Category: Aurora

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Sci-Fi London Film Festival 2019 Returns in May With a Selection of 360 & VR Shorts

For those who love a good science fiction film, the Sci-Fi London Film Festival returns to the city next month for the 19th time. The event will see 4 world film premieres, 11 UK film premieres, 11 world short premieres and 13 UK short premieres, alongside a collection of 360-degree and virtual reality (VR) short films.

Image credit: Cyberdream VR

The Sci-Fi London Film Festival 2019 is taking place at two venues in London, the Prince Charles Cinema and Stratford Picturehouse. Guests wandering around either location will be able to find members of the festival’s team carrying headsets, able to enjoy eight confirmed experiences:

  • The Book of True Feelings – 3 mins – “A simple experiment on how performance context cues in virtual reality can shape experienced emotion. Ahlquist describes the work as an inverse of the Kuleshov experiment that discovered essential principles in context cues to convey meaning and emotion in film editing.”
  • Sympathetic Threads – 13 mins – “A speculative fantasy drama that follows the characters as they interact throughout an evening together. Combining live action, animation and a spatialised soundtrack to immerse you in the lives of these people.”
  • Rocketman 360 – 20 mins – “A few minutes before taking off to Mars, an astronaut receives a 360 video from his girlfriend.”
  • Aurora – 5 mins – “Set in a beautiful forest clearing “AURORA” gives the audience space to experience the majesty of nature through a time-lapse style narrative of day to night, spring to winter and life to death.”
  • Future Warfare Simulator: The Year 2030 – 9 mins – “The year is 2030. How does the world look? What are the meta-trends that the global military has to deal with? This 360 film was created for the Australian Army’s Future Warfare Directorate.”
  • En Machina – 12 mins – “Two inventors, Steve and Steve, create the world’s first true artificial intelligence in their garage, but it doesn’t seem to be impressed.”
  • Cyberdream VR – 3 mins – “A virtual hallucination taking you on a journey through the broken techno-utopias of cyberspace.  A psychedelic world of surrealistic rave visuals and vaporwave music.”
  • The All-Seeing Eye – 5 mins – “It paints the world differently. A Mixed-Reality Location-Based Experience, Powered By MagicLeap & SubPac.”
Rocketman
Image Credit: Rocketman 360

In addition to the VR films, the festival will also be hosting #HACKSTOCK: 5 on the 16th – 18th May. The event is designed to bring: “creators, makers, disrupters, artists, musicians, hackers, developers and you together in one place to talk it, think it, do it and play with it.”  Completely free and held at a secret location, every form of headset will be there – from cardboard to Magic Leap. Access to the Hackstock playground is by password only, register on the festival website for the details.

Sci-Fi London Film Festival 2019 runs from 15th May until the 22nd May, with the opening day at the Prince Charles Cinema showcasing the UK Premiere of PERFECT, while the closing night at Stratford Picturehouse will see the World Premiere of THE RIZEN: POSSESSION. For any further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

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Pink Kong Studios Debut VR Animation Aurora at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival

This time of year features a plethora of immersive film premiere’s thanks to festivals like Sundance, Tribeca and SXSW. While those are all in the US, there are plenty of other films festivals featuring 360-degree and virtual reality (VR) content. Last month was the Audi Dublin International Film Festival and as part of its Immersive Stories Conference, Irish creative  Pink Kong Studios debuted its first animated VR short Aurora to the public.

Aurora screenshot1

Aurora immerses the viewer in powerful visuals and sounds of nature. The emotive storyline offers a captivating experience, inviting viewers to reflect on the nature of time itself.

Directed by Aoife Doyle and produced by Niamh Herrity alongside writer Denis James Ryan, the team were awarded a bursary of €30k EUR by ADIFF, Screen Training Ireland & Audi Ireland to produce Aurora. Director Aoífe Doyle explains: “Emerging technologies have always been on our agenda since myself and Niamh founded the studio in 2014. Aurora has afforded us the opportunity to realise a goal of creating a storytelling piece in VR. It’s amazing that you can don a headset and be transported to another world. That’s the great thing about immersive storytelling!

“We hope AURORA gives the audience a space to experience and reflect on the passing of time. Time can be profound and precious, and we really wanted the audience to take a moment and appreciate that. The story follows the lives of a young family and all who inhabit the films vividly coloured landscape. We really wanted to create an emotional and immersive experience. As we watch the seasons change Nature herself becomes a central character in the piece”, continues Doyle.

Aurora screenshot3

Created in just four months, Aurora stayed true to Pink Kong Studios 2D sensibilities,  with the virtual environment incorporating both 2D and 3D elements. The film premiered as a room scale experience utilising HTC Vive allowing certain elements of the film to be interactive.

“If you’re patient and still, you can enjoy the beauty of a fawn and its mother grazing a few feet from you but move too quickly towards them and you have the ability to spook them…just as you would in real life. The desire to implement these additional experiences for the audience within such a tight schedule led us to bring Peter Craddock and the team at Manchester based Studio Liddell onboard the project. We worked closely together to stay true to the vision of Aurora and I’m really proud of what the whole team achieved in such a short turn around,” Doyle adds.

Aurora will be taken to several more festivals and VR events around the world. Currently there’s been no mention of a wider home release. You can see the trailer here, and for any further updates, keep reading VRFocus.