Cannes film festival – Page 2 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

May 20, 2017

VR Satire Comes to Cannes Film Festival

What is is like to be a performer, totally at the mercy of the whims of your audience? A satirical virtual reality (VR) experience directed by Ethan Shaftel is trying to put attendees of the Cannes Film Festival in that position in a VR film titled Extravaganza.

Featuring as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s Marche du Film NEXT Vr program, Extravganza puts viewers who strap on the VR headset in the position of being a helpless puppet performing a ridiculous show for the entertainment of a clueless executive played by Paul Scheer. However, much about the experience is not what it seems and it might just be possible for the player to break out of their enforced performance.

The experience uses technology provided by 3D modelling company MAXON, using its Cinema 4D software to render the VR content, which Shaftel has used in previous projects for visual effects and animation. “In EXTRAVAGANZA the viewer finds themselves in the novel position of being “consumed” by an audience, subjected to their insults and confronted with many of mainstream entertainment’s blind spots and prejudices,“ explains Shaftel. “Using MAXON’s 3D and virtual reality filmmaking tools allowed us to create an immersive environment so that we could bring assumptions to the surface we have about how stories are told that couldn’t otherwise be told in a traditional film medium.”

“One of the cool things we did with EXTRAVAGANZA is to combine our live-action actor Paul Scheer, filmed with a traditional non-VR camera, within a fully 3D-animated world. When Scheer lifts up the VR puppet show where the viewer is “inside” and straps it to his face, he is fully a part of their environment, staring down at them and the other VR puppets,” Shaftel continues, “This required us to work out some tricky projection-mapping style techniques in Cinema 4D to blend the real footage and the animation. We also relied on the Xref tools to instance our mechanized instruments to better synch with our musical score, the Point Level Morph for our inflatable ballerinas, and various Character Constraint tags to rig-up all our puppets and the mechanized moving stage together.”

The Cannes Film Festival will take place between 17th-28th May in Cannes, France.

VRFocus will continue to bring you news of innovative new VR film projects.

May 11, 2017

Immersive Summit to be Launched in Cannes

Winston Baker are launching a new tech conference in partnership with Marche Du Film, the business counterpart to the more famous Cannes Film Festival, to discuss innovation in film and how to break into the virtual reality (VR) industry.

Winston Baker are a well-known event management company who have organised the event to take place on 19th May, 2017. The event will feature a keynote speech from Rich Gelfond on IMAX Corporation’s recent forays into VR technology, and a presentation by director and producer Brett Ratner. Other film and technology industry names who are due to appear are Marcie Jastrow of Technicolor, CEO of Digital Reign Productions Evette Vargas, Chris Payne of the New Zealand Film Commission, Michael Andreen of 20th Century Fox and many other recognisable names.

“Within the frame of our program NEXT, we’ve started two years ago to explore immersive cinema and VR, both in terms of production and distribution. We’re excited to join our forces with Winston Baker to launch this Immersive Summit, which will complement perfectly the workshops and experiences offered by NEXT to Marché participants” said Jérôme Paillard, Executive Director of the Marché du Film.

The event will have panel discussions, interviews and workshops which will go on throughout the day. The Immersive Summit is being sponsored by a wide array of investors and companies from the film and television sectors, including EP Financial Solutions, Akin Gump, New Zealand Film Commission and The Hollywood Reporter.

Further information and registration details are available on the Film Finance Forum website.

VRFocus will bring you further news on the Immersive Summit as it becomes available.

April 15, 2017

Cannes Film Festival Gets First VR Entry

The Cannes Film Festival is now in its 70^th year and is considered one of the most important events in the calendar for movie buffs and professionals in the film industry. Significantly, this year will also be the first time that a virtual reality (VR) film will be included in the festival line-up.

The VR entry is directed by Mexican director Alejandro G. Inarritu, who has previously been the recipient of Academy Awards for his films The Revenant and Birdman. His VR Cannes entry is titled Carne y Arena (Meat and Sand) which is an exploration of the experiences of immigrants and refugees. The official description is as follows:

“Based on true accounts, the superficial lines between subject and bystander are blurred and bound together, allowing individuals to walk in a vast space and thoroughly live a fragment of the refugees’ personal journeys. CARNE y ARENA employs the highest, never-before-used virtual technology to create a large, multi-narrative light space with human characters.”

Festival director Thierry Fremaux said it was: “A beautiful film, you are shivering when you come out of it.” and compared it to the innovations of the Lumiere Brothers, who are regarded by many as the fathers of cinema.

49 films are due to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which is set to take place from 17th-28th May in Cannes. Southern France. In a reflection of the changing world of film and television and the growth of technology, several of the films were funded by Amazon or Netflix, and television series such as the revival of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks will be previewed at the festival alongside movies.

VRFocus will continue to bring you news on VR in film and television.

April 13, 2017

Heavy hitters and hot tickets: Cannes 2017 is as mouthwatering as ever | Peter Bradshaw

Michael Haneke’s Happy End leads the charge for this year’s Palme d’Or, but there are tasty spectacles on the Croisette wherever you look

The Cannes official selection list has been unveiled and it is a politicised lineup with a repeated thematic emphasis on the refugee crisis, designed to give the finger to the New Trump Order. The inclusion of Claude Lanzmann’s new film Napalm may be of interest to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer – horrified as he is about countries who use chemical weapons.