Filmmakers Launch New VR Company At Tribeca Film Festival

Among film festivals, the Tribeca Film Festival has one of the strongest relationships with virtual reality (VR), with several VR and 360-degree movies getting premieres at the event Now a new VR content company has been announced at the event.

Filmmakers Jacob Wasserman, Adam Donald and Ant Gentile have announced the creation of a new VR content company named Hidden Content, which was revealed at the premiere of the company’s first project, horror anthology The Caretaker.

The Caretaker is a narrative horror anthology in 360-degrees, which stars Adelaide Clemens, Tom Lipinski, Clara Wong and Diana Agostini. The pilot was a co-production with RealMotion Inc, with Max Born and Schuyler Weiss serving as producers, and Gentile and Kimberly Parker as exectutive producers.

Hidden Content will be working with film producer and financier Max Born again to produce a slate of VR films and develop a distribution platform for VR and augmented reality (AR) content. The aim is to have Hidden Content act as a full-service VR company. The three filmmakers behind the company have worked extensively in VR and 360-dgree cinema producing VR adverts and other branded content.

Hidden Content are working on three additional new VR genre series, though details on what these are have not yet been unveiled. The company is also working with other VR creators to add to the slate of projects for 2018.

The team previously produced Broken Night, a live-action interactive narrative which tells the story of a woman and her husband returning home from a night out to discover someone has broken into their home. The viewer can make decisions that influence the direction of the narrative as it progresses.

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Additional information on Hidden Content’s projects can be found its website. Further news on Hidden Content and other VR experiences will be reported on here on VRFocus.

Boutique Audio Company HOBO Audio Launches VR Division

HOBO, an audio post studio, has announced the launch of a 360-degree virtual reality (VR) division whilst forming alliances with studios East Coast Digital and Hidden Content, to offer clients a full service for immersive content creation.

The services the companies will offer shall range from concepting through production, post, music and final audio mix in an immersive 360 format. Currently the companies are collaborating on several projects without going into further details on what they might be.

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“The applications of 360 VR are already having an impact on everything from gaming and entertainment to science, health, medicine, history and teaching,” said Howard Bowler, HOBO Founder and President. “At HOBO, we get comfortable with new technologies that inspire us by diving in head-first and working with the tools. That’s what we’re doing with 360 VR content.”

HOBO (through its division Green Point Creative) has been developing an original dramatic TV series produced in 360-degrees that Bowler describes as a “Wire” inspired story set in the suburbs that will be shot and distributed via various immersive platforms.

“I’ve always envisioned HOBO as doing more than audio, but always resisted the temptation to simply add new post services,” Bowler adds. “I wanted something more holistically focused. 360 VR is a technology that I believe will grow as more companies like ours create content for it. We’re committed to working with other creative companies that also want to push the boundaries of this new medium.”

Hidden Content was founded by Creative Director, Ant Gentile, Jake Wasserman, and Adam Donald as a VR production and post-production company. Its worked with such clients as Samsung, 451 Media, Giant Step, PMK-BNC, Nokia and Pop Sugar.

East Coast Digital (ECD) was founded by Scott Kleinberger in 1998. Its VR work includes the short film Cardboard City, which was a co-winner of the Samsung Gear Indie VR Filmmaker Contest and debuted at Sundance 2016 on the Milk VR platform.

For further updates on HOBO’s VR plans, keep reading VRFocus.