00:16:22.869] Kent Bye: And finally, for you, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:16:33.233] Roger Ross Williams: The ultimate potential of virtual reality, I don't know. I mean, it's all very new. I mean, it's new for me, but I think it's new for everyone. And I think we have no idea. You probably have a better idea where this is, or maybe you don't, but where this is all leading us. But it's leading us to something profound. I just want to be part of it and want to create wherever the technology is now. Keep trying to push it forward as a creator and as an artist and see where it goes. I don't know.
[00:17:07.986] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community? No.
[00:17:15.403] Roger Ross Williams: But just thank you for what you do. You guys are at the forefront of something. You're like explorers. I was just in Portugal and they kept referring to themselves as explorers because they were the explorers, like Columbus. And all these people, but they're the explorers. And I was like, ah, explorers. But you guys, the VR community, they're real explorers. And they're really creating a path to the future.
[00:17:48.185] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So that was Roger Ross Williams. He's the creator of Traveling While Black. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, it's great to hear from Roger, just how he's been traveling around and showing this experience and just to hear the impact that has had for different communities. I think one of the most striking one was to hear the CEO of Walmart. sound like he's already been supporting the future of storytelling and Sponsoring it and he came to it and saw the traveling while back experience and was so moved by it that He wanted to bring back the traveling while back experience and to show it to his entire executive team at Walmart so if you think about like VR for change and the impact that you can have and and I think one of the things that Roger Wallace Williams was seeing at Sundance was that, you know, it's a piece that not a lot of people get to see because, you know, not a lot of people have virtual reality headsets, or it was at the New Frontier section, which is off the beaten path for a lot of the films that people see at Sundance. But there's enough influencers within the Black community that had seen it, and they were really just raving about it, that it really caused a lot of people to go see it. And then what he was saying is that a lot of those people ended up taking that experience and then bringing it into their communities around the world. And it went around to all these different places, the future of storytelling, of course, and then showing up these many different film festivals. And it's great to hear the process of, you know, showing it to different places and this whole civic engagement and part of any the VR for good. Whenever you have any social impact documentary, there's this whole outreach and engagement aspect. But a piece like Traveling While Black, you could show with a mixed audience of people who are African Americans who have had these variety of different experiences of racism, and people who are white who don't necessarily have that as their day-to-day experience. And so I feel like this film does a good job of really explaining the different contexts and experiences. allows you to kind of slip into different conversations that maybe if you were there, those conversations would change just because, you know, you don't have the shared experience. And so there's a different quality and tenor of conversations that can be had. And so that's a great thing about virtual reality is it can allow you to start to introduce you to these whole immersive worlds that are very real for a lot of people, but you may not just have easy access. And I think that the medium is able to get you there really quickly. And so he said that it was able to really start to set these contexts where people have these shared experiences and then from there be able to connect to each other and be able to maybe talk about things that would be very difficult to talk about otherwise. And I think this principle is probably one of the most profound that I think that virtual reality has the capability of doing. I mean, any art, any medium, any film is already doing that. You watch a piece and it allows you to have the shared context that then you can start to connect about different aspects of the characters or the experiences and then maybe be able to draw upon your own experiences and start to share that. And so this model of just having these outreach engagement experiences, having these group experiences where people can all watch it, and then at the same time, and then afterwards have a group discussion, I think is a great model for the future of where the VR for good movement can go to. And I think that you know, a lot of what they've been doing here of, you know, doing other things. So creating other educational materials or things that people can download and to be able to provide the resources, to be able to structure things or to organize or to, to take the momentum that you get from watching a piece like this, and then to be able to do something afterwards, whether that's, you know, signing a petition or in this case, maybe just having conversations and be able to talk about your shared experiences, to be able to maybe set a broader cultural context that is able to allow you this entry point into somebody's experiences that you otherwise have no broader context for. So it was great to just quickly catch up with Roger here. Like I said, if you, if you haven't seen traveling while black, definitely try to go watch it in virtual reality, and then go back and listen to our previous conversation in episode seven 42, where we dive in quite a bit more about his process and about the specifics about the experience and then, you know, his journey into making this piece. 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 the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
