Technology is Hollywood’s current arch nemesis, but as exhibitors on Venice film festival’s ‘immersive island’ will tell you, AI, VR and XR could lead to a brighter future
One of the hottest tickets at the 80th Venice film festival isn’t a movie at all but a VR installation on the event’s self-styled “Immersive Island”. Each user sits at a computer and answers a series of personal questions, which the exhibit – in the space of a few seconds – converts into a bespoke portrait of their life. The project, Tulpamancer, is officially the work of Brooklyn-based artists Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser. In practice, though, it amounts to a creative collaboration between the user and AI.
Generative AI plays the role of Sleeping Beauty’s bad fairy at Venice. The ongoing writers and actors’ strike was largely prompted by fears over the new technology’s impact on film and TV production and has resulted in numerous star performers deciding to skip this year’s festival. But in the meantime, AI – unwelcome, uninvited and arguably misunderstood – has already joined the party. It’s hiding in the cracks of the films on the main programme and helping facilitate the creation of the XR (extended reality) pieces on the island.
On the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the small island home of Venice film festival’s Immersive section, I donned an XR headset and boldly went where most festivalgoers don’t
Traditional cinema hogs the limelight at the Venice film festival but there’s an array of wilder delights just behind the main site. Hang a right past the PalaBiennale theatre and a boat whisks you across to the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the small island home of the event’s Venice Immersive section. It’s a two-minute ride but it feels like light years away.
Venice’s self-styled “Immersion Island” is dedicated to showcasing emergent technologies – and by definition emergent storytelling. There are 28 XR (extended reality) productions in the main competition, together with 24 “world gallery” tours hosted by VRChat, and these run the gamut from interactive movies through 360-degree videos to the sort of imposing standalone installations you’d otherwise find in a modish art gallery. The medium is nascent and even the language around it is still bedding down. The works on the schedule aren’t quite films or games or art displays, although most will contain elements from all three disciplines. “We like to call them experiences,” says the woman on the desk with a shrug.
Using VR and haptic vests to transport users to a sweaty club in 1980s Britain, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is so realistic that you might need a lie down afterwards
I’m not the kind of person who you’d normally find at an illegal rave at a regular raving time, let alone 9am on a Wednesday. But that’s where I found myself this week – virtually, anyway: with a haptic vest strapped on to my back, a controller in each hand and a virtual reality headset covering my eyes, I’m transported back to 1989, hooning through the suburbs with my friends to find a secret dancefloor.
Darren Emerson’s award-winning interactive VR film, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, tracks the acid-house movement and rave scene in Coventry, UK. It’s wholly transportive – I forget that I’m actually standing in the middle of an empty studio in metro Melbourne, because for half an hour I’m in the back of a car, in a friend’s poster-strewn bedroom, in a police station, hurtling down a freeway, bumping up against sweaty bodies in a club and walking through a forest hungover as the day breaks and the sun peeks through the trees.
Australia’s cinephiles have been well served by this year’s Melbourne international film festival, with a program that – as usual – sources an eclectic range of productions from around the globe. Announced on Tuesday, the festival’s 71st iteration runs in Melbourne cinemas from 3-20 August – and in regional cinemas from 11-13 and 18-20 August. An additional online version will run from 18-27 August.
Many of this year’s highlights have already played at Sydney film festival – so click here to read more about No Bears, Hello Dankness, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, 20,000 Species of Bees and How to Blow up a Pipeline.
The Venice film festival section Venice Immersive is dedicated to ‘extended reality’, where visitors can explore new narrative worlds. Our intrepid correspondent gets lost
I’m at the Venice film festival, in a hyper-real city square, surrounded by lapping blue water and tourists who move in mysterious ways. There is a ginger cat here called Dorian who walks on his hind legs and speaks with a French accent. Dorian is showing us how to walk and turn and jump and crouch. He’s concerned by the tourist who can’t get herself off the ground. Dorian explains that if we ever get lost we should press the “respawn” button which will put us right back where we began. He sighs heavily and says: “Sooner or later everybody gets lost.”
It is the fear of getting lost – this terror of the unknown – that scares many punters away from Venice Immersive, which sits behind the big Mussolini-era casino that hosts the film festival proper. That and the boat ride, the headsets, the schedule, the stress. The movies on the main programme: they’re largely a known quantity. Whereas the “extended reality” exhibits out on VI island are almost too much to process; we lack even the grammar and the language to frame them. To misquote Bob Dylan, something is happening here – but no one, it seems, can definitively say what it is.
The Melbourne international film festival installation transports viewers to the Daintree Rainforest. Its creators share how they built an entire ecosystem
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts stopped all the clocks the moment they arrived in the Daintree Rainforest to start a five month research trip for their epic, 48-hour, virtual reality film Gondwana. Arriving in the wet season of 2019, “we scrambled our phones, our computers. We embraced the cycles of time that occur in the forest,” says Andrews, the film’s director. “That letting go and surrendering gave us time to listen, and gain a deep appreciation of the multi-layered nature of that environment.”
