Film – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 13, 2020

Virtual voguing and digital razzle-dazzle: London film festival takes the arts into a new dimension

The BFI London film festival’s exciting and enchanting new strand – LFF Expanded – mixes recorded, virtual and live experiences. It’s a pivotal moment for performance

October 13, 2020

Virtual voguing and digital razzle-dazzle: London film festival takes the arts into a new dimension

The BFI London film festival’s exciting and enchanting new strand – LFF Expanded – mixes recorded, virtual and live experiences. It’s a pivotal moment for performance

‘Pivot” – to stay on the spot while turning to a new direction – is a word much bandied about in cultural organisations right now, as they look for ways forward while the Covid crisis has suspended normal activity. Like all live arts, dance has pivoted heavily towards the screen, and to “blended” on-site and online access. Fortuitously, screen arts are simultaneously turning towards the live: this year, the BFI London film festival launched LFF Expanded, a new strand dedicated to virtual reality, extended reality, augmented and mixed realities, immersive and 360° experiences – a ragtag set of labels all trying to capture the sense of “convergence” (as the lingo has it) between recorded, virtual and live experiences.

I went to LFF Expanded on site at London’s BFI Southbank (it’s online too, but you don’t get headsets, or help at hand) to find out how dance and VR/XR are interacting. Acqua Alta (on-site only) is a delightful pop-up book – yes, just white paper and black ink – by French company Adrien M & Claire B. The 10 spreads fold out into different scenes from the story, but the magic comes when you view them through a computer tablet: two inky silhouettes – miniature, motion-captured versions of dancers Dimitri Hatton and Satchie Noro – emerge from the paper and step and swirl around, off and up from the page. The enchantment comes not from deceiving our senses – the illusion is entirely undisguised – but from the superimposition of animated fantasy on to material reality.

Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson’s Dazzle Solo is titled as such not because it has a solo performer, but because it is a single-user version of an interactive, multi-user gallery installation, currently on hold. As for “dazzle” – well, imagine a cross between Oskar Schlemmer, Bridget Riley, Merce Cunningham and a liquorice allsort, and you get a sense of the vibe. Its inspiration was the legendary Chelsea Arts Club Ball of 1919, where partygoers dressed up to imitate the black-and-white dazzle camouflage (AKA razzle-dazzle) used on naval ships. In Martelli and Gibson’s environment, you can jump between different scenes, each with their own giddying perspectives, algorithmic choreography and psychedelic dancing figures – humanoid, geometric or entirely abstract – that can pass right through you like digital ectoplasm. It’s pure fantasy – and dazzling though it is, the rarefied solo experience feels a little self-isolating. I can imagine the unquarantined gallery installation being more of a ball.

LFF Expanded continues at BFI Southbank and online, free until 18
October.

September 6, 2019

Cold war experiments and storybook monsters – back to Venice’s VR island

Now in its third year, the virtual reality section of Venice is making serious forays into documentary territory.

The 76th Venice film festival has included sci-fi thrills and comic-book action, backstage melodrama and medieval court intrigue. During the event’s most escapist moments, anyone longing for a dose of reality would have had more luck finding it in the virtual world.

Venice VR is a pioneering festival sidebar dedicated to showcasing the best examples of an emergent art form, with a programme of 40 VR works from around the world. Now in its third year, the section already appears to have turned more mature and serious in its focus. “New art forms usually gravitate towards dystopian fantasy and escapism,” says Liz Rosenthal, Venice VR’s co-curator. “But we’re now seeing projects that are more interested in human relationships and social issues. It’s all got a lot more sophisticated.”

July 8, 2019

In the age of deepfakes, could virtual actors put humans out of business?

In film and video games, we’ve already seen what’s possible with ‘digital humans’. Are we on the brink of the world’s first totally virtual acting star?

When you’re watching a modern blockbuster such as The Avengers, it’s hard to escape the feeling that what you’re seeing is almost entirely computer-generated imagery, from the effects to the sets to fantastical creatures. But if there’s one thing you can rely on to be 100% real, it’s the actors. We might have virtual pop stars like Hatsune Miku, but there has never been a world-famous virtual film star.

Even that link with corporeal reality, though, is no longer absolute. You may have already seen examples of what’s possible: Peter Cushing (or his image) appearing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story more than 20 years after his death, or Tupac Shakur performing from beyond the grave at Coachella in 2012. We’ve seen the terrifying potential of deepfakes – manipulated footage that could play a dangerous role in the fake news phenomenon. Jordan Peele’s remarkable fake Obama video is a key example. Could technology soon make professional actors redundant?

April 4, 2019

Tsai Ming-liang: master of long takes and watermelon sex

This ‘slow cinema’ legend has now abandoned all dialogue. As the UK Taiwan film festival kicks off, he talks about his latest work – about a man with neck pain who owns a fish

‘In my childhood, cinema was like going into a temple. Now, it’s more like going into a shopping mall,” says Tsai Ming-liang. Over the course of his nearly 30-year career, the Taiwanese film-maker’s work has moved further and further towards the “temple” end of the spectrum. Often bracketed under the “slow cinema” movement, he is a master of the very long take. His last feature, 2013’s Stray Dogs, included a shot of two people staring at a mural in an abandoned building that lasted over 14 minutes. But despite his shaven head, Tsai is no monk. In the past, his films have featured choreographed musical sequences, surreal comedy, and plenty of sex – gay, straight, solo, even watermelon-incorporating, in the case of 2005’s The Wayward Cloud.

