The Tribeca Film Festival is releasing fifteen 360 videos that were programmed within their Cinema360 program for free via the Oculus TV platform, and they’ll be available to watch until April 26th. This is a great opportunity to see a portion of the types of pieces that are typically programmed at film festivals, however, the 18 Virtual Arcade, PC-based VR stories do not have any current plans for digital distribution or screenings. It’s worth noting that last year’s Storyscape’s Winner The Key was released yesterday, and I highly, highly recommend checking that out to get a sense of the 6-DoF & interactive, immersive stories that typically screen at Tribeca — and be sure to then go back and listen to the interview that I did with director Céline Tricart in Voices of VR episode #821.
But I had a chance to speak with senior programmer and chief curator of Tribeca Immersive Loren Hammonds about turning a portion of Tribeca Immersive virtual, as well as an overview of the fifteen 360 video pieces. He provides a spoiler-free introduction and sets a deeper context for the program, and I dive into my thoughts and reflections on the pieces at the end. You should be able to see watch the four Cinema360 programs on the Oculus Quest or the Oculus Go via Oculus TV, and you can get more context in this interview with Hammonds, via this Oculus blog post overview, or from the Cinema360 program online.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
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 today would have normally been the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival with the Tribeca Immersive, showing both the immersive experiences that are Six Degree of Freedom, as well as the Cinema 360. So because of the global pandemic, though, they've had to pretty much not have any co-located physical gathering aspects of the Tribeca Film Festival. But Tribeca is actually collaborating with Oculus to be able to bring out 15 of their Cinema 360 video pieces. This is not the full immersive program that would have had immersive stories with the storiescapes, competition, and more of the location-based entertainment. This is just 15 of the 360 videos separated into four different programs. So I had a chance to sit down with Lauren Hammonds, the curator of Tribeca Immersive, And he talks about the program. Now, there's no spoilers in the sense that you can listen to it just to get a little bit more context to learn more about the actual pieces. I highly recommend checking them out, especially if there's any program that sounds intriguing. But I actually would encourage you to check out all of the pieces. And you're not going to like all of them, but there's going to be ones that stand out. And at the end, I'm going to be unpacking my impressions and thoughts on the pieces so you can kind of listen to the first portion, go off and actually watch the content, and then finish listening up to the podcast and debrief and unpack it a little bit more. And there may be some opportunities to meet live sometime over the next week in virtual reality or through Zoom. That's still yet to be seen. Trebek is going to be having a number of different recorded conversations with the creators, and then it's yet to be seen whether or not I'll have any additional gatherings over the next week or so. So keep an ear on that on Twitter or on Patreon. So this interview with Lauren happened on Thursday, April 16th, 2020 with Lauren in New York City and I was in Portland, Oregon. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.790] Loren Hammonds: My name is Lauren Hemmons. I am Senior Programmer of Film and Immersive at Tribeca Film Festival. So I curate the Tribeca Immersive section annually, which includes the Virtual Arcade, Storyscapes, and Tribeca Cinema 360.
[00:02:24.150] Kent Bye: Great. So, uh, since the last time I saw you at Sundance, news had been breaking about the coronavirus and China, but now we're in the midst of a global pandemic. And so maybe you could bring us up to speed as to at what point you decided to shift things up a little bit and do something different with how you're displaying Tribeca Immersive this year.
[00:02:45.292] Loren Hammonds: Yeah, of course. So, you know, it's been a very difficult month and a little bit of change at this point. I think, you know, as you said, when we were last together in Utah at Sundance, the news was a trickle and it continued to trickle in. throughout February as my curation finished and we started setting up for announcing the official selections at Tribeca. Ultimately, early March proved to us that it was going to be impossible to put forth the festival at the scale that we usually do, and we were forced to postpone. During that time, you know, we were still doing our best to kind of drive ahead, not quite understanding the gravity of the situation at first. But as it became apparent, it was great. You know, we have some great partners. One of them is Oculus and had a great partnership with Oculus through the festival for several years now. And in talking to them, we discussed the possibility of pivoting and putting some of the programming online, mainly because obviously we wanted to be able to not just have everything kind of poof into a cloud of smoke. We wanted to be able to support the creators who, I mean, to me, it was difficult enough for me just to kind of wrap my brain around the fact that we wouldn't be doing what would have been my 14th festival at this point. but really to think of what is next for these creators who are counting on the festival ecosystem to launch their work to the public. So we discussed some different options, and one of the things that we realized we could pull together rather quickly, as long as the creators were on board, was to migrate our Tribeca Cinema 360 online through the Oculus platform. So I quickly reached out to all of the creators immediately following our postponement took everyone's temperature on it. And as is the case, as I'm sure you can agree, the XR community is very open to innovation, very open to different ideas. And every single one of the projects agreed to come along with us on this experiment. So it's really exciting. And here we are right now about to launch it tomorrow.
[00:04:58.975] Kent Bye: Well, and I should clarify that there's typically been two sections. There's the 360 video, and then there's the virtual arcade. And you've announced what those virtual arcade pieces would have been had you been able to show the full room scale, and six degree of freedom, and augmented reality, virtual reality, and sometimes even installations using other emerging technologies and haptics. All the stuff that you would actually need to have the full installation, all that hardware there, That is a whole other separate program that is not going to be a part of this, but what is going to be a part of this is what would have normally been the 360 video program. That's right. So before we dive into the program that is going to be there, what's happening with the virtual arcade, because I've go to a lot of Sundance and Tribeca, South by Southwest and Venice. And, you know, those kinds of virtual arcade experiences are the ones that are really pushing the medium forward in a lot of different ways. but they also require kind of a location-based entertainment type of distribution system that has typically been through film festivals like Tribeca. So what's happening with the Tribeca Arcade?
