Category: Sci-fi London Film Festival

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Sci-Fi London Hosts VR Film About Censorship and Violence

The Sci-Fi London Film Festival will be showing a virtual reality (VR) film that explores the consequences of immersive violence and censorship in a dark cyberpunk future.

The film exists in a potential future where some violent crimes have been linked to videogamers. As a result, a new censorship bureau is created who employees are tasked with trying to take the sex and violence depicted to the utmost extreme.

Director Konsantin Shelepov spoke about the film as a warning, both of the consequences of censorship and of what exposure to violence of that level could potentially do to children. Shelepov says he chose a deliberately gritty, realistic style to emphasise the disturbing nature of the violence being depicted.

“What we did was a literalization of this artificial brutality,” Shelepov said, “There are so much murders on screen that we don’t even take those as murders. One character kills another is just a line in a script. Sometimes people even find ‘bodycount’ funny, but it is not. That’s why our approach was to emphasize each stab and each drop of blood so that the audience literally felt the idea.”

The film also explores the idea of what exposure to this kind of immersive violence might do to the people whose job it is to censor this content. The filmmakers decided to look at the idea of ‘Who watches the watchmen?’.

Shelepov continues: “Just like bookprinting, firearms, cars and the Internet required the legislation to change, AR and VR will also affect the way we live. Our movie shows some of the dangerous perspective. But we are not politicians or activists, we are just filmmakers, we ask questions that probably nobody can answer for now. But soon there will be answers, for sure.”

Censor will be shown at the Sci-Fi London film festival at 9pm on Sat 5th of May. Further information and tickets can be found on the Sci-Fi London website. For continued coverage of new an upcoming VR content, keep checking back with VRFocus.

Posted on

Sci-Fi London Film Festival Introduces New VR Experiences

The Sci-Fi London film festival has been running for 17 years now, and has introduced its attendees to many innovative new films and live performances. The event is now including immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences in the line up.

Four VR shorts will be shown at the festival alongside regular events such as the 48 Hour Film Challenge, several world film premieres and UK film premieres. Monday 1st of May will see the debut of R.I.S.E – A Dystopian VR Experience, which aims to explore the possibility of letting robots take over, and the idea that normal work will become obsolete as technology marches on. R.I.S.E was produced as a collaboration between Sci-FiLondon and PsychFI and developed by VR content creator beLoudest. The experience will be available on iOS and Android after the Sci-Fi London premiere, and will be compatible with Google Cardboard headsets.

Also taking place at the festival with be Hackstock: Beyond 2017. The organisers have brought together almost every type of headset, from Google Cardboard to HTC Vive and Microsoft’s HoloLens will all be available for attendees to try out. Developers, musicians, artists, hackers and almost everyone else who is interested can discuss the possibilities presented by VR and AR technologies.

Other VR experiences available during the festival are VR shorts Remember, Tesla Punk, Misfits and 37th Week.

The Sci-Fi London Film Festival takes place from 27th April until 6th May 2017 in venues across London. Full details on the programme are available on the Sci-Fi London website.

Tickets have not yet gone on sale.

VRFocus will bring you updates on new Sci-Fi London and other VR events and experiences when they becomes available