The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 and since then has held over 1,500 screenings. The festival’s line up often includes cutting edge, innovative films, documentaries and shorts. As virtual reality (VR) has grown in influence, Tribeca has begun to feature VR experiences alongside more traditional media. The film festival will this year be featuring a Virtual Arcade, which features VR experience Draw Me Close.
Draw Me Close is a collaboration between the National Film Board of Canada and the Uk’s National Theatre. The VR experience was created by playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill, and tells the story of the relationship between a mother and her son after she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience is a combination of live-action performance captured with a 360-degree camera, mixed with 3D animation.
Draw Me Close will première at the Tribeca Film Festival as part of the Storyscapes virtual arcade, which will feature 30 VR projects for attendees to immerse themselves in.
“There’s no other story that weighs more heavily on my mind right now than my relationship with my mother—a story that’s still in the process of unfolding. Draw Me Close has been an extraordinary opportunity for me to reckon with all of the challenging and ultimately unknowable questions around mortality.” said Jordan Tannahill, Co-creator of Draw Me Close.
“The primary motivation for the NFB and National Theatre Lab was to combine the strengths of our respective studios and experiment at the edges of creative documentary, theatre and VR—to expand the possibilities of VR storytelling and play a small part in building a creative vocabulary for this evolving medium. Jordan is a brilliant writer and multi-disciplinary artist, and not afraid to play with boundaries, including between the mediated and the live, so Draw Me Close really benefits from that chemistry. He had a wonderfully humanistic vision for what he wanted to create with this piece. I’m looking forward to seeing Tribeca audiences inhabit the world that we’ve created, and I think they will be emotionally transported when they do.” added David Oppenheim, Producer at the National Film Board of Canada.
The Tribeca Film Festival is taking place from 21st-29th April. Further information can be found on the Tribeca official website.
VRFocus will continue to bring you new on VR projects.