[00:06:06.082] Loren Hammonds: Yeah, that's a great question. So first let me just say it's a really interesting time because even starting last season we saw truly how creators were starting to embrace the LBE model. for distribution. And that absolutely continued through what was programmed for this year for the virtual arcade. People really needing, a lot of people really relying on in-person installations. That said, you know, we still have a team that is exploring opportunities for later this year for an in-person arcade. But as you know, things are so uncertain at this point. We're just not sure what the new normal will be. We're not sure when it'll be safe to get people to congregate again, and when that is, if it's the right time to do something like this. So there's an entire exploratory mission happening outside of Tribeca, looking at dates and looking at venues and looking at all of those things. In parallel, I've also been talking to a lot of innovators in the field to see if there are any other potential options to bring this work to life, minus the IRL installations, but with full six degree of freedom builds and perhaps a different way of exhibiting the work. So all of these things are definitely in the front of my mind right now. You know, the 360, as you said, it was very It was a lot easier to bring that online immediately because traditionally we present that in a theatrical format anyway. So now people with headsets with an Oculus Go or an Oculus Quest can actually experience this without any true difference of how they would have experienced it at the festival and even on the same date that the pieces would have premiered. But there are some really interesting innovators in the field that are looking at what the future of exhibition in VR could be. Obviously, Museum of Realities and Kaleidoscope and the things that they're working on are pretty exciting. Vroom and Oculus Venues. There are a lot of different platforms that could potentially offer solutions to these difficulties that not just Tribeca are having, but, you know, film festivals and other exhibitors across the globe are having.
[00:08:23.483] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like with this constriction, it's an opportunity to see what technology is already out there and to think about what the distribution of that content is because film festivals like Tribeca have traditionally been all about physically showing up to a location. However, there's been this problem each and every year of throughput of more people wanting to see the content than can be able to see it. And so with these pieces of content, you normally buy a ticket and then you have this ephemeral experience because it's still located within the artist and the creator's PC. You're not actually distributing it digitally in any way. But I'd love to be able to see if there was some way to be able to still have that type of ephemeral in real time distribution of the content for people to be able to experience it and then still have that ability to experience it without having to own it and to download it. And that's, I think, been part of the allure of something like the film festivals is that it is this distribution platform. And I, I'm hoping that at the other side of this, we can start to find new ways to work with what we have with people who already have this headsets. And that if you have the hardware, you'd be able to find a way to kind of distribute it in an ephemeral fashion that still gives that premier type of experience where you're able to still curate the best of work that's out there.
[00:09:46.286] Loren Hammonds: Yeah, I would love to be able to explore ways to merge the two. I think that it's, you know, it's, this is a very scary time for everyone across the globe. But I think it is also potentially an exciting time for many different industries. And for personal relationships as well, you know, there's kind of a reset button that's been hit at this point and we can actually all work together to figure out what the future of this might be. It's really quite interesting to see how quickly people in the XR community have managed to kind of jump in and start experimenting already. I'm on so many WhatsApp chats where there are constantly experiments happening and constantly, you know, people are like, I need 15 people to come into this room and just see what it's like when we're, you know, for us to interact with each other. And to me, I think, you know, that's right now we're all at home. And those of us with headsets, we can do those things and we can really drive this forward. And it's interesting too, to see how something as terrifying as a global pandemic has managed to also drive headset adoption in a way that you can't even get an Oculus Quest at the moment. It seems to be sold out across the world and the goes are going quick. So it's something that we all wait for, but we didn't want it to happen in this way.
[00:11:09.449] Kent Bye: Great. Well, let's, uh, shift into actually talking about the content that's going to be made available here. And it sounds like it's going to be just to clarify, first off, it's going to be through Oculus quest and the rift and Oculus go. Is it available on steam in any way, or do you have to have one of those headsets to see it?
[00:11:25.321] Loren Hammonds: So you have to have the Oculus Go or the Oculus Quest in order to see the Tribeca Cinema 360 program, which are 15 immersive 360 films. In conjunction with that, on Rift and Rift S, Oculus is also releasing the Key. which was the StoryScapes winner last year at Tribeca. So everything was just very serendipitous as we talked to Celine, who's the creator of the key, about the timing of being able to make this available for public consumption. And it really just works very well that people actually also get an opportunity to see something that is a six-off experience that's representative of some of the work that we've shown and are showing at Tribeca in conjunction with the 360.
[00:12:08.993] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. The, the key is amazing. It was the winner of the story escapes and actually went on to win at Venice as well. So I'm excited for that to finally get out there for people to be able to actually see it. Yeah. And if people do have revive, then they can potentially have other systems and then kind of go the back door in, but other ways to get it sort of off label ways to see it. If you don't have one of those headsets, there's still ways to do it. If you have revive. But let's dive into the actual four programs and maybe you could just kind of give me a brief overview because you know, you're, you're obviously curating a lot of this stuff, but how do you kind of make sense of the content? Uh, I'm sure there's an emergent process of seeing what gets accepted and then kind of clustering together. So maybe you could just talk about the process and a little bit of an overview of what's actually showing here.