In person, he is unassuming and quick to laugh. “In the past I really cared if people understood my films, but when you grow older, you care less,” says Tsai, who turned 61 last year. “You want to do something to please yourself. I feel like the film industry has trapped film-makers. They tell you you need to have a narrative structure, you need to do things a certain way. They limit the imaginations of film-makers. I often think about, what is the meaning of film? What does film want to say? The simple thing is, film is about images.”

January 21, 2019

From red pills to red, white and blue Brexit: how The Matrix shaped our reality

Twenty years after the release of The Matrix, its prescient vision of a virtual world continues to mirror events in real life

The Matrix has barely started when a phone booth is demolished, left as a smashed pancake of glass and metal. It was a prophetic touch. Payphones were still everywhere in western cities when the film came out in March 1999. By the time of the first sequel four years later, they were already half-vanished, replaced by a private army of Nokias and Motorolas.

But now The Matrix is a relic too, a quaint slice of 90s nostalgia about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. “1999”, the recent song from Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, features wistful lyrics (“Those days, it was so much better”) and cover art in which the millennial pop stars wear the black leather costumes made famous by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as they battled the machines enslaving humanity. Yet for a relic, it never slipped far from view – still a familiar reference in a world divided between internet and IRL (in real life), its characters endlessly circulating in memes and gifs, often as vehicles for the acrid politics that define our 21st century.

To ‘redpill’ is now a verb, opening the eyes of far-right recruits to hated oppressors – feminists and people of colour

January 10, 2019

One perfect shot: the unsung power of cinematography

Cinematographers can have as much influence over a film as a director. But will prestige TV and declining ticket sales at cinemas put their craft at risk?

Cinematography is one of the most mysterious aspects of film-making. The American Society of Cinematographers turned 100 this month and, though last year’s Oscar for the category drew attention after the first nomination for a female cinematographer, and Twitter users reguarly share examples of “One Perfect Shot”, the art of “painting with light” is little understood.

Cinematographers are responsible for photographing films, but in practice their job is more complex. The skill of the cinematographer, or director of photography, is to combine visual artistry with technical knowledge and a certain amount of people management. “Maybe as many as 80 people on a movie come under your direct command,” says Bill Butler, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer who worked on classics including Jaws and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Next to the director, it’s the cinematographer who is really in charge of everything, from the costume you wear to the makeup. You do a lot more than just take meter readings.”

There will be more and more advances in the technology and the way people view films, and I love it

November 21, 2018

Ralph Breaks the Internet review – virtually impossible to enjoy tiresome arcade game re-run

The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph is an overstuffed but weirdly pointless exercise in tech worship that fails to include much that actually connects with the audience

Wreck-It Ralph, fictional star of a fictional 80s arcade game, is back for another exhaustingly pointless romp in the frenetic and jeopardy-free world of virtual reality. Only this time he’s not wrecking, he’s breaking, an entirely different concept. It is destruction for winners, not losers, like Kim Kardashian’s bottom, or the Beatles breaking America, or that man in the Bois du Boulogne breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.

This headspinning, Ritalin-fuelled sequel to the 2012 film is somewhere between Ready Player One and The Emoji Movie, summoning up a zero-gravity spectacle of dazzling colours and vertiginous perspectives, a featureless and inert mashup of memes, brands, avatars and jokes. Some of these gags are pretty good: like the fairytale princesses who gather round the heroine to explain that a life-changing moment is always accompanied by “staring into some water”. Some other gags aren’t quite so fresh, like a gamer being called “Babe-raham Lincoln” – stolen from Wayne’s World – and a nerd superfan asking pedantic questions at a convention — stolen from Galaxy Quest. And the incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

November 19, 2018

Welcome to the jungle: experiencing the Amazon in psychedelic virtual reality

VR artist Lynette Wallworth returns with a film that brings the transcendental experience of Brazil’s Yawanawá people to life in vivid colour

I am deep in the Amazonian jungle, somewhere near the Gregório River. My vision is affected by a hallucinogenic tea called Ayahuasca, referred to by the locals as Uni. A huge and majestic old tree towers in front of me. A patch of bright psychedelic colour appears in my vision and moves with my gaze, as if projected from another plane of existence. Before I have properly come to terms with this striking tableau, my position changes. I realise I am now inside the tree.

This is a scene from Awavena, the new virtual reality film from acclaimed artist Lynette Wallworth. My actual location is Carriageworks, Sydney, where this impressive work had its Australian premiere on Friday as part of Create NSW’s annual 360 Vision virtual reality and augmented reality event. Awavena is showing there until 9 December.

I told my people, ‘I met this crazy woman who has a big vision. I think we can do something together’

August 31, 2018

‘Screaming nightmare’: William Shatner boldly goes into VR

Star Trek’s Captain Kirk voices concerns about virtual reality after simulating a walk on Mars

As Captain Kirk in Star Trek, William Shatner took us to places “where no man has gone before”, with stories that foreshadowed the invention of the mobile phone and tablet computers. Now, in real life, the actor is exploring virtual reality – but he wants the entertainment industry to be aware of its potential detrimental impact on vulnerable minds.

Shatner told the Guardian: “The use of technology to affect our minds is so powerful now that we need to be on guard in the future.”