All of the VR content is, as usual, included as part of the festival’s New Frontier selection. There’s 15 total projects in the selection this year, with 10 specifically for VR — an increase from this year’s 7 out of 14 New Frontier projects.
It’s a varied selection, a mix of in-person, online, live and on-demand events, presented across many different forms of VR content.
Projects like Flat Earth VR (by Where Thoughts Go developer Lucas Rizzotto), pictured above, will enter the realm of VR satire, immersing you in the quest of a flat earther to travel to space and prove the haters wrong by taking a picture of our pancake planet.
Meanwhile projects like Suga’, Cosmogony and Gondwana will err into live performance territory, each offering an experience that is either live, dynamic or time-dependent in some way.
Gondwana, pictured below, places you in the Daintree rain forest in the middle of a 24-hour sequence that repeats through the duration of the festival. Every 14 minutes, time jumps forward a year and highlights existing and future degradation brought on by climate change and climate data projections. It’s a dynamic experience wherein the more people who take part in Gondwana, the more the forest becomes resilient.
My takeaway from this year’s selection reaches an all-too-familiar conclusion; wondrous potential, genuine enthusiasm and arresting innovation are at war with budget constraints, technical proficiency and films that, frankly, don’t need to be in VR.
We rounded off our summary by remaining optimistic that a future selection might see creators tap into meatier opportunities and experiences that set the VR medium apart from the pack. Could 2022 be the year? We’ll have to wait and see.
Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean’s Wolves in the Walls and its star character Lucy might have been brought into virtual reality (VR) by Fable Studio but the team has far greater plans for its Virtual Being. This was showcased during the Sundance Film Festival this past week with Lucy attending the event to get feedback for her very own short film.
The very first Virtual Being to attend the festival, Lucy held meet and greets with other Sundance artists to discuss ideas for her film Dracula (working title) with the Fable team then taking those to create the very first screening which took place on Tuesday 2nd.
“As an aspiring artist and a work of art, she relates to festival-goers on multiple levels,” said Halley Lamberson, Producer, Lucy, in a statement. “The meta creative process for our team, trying to capture the behind the scenes of creation, the layers of creativity between character, team and movie…Nostalgic style yet simultaneously a paradoxical mix of old tech and new tech.”
The purpose was to further push Fable’s AI vision for virtual beings, where they can become more than just pre-programmed characters. The idea is to create interactive characters, whether that’s for VR or any other media, which can learn and remember their interactions with you for a far more engaging experience. This was put to the test by Lucy responding to the audience via video chat.
In the video below you can view the short film and see how Lucy responded to questions about the film, being at the festival and more. It provides a tantalising glimpse at the future of AI storytelling.
“Sundance is about community building, risk taking and the new and crazy in storytelling. So putting Lucy in the midst of a community and have her learn about community building – and this community especially as she’s an aspiring animator made perfect sense for us,” adds director Philipp Maas.
Lucy’s first film may not be ready for the bigscreen just yet so in the meantime there’s always Wolves in the Walls for Oculus Quest and Rift. As Fable Studio continues its work in AI, VRFocus will keep you updated.
The Sundance Film Festival has, for many years now, proved a useful means of gauging the state of VR filmmaking early on in the year. The problem is that, even after all this time, the story hasn’t changed all that much.
2021’s modest selection of VR movies — seven of the 14 total projects in this year’s New Frontier selection — do feature some experiences much longer than those seen at previous iterations of the festival. There are also a lot of new faces mixed in with the old and topics continue to wrestle with modern affairs in brave and often striking ways. But my takeaway from this year’s selection reaches an all-too-familiar conclusion; wonderous potential, genuine enthusiasm and arresting innovation are at war with budget constraints, technical proficiency and films that, frankly, don’t need to be in VR.
Everything in this year’s selection has at least some sort of spark to it, but most wrestle with at least one of those aspects. The first episode of Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster and Yasmin Elayat’s The Changing Same, for example, is a hard-hitting look at racial injustice in the US that immediately zones in on VR’s strengths. It subjects you to a first-hand account of police discrimination, driving home its depiction with one particularly sobering comparison that sees the cast of characters and their actions mirrored in slavery. But scrappy production values that make actors appear like live-action projections on top of 3D models take a toll on immersion.
On the flip side, there’s Namoo, a typically slick and wholly enjoyable piece from Baba Yaga and Invasion! studio, Baobab. The gorgeous animation and eye-opening art help enliven a whimsical short that follows an artist through the highs and lows of his life. But while visual prowess might invite comparisons between Boabab, the holy grail of modern animation that is Pixar, the cliched story beats (which themselves feel too close to one of Pixar’s most cherished works) suggest Baobab narratively still has some way to go before it earns that mantle.