[00:12:53.952] Loren Hammonds: Sure. So as you know, Kent, and I'm sure people who have come to Tribeca before or read about the festival know, we really concentrate on storytellers and putting storytelling at the forefront of what we select. And so that kind of driving force still powered the selections of Cinema 360 this year. And I look at it as almost a parallel to the traditional film festival in that I'm these programs so that the films complement each other within the programs. And it can be thematically or it can be just some sort of a through line that really works. And so there are a couple of things in here. You know, we have four programs, 15 projects in all divided into four programs. The first one is called Dreams to Remember. And there are four projects in that. And the idea behind that is like these are, they're very different, but they're all kind of dreamlike experiences that creators have taken a novel approaches to the storytelling. So we have First Step, which is a piece from Germany that tells the story of the first Apollo mission, but it tells it in a way that I think no one has seen before. It almost positions it as a fairy tale. and the magic that it takes to even have the audacity to believe that you can go and set foot on the moon. And most importantly, the visuals really put you into places that are impossible to be, whether it's the cockpit of the space shuttle or alongside the shuttle as it's launching or the surface of the moon. It's really, really beautifully done in reenactments and they worked really closely with experts to make these reenactments as realistic as possible. So that's First Step, which is great. We have Rainfruits, which I mentioned First Step comes from Germany. We have a very wide international birth, I think, for this program. There's projects from Germany. This next one that I wanted to mention is Rainfruits, which is from South Korea, and it's a story of a man from Myanmar who traveled to Korea in hopes of having a career in engineering and ultimately gets trapped in the work of a day laborer. And it's a very moving and emotional and personal portrait. Singmoo Lee, who was last at Sundance, actually, with Scarecrow, with a very, very immersive and interactive project, has made this in a more traditional cinematic way, but with some of the same tools that you often see in fully immersive work and 6DOF work, like volumetric capture and photogrammetry. I think it's a really, really beautiful impressionistic look at this story, and it's an adapted work of creative nonfiction. There's another great animated piece in there called Dear Lizzie. Dear Lizzie comes from Within and 500. And it's a piece that was made in conjunction with the musical that is Deborah's Child. And it's just kind of a flight of fantasy. Very colorful and just a really beautiful piece. And then the final work in that program is from Finland, actually. So it's called Forgotten Kiss. And it's another adaptation of a fairy tale about a prince who was once kissed by a fairy as a young child and then always kind of has this thing that he's looking for, but he doesn't exactly know what it is. What's interesting about that is it was made in conjunction with the Helsinki XR Center, which is working to ultimately be one of the largest XR centers in Europe. And the creator is a theater director and writer. who has used his, you know, remarkable abilities in that realm to bring it to VR and bring some traditional theater actors into there and just have some really beautiful environments to put them in. So that's program one. Program two is 17 plus. So what I can say about 17 plus is that this is my take on a midnight program, right? And when I think about midnight, I don't think about it as horror and like, just like jump scares or anything like that. I think of midnight more as genres of effect of these pieces that you really want to experience with others, or you want to talk to others about. And these creators are just making some things that are very subversive, in wildly different ways in narrative and in nonfiction. So we have A Safe Guide to Dying, which has a pretty cool distinction of being the first ever thesis from the AFI Conservatory made in 360. And this is a narrative about an aging man who is having suicidal tendencies, and he is using VR, and this is a VR of 2029, the VR of today, using VR to put himself through the simulations of what would be the least agonizing way to commit suicide. So it's pretty dark, but it's really an interesting way to tell the story using the medium of VR as both a narrative agent and as the medium itself. Black Bag is something that I saw at Venice last year and was blown away by. I think that it's just an amazing animated and twisty kind of look. It comes from China. It's a story, I mean, I feel like it's almost better to just let people make their own story out of what they receive in their eyeballs when they have the headset on, but it's a story of a man who maybe is not quite sure where he is or what he's been through in the recent past, but it's super cool. The Pantheon of Queer Mythology is a piece from Spain by Enrique Agudo, and that is something again that it always excites me when I see work by a creator that I am totally unfamiliar with, and I just think they're doing something really special with the medium. This one is LGBTQ-focused, I'd say. Enrique has kind of created these multiple deities that we get to visit through different environments, and it's almost a meditative experience in seeing these invented deities and thinking about the construct of gender. And, you know, he's got a lot of thoughts going on within each of the four chapters of that experience. So that's one we're excited about. And then something that's more in the, it's more in the traditional realm of horror, and then also not at all, Saturnism. which is a French piece that puts you into the world of Goya's painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, which is a really, like, it's just one of the darkest pieces of fine art, I think, that people are familiar with. But they did such a beautiful job of creating that environment in 360 and allowing you to have this interaction with the giant Saturn. And no spoilers, but it might not end so well. So program three is very, I think this one is probably the one that's the most thematically tied together. There are three pieces in this. The program is called Kinfolk, and it's stories of homes and families. But really what it is, is these three creators approach the idea of memory and the idea of creating a memoir in VR in very different ways. The first one is Ferenj, a graphic memoir in VR. And that piece is about her personal identity as an Ethiopian American. And she used photogrammetry and voxels to take you to some of these places, like her grandparents' restaurant, different places that were very instrumental to her identity. And music plays an amazing role in that as well. She has some very interesting ideas about how memory can be expressed in this medium. The Inhabited House, which is a piece that I saw last year at IDFA, which comes from Argentina, is a piece about the creator Diego Campel's grandparents' house. And he uses the 360 truly as a canvas. He puts you in the space of his grandparents' house, but then brings different areas to life through home movies. 