Their experience in the 180m-year-old rainforest, which literally re-shaped their sense of time, has never left them. Now, the pair hope to immerse audiences in a similarly perspective-altering experience with the installation of Gondwana at ACMI as part of Melbourne’s international film festival, which will screen over 48 hours from Thursday to Saturday.
The Melbourne international film festival returns with a beefy line-up this year, just like the ol’ days pre-pandemic. Running in cinemas from 4 to 21 August, and online 11 to 28 August, the festival’s 70th edition includes 371 films – including 18 feature film world premieres and 112 feature film Australian premieres.
As usual, cinephiles have been pampered with selections plucked from all over the world. Here are 10 titles to put on your radar.
Please note that the following review is not an endorsement of purchasing the NFTs discussed, and the author does not themself own any of the collection.
One of the most prestigious events in the cinema calendar, the Cannes Film Festival is currently running until the 28th of May. Returning with full spectator capacity for the first time in two years thanks to a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, the event is embracing Web3 technology in a number of ways, including the first-ever NFTCannes Summit hosted by production studio Electromagnetic Productions (EMP), global cryptocurrency financial management company Galaxy Interactive, NFT app OP3N, blockchain platform Avalanche and private investing platform Republic.
NFT Tickets
The focus of our attention today, however, is an NFT collection that confers access to screenings for some of the biggest films debuting at the festival. In keeping with 2022 being the 75th anniversary of the festival, pplpleaser, a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City, has created a series of 75 NFTs in partnership with video content publisher Brut, an official media partner of the festival.
The artist previously worked in visual effects, with credits in feature films such as Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman and Star Trek Beyond, as well as games from Blizzard and others. She rose to prominence in the NFT world as an early creator of NFT animations, helping to define the anime-indebted aesthetic found throughout the sector.
Image Credit: pplpleasr
The collection is divided up into tiers, though each retains the same basic concept of an animated, seemingly anime-inspired white fox (somewhat reminiscent of Moro in the Studio Ghibli classic Princess Mononoke) walking the red carpet and striking a pose. The fox is fluidly animated, with silver tier NFTs featuring tie-ins with films opening at the festival. In the Top Gun: Maverick-themed NFT, it wears a pair of Aviator sunglasses, while in the Elvis-themed piece, it poses with a guitar.
While nice enough, the art is not the main attraction here. Depending on the tier of NFT purchased, different perks are accessible. NFTs in the most numerous bronze tier cost 5 ETH and confer access to the red carpet and a film showing. In the 6 ETH silver tier, holders are invited to the world premieres of Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis and Three Thousand Years of Longing respectively, while the 7 ETH gold tier NFTs enable holders to attend either the opening or closing ceremonies.
The NFTs are minted using the decentralized film distribution platform Shibuya, of which the artist pplpleasr is a founder. The platform is geared towards allowing users to fund and simultaneously guide the production of short films by minting producer pass NFTs. Unlike some other NFT-funded projects, the plan is for completed films to be made available to watch for free, rather than requiring direct NFT ownership to watch (as with Stoner Cats, an NFT collection tied to a series of short films backed, strangely enough, by Mila Kunis).
Image Credit: Cannes Producer Pass NFT
The Background
All proceeds from the NFT sales will be given to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and its Annenberg Accelerator Program, which supports aspiring female content creators.
“The Accelerator Program is one of our many solution-based initiatives to support and develop the next generation of talented female-indentifying creators,” said founder Dr. Stacy L. Smith of the collaboration. “We are thrilled that Brut and pplpleasr have seen the importance of such a project and have chosen to back us in this way.”
Interestingly, the NFTs are initially non-transferrable until they have been redeemed for red carpet access, at which point they can be sold on secondary markets. It’s an intriguing approach, giving what are effectively glorified tickets an afterlife as tradeable collectables that carry with them some of the mystique of the event they were originally for.
Cannes is not the only film festival to have gotten into the NFT game, with the Raindance festival creating a collection based on posters for the festival over the years. The wider film industry, too, is increasingly getting on board with the technology. Just one example is Decentralized Pictures, a blockchain-powered filmmaker platform founded by Roman Coppola and backed by Steven Soderbergh’s production company Extension 765, among others. The DAO-like platform is set to go live during the festival, using a native token, FILMCredits, as a voting mechanism to decide the worthiness of films for funding.
The Verdict
While the Cannes Producer Pass Collection is not going to set the world on fire by itself, it does represent an intriguing new opportunity for a film industry that is rapidly adopting Web3 technology. If Web3 is to succeed, it surely needs the participation of mainstream sectors and combining the glitz and glamour of Cannes, pplpleasr’s art, and a dose of innovative utility is a step in the right direction.
The star of Free Solo is back with a new series featuring terrifying climbs – this time using virtual reality
The great promise of virtual reality lies in its potential to replicate otherwise unattainable experiences. And few in the physical world can match the experiences of Alex Honnold, the American rock climber who has distinguished himself with ropeless ascents up some of the world’s most fearsome cliffs.
This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer
There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.
Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.