Of the seven films, just one is a live-action, 360-degree piece and that’s the complete four-part series, 4 Feet High VR. It’s a challenging piece intent not so much on breaking taboos as it is hitting them at full-speed and then grinding the shattered shards into dust. Running over 35 minutes, it follows a 17-year-old wheelchair user in Argentina that explores her sexuality amidst her class’s revolt to push for sex education in school. Again, there isn’t much to it that couldn’t have been said just as well — if not better — on a flat-screen, but it does offer a fascinating snapshot into many different struggles on subjects that are easy to take for granted in some parts of the world.
I’ve written before about the considered delivery of London Film Festival Winner To Miss The Ending– a warning to humanity as it races ever-faster towards digitization. I was also smitten with Prison X Chapter 1, an interactive piece that delivered on a potent sense of place as it casts ‘players’ into a Bolivian prison. It uses convincing instances like simply taking a shower or using the prison phones to really root you in its environment and invite exploration and interaction. I wanted to see it tie together better than its first episode affords, but it was my favorite pick of this year’s bunch. You can also check out Ian’s thoughts on the live performance of Tinker right here.
Ever the eclectic collection, then, but a set that suggests VR filmmaking faces the same challenges it did in 2016, even with the advent of the Quest 2. Many of these projects deserve the kind of funding and development skillset that many VR games get, but the commercial opportunity just isn’t there to provide it. Even then, the same existential questions — questions not unique to filmmaking alone — about VR’s real strengths persist. Just as VR gaming is still too attached to its flatscreen counterpart, VR filmmaking continues to reckon with the decades of tradition that preceded it.
I’ve played enough and seen enough to remain convinced there’s a goldmine to uncover, but continue to wonder if creators are digging in the right areas. Five years into the age of consumer VR and I’ve yet to see anyone really capitalize on the narrative gut punch waiting for players at the end of Fated: A Silent Oath, and think that precious few movies have learned the right lessons from the reality-defying wonder of Dear Angelica. Those opportunities, the kind that will really set this medium apart from the others, remain unearthed at Sundance 2021, but I remain optimistic they lie in wait.
The Sundance Film Festival has, for many years now, proved a useful means of gauging the state of VR filmmaking early on in the year. The problem is that, even after all this time, the story hasn’t changed all that much.
2021’s modest selection of VR movies — seven of the 14 total projects in this year’s New Frontier selection — do feature some experiences much longer than those seen at previous iterations of the festival. There are also a lot of new faces mixed in with the old and topics continue to wrestle with modern affairs in brave and often striking ways. But my takeaway from this year’s selection reaches an all-too-familiar conclusion; wonderous potential, genuine enthusiasm and arresting innovation are at war with budget constraints, technical proficiency and films that, frankly, don’t need to be in VR.
Everything in this year’s selection has at least some sort of spark to it, but most wrestle with at least one of those aspects. The first episode of Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster and Yasmin Elayat’s The Changing Same, for example, is a hard-hitting look at racial injustice in the US that immediately zones in on VR’s strengths. It subjects you to a first-hand account of police discrimination, driving home its depiction with one particularly sobering comparison that sees the cast of characters and their actions mirrored in slavery. But scrappy production values that make actors appear like live-action projections on top of 3D models take a toll on immersion.
On the flip side, there’s Namoo, a typically slick and wholly enjoyable piece from Baba Yaga and Invasion! studio, Baobab. The gorgeous animation and eye-opening art help enliven a whimsical short that follows an artist through the highs and lows of his life. But while visual prowess might invite comparisons between Boabab, the holy grail of modern animation that is Pixar, the cliched story beats (which themselves feel too close to one of Pixar’s most cherished works) suggest Baobab narratively still has some way to go before it earns that mantle.
Of the seven films, just one is a live-action, 360-degree piece and that’s the complete four-part series, 4 Feet High VR. It’s a challenging piece intent not so much on breaking taboos as it is hitting them at full-speed and then grinding the shattered shards into dust. Running over 35 minutes, it follows a 17-year-old wheelchair user in Argentina that explores her sexuality amidst her class’s revolt to push for sex education in school. Again, there isn’t much to it that couldn’t have been said just as well — if not better — on a flat-screen, but it does offer a fascinating snapshot into many different struggles on subjects that are easy to take for granted in some parts of the world.
I’ve written before about the considered delivery of London Film Festival Winner To Miss The Ending– a warning to humanity as it races ever-faster towards digitization. I was also smitten with Prison X Chapter 1, an interactive piece that delivered on a potent sense of place as it casts ‘players’ into a Bolivian prison. It uses convincing instances like simply taking a shower or using the prison phones to really root you in its environment and invite exploration and interaction. I wanted to see it tie together better than its first episode affords, but it was my favorite pick of this year’s bunch. You can also check out Ian’s thoughts on the live performance of Tinker right here.
Ever the eclectic collection, then, but a set that suggests VR filmmaking faces the same challenges it did in 2016, even with the advent of the Quest 2. Many of these projects deserve the kind of funding and development skillset that many VR games get, but the commercial opportunity just isn’t there to provide it. Even then, the same existential questions — questions not unique to filmmaking alone — about VR’s real strengths persist. Just as VR gaming is still too attached to its flatscreen counterpart, VR filmmaking continues to reckon with the decades of tradition that preceded it.