2-D home movies that he then composites with the 360 to kind of almost time these different periods. So it's something that I hadn't seen before and it's something that's intensely personal and I mean it was it's really lovely. The final piece in there is Home, which is a piece that I saw in Taiwan at Kaohsiung Film Festival last year. And that creator, Kiting Hsu, made this in a very interesting way. So it's a first-person narrative where you play the role of his, or the viewer plays the role of his grandmother. And what he did was he actually shot it in his grandmother's house who has passed away. So when she passed away, The home went back to the state. So everything was moved out of the home. It was done. His family was never there anymore. And when he had the opportunity to make this film, he actually got the rights to go back to his grandmother's house, refurnished it as he remembered, and made this film, which is just about a visit with his grandmother on a summer afternoon. with a mixture of his actual family and actors. And it's just so poignant and beautiful. It's one of those where it gets a little dusty in the headset at different points, because it's just, you know, I think that it's transcendent. It's something that a lot of people will see their own families in, in all three of these pieces. So that's the Kinfolk program. And then finally, the fourth program is called Pure Imagination. And this one is my take on what I would, I have to be careful about this because I understand that VR is not for all ages. I understand that there are suggestions for, you know, the age of folks that should be able to put on a headset and have these experiences. But I do think that these particular works really kind of jumped out at me as things that would be fun to share with families and stories that are if not for all ages, let's say for most ages. Two of them come out of the VR for Good, the Oculus VR for Good cohort this year. So there's LUTA by Samantha Quick and Michaela Holland. And that one is done in conjunction with Yellow Boat of Hope. And that's a piece about a little girl who swims to school every day in the Philippines and the difficulties that these children really have with actually just commuting to school. And this particular girl decides that she's going to figure out a better way to get to school, and she's very inventive, so she creates all these different cool kind of wild vehicles to make it happen for herself. There's that one. Then Upstander is also out of VR for Good. So with Upstander by Van Phan, he worked with the Diana Award on that one. And it's about the dangers of bullying, but it's also about the fact that, you know, you can make a difference just by, instead of being a bystander, being an upstander. And he did something really interesting with this. It's animated as well. And the characters are backpacks. That's definitely something that I hadn't seen before. But they're really like just very expressive characters, even though they're all backpacks. And there are moments there that are very emotional and moving. And I think that, you know, something like that is very, it's important for more ages to be able to see a piece like Upstander and think about things in a different way, perhaps, and like capitalize on the fact that VR does really work to kind of strengthen your empathy. So I think that piece does a good job of that. We have Attack on Daddy, which is just outright fun from South Korea about a man who is watching after his young daughter, and he takes a nap, and then he wakes up and realizes that she's been somehow magically transported inside of her dollhouse, and there's some nefarious bunnies that are holding her hostage, and he's got to really step up to the plate and become a hero. And then there's the tale of the Tibetan nomad. which is by Carol Liu, and it's an adaptation of a Stan Lai play and a folktale, traditional folktale, about a shepherd who also falls asleep and his wife disappears, and he finds himself in a life that he would have never imagined. So, yeah, all four of those pieces also do something very different for the kind of all-ages or most-ages audience. but we're excited to bring them all to the global audience now.
[00:26:33.682] Kent Bye: So, wow, that was a great overview actually of all the pieces. I had a chance to watch them yesterday. And so it's actually really interesting for me to hear the deeper thematic intention that you have with a lot of these. Just one comment that I have is that I was surprised to see not any traditional 360 video documentary that I've seen in the past. And I know that, you know, with last year with the key with Oculus for good, that kind of represented the shift towards trying to find other ways to tell the stories that are more with using the affordances of the medium and to try to turn it into more of an immersive story. And so I think that's a very interesting direction that the two Oculus for Good pieces again this year were in that similar vein where it wasn't necessarily like a 360 video, but leveraging more of the computer animation and CGI and finding new ways to use the affordances of virtual reality as a storytelling medium to tell those stories. But I thought I was curious that there wasn't any, what I would typically think of like normal 360 video documentaries.
[00:27:32.906] Loren Hammonds: Yeah. I mean, I think. I could say that's for two reasons. I think partially it's the curatorial vision and partially it's exactly what you mentioned. And I think that the creators are figuring out ways to make nonfiction work in a different fashion and in a potentially more creative fashion. in terms of my curatorial vision, I think there's a burnout of what would be considered the traditional non-fiction work. I think that there's still some very beautiful, more traditional non-fiction work, even that was submitted, and I'm sure that we'll see it emerge as the year goes on. But for me, I'm really, really most excited in the creators that are taking a new and different approach to telling real stories. And that goes for anything from, you know, like Luta with the animated kind of reenactment of this fictional child who is going through something that's many, many children are actually going through every day in the Philippines, or something like brain fruits that is just a very impressionistic vision of a documentary and a personal story and is adapted from a brief memoir of that man who actually traveled to Korea and found his life something that he wasn't expecting. So, you know, I think there's a tendency, and I even see this in traditional film now, I think there's a tendency to move away from what in traditional films would be talking heads and what in traditional nonfiction 360 would be voiceover to tell these stories. And I'm excited when I see something that's different. So I want to be able to share that and kind of keep the media moving forward. Because I'm also, I'm very cognizant of the fact that a good portion of the XR community kind of discounts 360 or otherizes it in a way. And for me, I think we're far too nascent, right? We're far too early in the evolution of these mediums to throw one away for another. I think it's more important to recognize that the creators can use, you know, they can use them very differently. So that's just kind of what I'm trying to achieve with this curation.
[00:29:55.248] Kent Bye: Well, I'll be very curious to see what happens over the next couple of weeks to see what kind of emergent gatherings happen in virtual reality, because we're not able to physically be there, but they are widely available. And so I see it as an opportunity for the community to be able to actually watch all the content, which is kind of rare. You know, as a journalist, I have the privilege of being able to, to go to these festivals and to be able to have a good opportunity to see all the content. It's still a bit of a game to try to do that, but in this case, it's fairly easy for people.
[00:30:24.235] Loren Hammonds: You're the best in the game though. Kent. We all know that. We're like, Kent has seen everything and it's day two. As a curator, I'm trying to do the same thing that you're trying to do and see as much of it as I can. It's a challenge. So hats off to you for making that happen. And I'm really, I am excited that people will be able to see everything. It's going to be awesome.
[00:30:46.163] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I want to leave some space for people to have an opportunity to watch these pieces and then hopefully have some more opportunities to connect to some of the creators, maybe have some live events. I'm still trying to decide what's a new way to cover this as a new way of distributing it. There's new opportunities. And that's been the problem I'd say as a journalist in this space is that it has been hard to cover it because people can't see it, but now that people can see it now, there could be new ways to cover it. So I'm, I'm excited to see what may come of this as well.
[00:31:13.737] Loren Hammonds: Yeah, I mean, it's a very exciting time. As scary as it is, it is a very exciting time.
[00:31:20.800] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:31:31.067] Loren Hammonds: Wow, that's such a huge question. I think the potential is nearly limitless. In just the short time that I've been a member of the XR community, I've seen both technology and creative vision just move forward in leaps and bounds. And I think that it is quite possible that we will continue to see things that we never dreamed of. And also the idea of social experiences in a time where we can't actually be together is something that I fully expect to emerge in an even more overwhelming fashion than we've seen in the last couple of years. I think that even a piece like The Under Presents, right, where you don't actually get to verbalize with others, but you do get to interact with them. That's something that is needed at this point, right? We're all in our little bubbles. We've created our bubbles. Some of us are bubbles of one. Some of us are familial bubbles. This is a way to expand that and expand it not just through chatting and through video calling, but through participating in a story. And I think that that's something that we will absolutely see rising over the next couple of years. I think that, you know, no matter what the new normal ends up to be, no matter where we land after this crisis, this can never be forgotten. And people are always going to remember the fact that, wow, I was able to interact with people that I normally wouldn't have. And they're going to want to continue that, or at least that's my hope. I think that it can bring us a little bit closer together.
[00:33:10.812] Kent Bye: Great. And is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:33:16.817] Loren Hammonds: I just want to say, everyone, please stay safe and healthy. I want to thank you, Kent, for giving us a platform to talk about this work. And I want to thank everyone in the community and ask them to support these creators and check out the work and, you know, reach out to them and Let's make sure that the business of the medium continues. We know that the creative juices are there and they're still flowing and people are still working, but we want to make sure that the business continues. It's very important. At this point, we're at a very critical juncture, but I think we're in relatively good shape.
[00:33:52.882] Kent Bye: Hmm. Awesome. Well, I think, you know, obviously there's a lot of the stuff that's happening in the world and I echo that sentiment that I hope people are staying safe, but this situation that you're in at Tribeca trying to continue to, you know, the show must go on to a certain extent. And I'm just happy to see that there's new opportunities for people to have an experience of what you've been working on for the last 14 years and to. to get a little taste and a glimmer both from this 360 video but also to take a look at the winner from last year the key the fact that that's coming out at the same time i think is is huge as well for people to to finally have a chance to be able to to watch it i did an interview with celine and actually released it already just because it was like I just wanted to have it out there for people who did get to see it, but be able to watch it and then listen to people talk about it. Cause I think that's the other part of people seeing the work and be able to talk about it and explain it and try to put language to it. Cause I think that's a big part of what this is all about is to see the work, but to sense make around it and to put the language around it and be able to actually talk about it.
[00:34:50.510] Loren Hammonds: for sure. I definitely agree. And another thing that I'll add about the key that should be interesting, too, is that, you know, when it premiered at Tribeca and when it was exhibited at Venice, there was quite an elaborate installation around it involving live actors and a sound collar and different interactive screens and things in addition to the headset experience. And I think it's worth noting that Celine and her team really worked hard to adapt the piece for an at-home audience where you don't miss any of those elements, where that onboarding actually does still happen in the headset. And I think that that is really remarkable and something that we can look forward to for creators who are thinking about ways to transfer their experiences from an LBE, you know, from a place of LBE launch to an at-home distribution. So, yeah.
[00:35:49.588] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:35:52.372] Loren Hammonds: Thanks for having me, Ken.
[00:35:55.296] Kent Bye: So that was Lauren Haymans. He's a senior programmer of film and immersive at Tribeca Film Festival. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, if you have a chance to see these, definitely go out and check them out. I highly recommend just watching all of them. It's hard for me to give recommendations of what people are going to like or not like. You're going to like some of them. You're not going to like some of them. So that's just the thing of watching them. I think it's important to watch them and try to articulate your thoughts on them. If you don't like something, then actually that can be sometimes more useful of defining what you think the medium of VR is, of what works with it, what doesn't work with it. For me, it helps to be in conversation with people. Normally at these film festivals, I get to watch these pieces and talk to them with the community and that helps to calibrate myself in different ways to be able to articulate my thoughts on them. What'd you think about this? What'd you think about that? So this is an opportunity to watch all these pieces and then over the next week or two to potentially get together in real time and to either with someone that you know one-on-one or with larger gatherings to be able to talk about the pieces. There's the actual stories and how the stories are told and what works and what doesn't work with using the medium of virtual reality. But then there's also the process of how they went about actually creating it. It's not easy to create immersive experiences. And so just to even finish an experience is quite a miracle. And just to hear about that journey, it can be insightful and inspirational if you're wanting to tell stories as well. So I'm going to dive into actually going into a lot of my thoughts of these experiences, what I liked, what I didn't like, and trying to go through that exercise. I'm just sort of riffing and having a conversation by myself. This is somewhere where it'd be very helpful to have a dialogue talking about all of these. So it's a bit of seeing these in a vacuum and just kind of putting out my initial thoughts, but hopefully this will just inspire further conversation. And what's really important is what you like, what you don't like, but also what you think works well with the medium and what doesn't work well. So let's dive into the actual experiences So the first the dreams to remember the first step was absolutely amazing I highly recommend checking that out just because they're doing a lot of taking archival footage and creating a photogrammetry like spatial recreation of stuff but also with actors and There's a lot of technical stuff that they're doing that I think is very interesting. The Apollo 11 going to the moon is a story that's been told a few times within virtual reality. I think this one though, I think is particularly effective just because they don't just go into Apollo 11, they go into some of the other missions, but just the way that they tell the story in a little bit more cinematic way, but pulling on that existing archival footage and somehow magically transmitting it into, you know, as if you were kind of going back in time and shooting the whole thing in a 360 camera. So lots of really great technical innovations there, highly recommended. Rainfruits, I thought was interesting in the sense that they're using a lot of point cloud representations to give you this impressionistic look at these different spaces. And then the characters they're using different shaders to give different visual abstractions of embodiment. And so the story is actually compelling in the sense of it's a real life story of immigrant going into Korea and the different challenges that he faces and the letters he's writing back and forth. And just this take on the memoir, I think is interesting to see how you're able to tell that story. I think they did a particularly good job of trying to do some sort of visual abstractions. A lot of times within these immersive pieces, you'll see a disconnect between the audio that's happening as well as what you're seeing. And there's still a little bit of a disconnect in this piece, but I think stronger relative to a lot of the other ones, just being able to tie together what they're talking about and what you're seeing visually. And then Dear Lizzie is like this animation piece that taken more of an illustrator approach in this 2.5D animation style, where you're having different animation, probably from other existing toolkits and putting it into an immersive environment, but still having kind of like a flat experience of that but nice short and sweet and stylistically way different than a lot of the other pieces that are programmed this year. Forgotten Kiss does very much seem like a theater production where they're coming from the center of gravity of theater. The story that's being told is a fairy tale. It has this conceit of the dark ride of you kind of moving through these immersive spaces and they have large architectural statues and different figures but There's a bit of disconnect between what's being said and what you're seeing. Like if, for example, you were to take away all the audio and just watch it visually, like how much of the story would you be able to get? And so they're leaning heavily on telling you the story and showing you a abstraction of some of the different visuals around you. But if you were to take away the audio altogether, then I think it would be a completely different story. leaning very heavily on that audio transmission of this narrative. And for pieces like this, I'd like to see a little bit more of like actually using the virtual reality medium to be able to start to tell the story. So why does this need to be in VR? What is the thing that you could only tell about the story if it's in VR? And I'd like to see a little bit more in a piece like that. So that was Forgotten Kiss. So moving on to the 17+, there is a lot of provocative pieces in here, and I think overall, stylistically, some different approaches as well. So A Safe Guide to Dying from the AFI was a film thesis project, and this has some interesting conceits in terms of narrative-wise, of looking at the future and the implications. They are covering a topic that is very intense and actually have some of the most graphic representations of violence that I've seen in virtual reality. And there is a content warning, but I don't know. It's hard because it's at the beginning of the program. It's hard to skip it if you are sensitive. But I would say that they're kind of blending a lot of the 2D film. You can kind of see that they are still coming from the center of gravity of 2D filmmaking. And they have 360 video, but there is a lot of the piece that is actually creating this surveillance-like, you know, multiple perspective panopticon experience. And the story itself is trying out different ways to commit suicide. And there's a bit of a cavalier approach to this topic, I'd say. You know, there's a little bit of lack of sensitivity towards the severity and reality of this. So it in some sense felt a little disjointed in terms of lack of cohesiveness of the narrative aspects of the story but there are some interesting aspects at the end where you get trapped in VR and you're not necessarily sure what reality is and kind of losing your grip on reality and just covering things in a way that I hadn't seen before and I thought that was interesting. So there is some payoffs at the end but It's not a piece that I can universally recommend just because I have no idea what people's sensitivities to seeing that type of violence might be. So, Black Bag, I saw it at Venice as well and I actually really enjoyed it the first time I saw it. What I really enjoyed and appreciated about this piece was that it's got a very distinct visual style. I mean, it is trying to move you through this experience and taking a very stylistic approach. It's like hand-drawn and got this kind of rotoscope type of feel. but it's also got some very interesting world building probably some of the more interesting world building of all the different pieces that are here and using things that you could only do within VR in terms of the sense of scale and the sense of worlds that you're being taken into but at the same time it's a bit dystopic and dark and a little bit of a male fantasy of violence So certainly not for everybody, but I did appreciate the storytelling aspects of how to tell a spatial story now That story is still a little bit open-ended, but the crater is coming from China And so maybe there is some different aspects of the experience of surveillance or living in China where they're trying to like unpack some of those experiences, but I have to you know, talk to the crater and kind of unpack it more but Black Bag, I think, is a good piece to if people are super skeptical about what 360 video has to offer the rest of the VR community. I think this is a good example to see different aspects of storytelling and cut scenes. And it feels like you're kind of stepping into a graphic novel in some ways. So the pantheon of queer mythology is again using this conceit of moving the camera through these different spatial worlds. Some of the more elaborate world building and characters, but again, I think that there's a bit of a disconnect between what is being said and what is being shown. Again, a type of piece where I'd like to see further exploration of how you can use the spatial nature of virtual reality. you do have a lot of the 3d models and objects and as you're moving around you do get a real good depth sense and spatial sense and so it does leave you with a memory of it in that way but again i'd like to see a further exploration of using the spatial medium for answering the question like why does this absolutely have to be in vr So Saturnism, I think is, is one of those pieces where it would have benefited for having the original high resolution copy of it, just because the digital artifacts and the version that I saw at least was pretty severe. And this type of piece is really leveraging on that dark moody experience with this conceit of trying to, you know, step into a painting, which I've seen a number of different pieces that do this and Saturn's darkies literally eating his children. So trying to recreate that sense of tension and. Was it able to really create that sense of terror of being there? There's different experiences of horror that I've seen in virtual reality that have been more intense in that sense. And so I'd like to see, you know, maybe a further exploration of the enemy that's there, but you don't quite know it's there. There's the building and the releasing of tension didn't necessarily have a big payoff that I've seen in other horror experiences within VR. So. but still trying to put you into a painting. And is it a painting that you want to enter into? I think that's another question, but with all that's happening in the world right now, it could be a bit cathartic to go into these different worlds of Saturn eating its children. So that was Saturnism. The Kinfolk series, I think it's probably one of my favorite programs. I thought that a lot of the topics that were being talked about in terms of family and home and memory just work particularly well within virtual reality. So the fringe, a graphic memoir in VR, some great music to be able to take you into a different place and just The connection between music and memory is very strong. And so I thought that actually worked really well there's a lot of like abstract point cloud representations of the different scenes and sometimes there's a lot that's happening like layers upon layers upon layers and I think this is a piece that may have benefited from reducing a lot of the other clutter and really trying to focus in on different pieces and the movement of the camera through the piece also just kind of felt somewhat arbitrary or random and so having a little bit more deliberate cinematography as you're moving through these spaces and potentially having a little bit tighter correlation between what is being said and what you're seeing but And when talking about memory, you do have these impressionistic fragments. And so maybe it's just a recreation of some of those aspects as well. And also an exploration of a little bit more of a personal memoir of identity and race and mixed race heritage and being connected to different regions. And so I thought that was interesting anthropological exploration as well. The Inhabited House I saw at the IFA doc lab in Amsterdam and really really enjoyed it when I first saw it and again enjoyed it again. The innovation here is taking what are traditional home movies in 2D but Taking like a 360 photo and overlaying those memories on top of a consistent architecture So you feel like you're actually in this house and you have this spatial experience of this house But you're getting this portaled window almost like an augmented reality within virtual reality into the past and then mashing together different parts of the past together within the same scene and and you're moving around the space and seeing different perspectives of the past and just talking about family and your ancestors and being in the home. I think this conceit of being within your grandparents' home is a very powerful one, especially if you have had an opportunity of knowing your grandparents and going into their homes it ends up being this thing that is a common experience that we have. And I'd love to see more folks go into creating or recreating different aspects of their childhood homes or their grandparents' homes. And if they do have any digital artifacts, just start to overlay them and then to annotate them with your own story. Just a super powerful approach. Simple on the surface, but when I first saw this piece, it was like, Would I see myself watching this home movie? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe if there was a compelling story that's overlaid it, but to be immersed within the larger architecture, it just opens up this portal that allows me to be much more receptive to looking into this type of footage or these types of stories. So I think it's really powerful exploration of memoir and family and memory. And then the last one of this piece was home. There's a trend that I've seen from both Taiwanese and Chinese filmmakers, these durational takes, these single shot takes, they're just long. And I think it actually starts to work really well for diving into the affordances of virtual reality to take you into a place and to give you a little snapshot of somebody's life. And I wasn't aware of the backstory of this piece and hearing more about that, that his grandmother had already died and they lost access to ever going back into this home and then to get permission to go back and to refurnish it and then to bring in the family again to come back as well as, you know, to have actors in there kind of seamlessly blended together. It just really sweet and powerful, really powerful. It's like an anthropological lens of seeing how the Chinese culture respects the elders, but also just at the end, you're kind of left there alone and just tapping into this archetypal experience of lineage and family and grandparents and the relationships of families and family dynamics. And yeah, just really well done. I really enjoyed it. And after hearing additional context, it's just really moving just to hear that additional backstory to this piece in particular. All right, so the last section of the pure imagination. So these were pieces that were geared towards all ages and two of the pieces were from Oculus for good. Again, continuing this dynamic of rather than just doing pure 360 video, seeing how you could start to use the affordances of animation and storytelling. So the Lutaw was the first one I saw in this program and they're doing montage sequences and accelerating time in different ways that I think are very interesting. And the character design's great. One question that I have is what are the things about this piece that really required, that has to be told in VR? And I'm not sure that I, as, as I'm walking away, that I have a good answer for that. And a lot of these Oculus for Good programs, they have a very specific message that they're trying to communicate. And so I think they're able to do that. In certain parts of the Philippines, kids have to take boats in order to get to school, which is way different than a lot of the other regions. And so that's a very specific thing of commuting in order to get education by having to use boats and the challenges of trying to deal with that. And this nonprofit that's very specifically looking at that. So Attack on Daddy was, in terms of genre-wise, like the one comedy that was included this year. And in terms of VR and the affordances of VR, being able to shrink yourself down and put yourself into the dollhouse, I think is one of the things that's compelling about virtual reality, to be able to do things like that where you couldn't necessarily do that otherwise. And just kind of a fun, quirky experience where if you've spent any time playing with kids and allowing them to chase their imagination, then it plays into that as well. imaginal exploration of this dollhouse and different dynamics of scale and yeah just kind of like a fun light-hearted comedy piece. The Tale of the Tibetan was a piece, again, it's an adaptation of a folk tale. You're somebody who ends up going through grief and loss. And it kind of felt like a student production, sort of a low budget exploration of this topic. And the pacing was a little slow in this piece and the places that I'm being taken didn't feel like there was a huge payoff for why a piece like this absolutely needed to be in VR. You know, it's pieces like this where it's easy for me to say, well, I don't know if it worked so well, but they're actually creating it. And so to really identify the specific things that worked and didn't work is part of the challenge of creating a larger critical discourse. So I'm really curious to hear other people's thoughts on this one actually, and just to see what is it about it that works and doesn't work. And then finally the Upstander, which was another Oculus for good piece, which is an animated piece where you're watching characters who are backpacks. A very interesting choice. I've never necessarily identified with backpacks, but it's trying to tell a story that is meant for a very specific audience. And so I'm not that target demographic. And so it's hard for me to know how effective a piece like this is going to be with communicating this message. It's a very important message to be able to actually stand up if you see bullying. It'd be very curious to see the type of experience that actually encourages you to be a first person player, to actually to stand up and to do that training of being more than just a bystander, but to actually stand up and to actually embody what they're trying to communicate in this piece. You know, they're trying to make it so that it's breaking a taboo of just being a bystander and not saying anything. And I don't know if this narrative world is going to be enough to be able to do that. So a couple of things that I think work well in a piece like this is the animation. So how much can you give expression to abstract objects? And I think it's difficult to do that in reality, but in animation as a medium, it's easier to do that. And so finding ways to give expressiveness to these inanimate objects. And so some interesting experiments in that sense of trying to actually take something like a backpack and give it emotion and expression. There was a success there. And I think another montage sequence that I think worked particularly well within VR was the point at which you're getting a lot of cyberbullying on your phone and people really just attacking you and it's quite intense to imagine yourself, you know, reading these messages that are coming through. So I thought that was effective in terms of using the virtual reality technologies to kind of like bombard you with a lot of this type of cyberbullying and Trying to build empathy in that sense and I do think that it was successful in that sense So I'll be curious to see what happens with this piece and how effective it is with reaching the youth that it's really trying to target So the key is going to be coming out. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you check that experience out and also check out the interview that I did with Celine Tricart back in episode 821, because I think there's a lot of really great narrative innovations. And if you watch that piece, I think you'll get a good sense of the type of content that was being programmed at Tribeca. So that was a piece that won the Storyscapes last year and went on to win at Venice as well. So definitely worth checking out, especially just to see what has been happening in the realm of immersive storytelling. So again, this is an opportunity right now for a lot of these pieces to get out there for people to watch. I highly recommend just checking them all out. And I'm looking forward personally to seeing where this all goes in terms of trying to find new ways of displaying this work. Again, just as a reminder, I think what's important about this as an exercise of immersive storytelling is to try to watch all the work, whether you like it or not, is not necessarily always the point. It's, again, very difficult at this point to create anything within the immersive space. And so If you don't like something, then go out and make something better. That's the whole point is that this is a kind of a dialectic that happens where it's a process of creation. It's not easy to take a first stab of trying to tell these different stories. And it's much easier to be in the position of a critic than it is to be in a position of a maker and a creator to be able to create something from scratch. So if you. think that you have another way of telling stories in a more compelling or interesting way, then use this as a catalyst to be able to go out and try to tell the story that you want to tell. And as an overall thing that I'm seeing in this year's program is that really leveraged the affordances of the medium, the spatial aspects of it, being able to move through a space, the interactive components. But again, this is a 360 video, so you're not able to actually interact. So. you're already at that point losing a lot of those aspects. But in terms of space and memory and creating immersive spaces that are symbolically representative of some deeper story, there's ways that you can start to experiment with that. Black Bag, I think, is starting to do that. And the conceit of moving a camera through a space is a way to really try to engage that more spatial aspect. That's a thing that I see a majority of a lot of these different pieces of the movement of the camera through these different spaces. And how do you do that in a way that's comfortable and doesn't make people motion sick, but also allows you to give a little bit more of that spatial experience. And I think it's worth looking at the 360 video as a medium and to see what transcends the medium itself and to see what is applying to all immersive media in terms of what works and what doesn't work and in terms of this is a new storytelling medium. 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 listeners-supported podcast, and so 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.