I’ve played enough and seen enough to remain convinced there’s a goldmine to uncover, but continue to wonder if creators are digging in the right areas. Five years into the age of consumer VR and I’ve yet to see anyone really capitalize on the narrative gut punch waiting for players at the end of Fated: A Silent Oath, and think that precious few movies have learned the right lessons from the reality-defying wonder of Dear Angelica. Those opportunities, the kind that will really set this medium apart from the others, remain unearthed at Sundance 2021, but I remain optimistic they lie in wait.
A new social VR story called Tinker premiered at the Sundance Film Festival running natively on Oculus Quest.
The experimental piece features a live performer embodying a grandfather with a participant invited to play along as their grandchild. Others can watch the story play out as silent observers free to move around the room. Its execution is similar to The Tempest from The Under Presents, which invites players to be part of the show run by a single performer.
The story plays with scale as only VR allows, shrinking the player down to the size of a baby as grandpa brings them toys and endeavors to make memories with them. The child grows over a series of vignettes — first flying a plane grandpa handed over in the crib, and then as a larger child drawing a picture on a whiteboard, and operating a remote-controlled car. Eventually, as an adult, you help grandpa find his medicine in the room.
Grandpa becomes forgetful, you see, unable to recall some of the road trips the two of you went on together, and by the end of the story he’s unable even to interact with the simple answering machine he has in his workshop. Yet still, he cares about the memories you made together and wants you to know that.
This is a surprisingly upbeat and even therapeutic take on a very painful subject for many, with the performer conveying through their dialogue a sense of importance to each memory-making moment. You draw on the whiteboard, for example, and then grandpa makes the effort to document it by taking a Polaroid and explains that he is writing down the date on the back of the picture so the memory can be more easily recalled. Dear Angelica took a more abstract approach to tell a pained story of a child and parent, whereas in Tinker you’re in an actual room with objects to pick up in the area. So the activities you and grandpa do together, combined with the personal touch of a live actor guiding a child, makes it easy to roleplay as a little one while reflecting on your own upbringing and the bittersweet sting of revisiting those moments.
The pace of the piece was thrown off by some bugs you would expect from an in-development piece of software. Dropping objects on the floor, for example, that should be easily handed from one person to another is a pretty quick way to distract from a narrative. Tinker is a very interesting piece, though, with an interactive live structure and scheduled performances distributed as a preview directly to headsets at home on Facebook’s evolving VR platform. That’s both an extraordinary challenge and something we want to see become more commonplace. You shouldn’t have to drive to Salt Lake City Utah to see something like this in a VR headset, and it is quite the relief to be able to do so from the comfort (and safety) of your own home. So we hope to see Tinker polished and released more broadly in some form, and that others see this type of work, and its home preview, as the model for future VR project premieres.
Tinker premiered as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program. While most of New Frontier is presented in a WebXR-enabled social platform, Tinker is distributed separately through Facebook’s Oculus and carries a hefty download size. Tickets are also hard to come by with limited spots available for the performances.
Baobab Studios have announced its next project, Namoo, an immersive animated film for VR directed by award-winning filmmaker Erick Oh.
Namoo (the Korean word for ‘tree’) is described as a ‘narrative poem come to life as an immersive animated film, and is inspired by the life of Oh’s grandfather. Centered around one tree, Namoo “follows the meaningful moments of one man’s life,” where “the tree starts as a seed and eventually grows into a fully-mature tree, collecting meaningful objects that represent positive and painful memories in its branches.”
You can view the announcement trailer below, giving us an early look at the stunning animation style.
Naboo was created with Quill, the VR animation tool available for PC VR. As you can see from the trailer, that gives it a very distinct visual style similar to many other Quill animations we’ve seen before, but with a bit of Baobab polish added on top.
Erick Oh is a Korean filmmaker based in California, and has worked across many different animation mediums. His work has been presented and awarded at various festivals and award ceremonies. Previously, Oh worked as an animator at Pixar on films like Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, and Inside Out. He has a plethora of awards and lots of experience to his name, which you can view over on his website.
Naboo will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which is currently running until February 3rd. As with other Baobab titles that debuted at film festivals, it’s likely that Naboo will see a wider release onto VR headsets sometime in the future.
The Sundance Film Festival and its New Frontier program offers a venue for cutting edge artists to showcase their work and start conversations that can lead to rewarding careers.
Even in normal years, though, there’s not a lot of capacity spread around Salt Lake City, Utah. Plus, in 2021, there’s the pandemic to consider. Organizers of the 2021 event partnered with Active Theory to produce a WebXR-enabled festival that works across a wide range of devices, including the standalone Oculus Quest, in hopes of fostering those same types of conversations in the complete safety of physical social isolation. According to organizers, Facebook donated Quest headsets to the artists in the event who will be wearing gold sashes — making them easy to identify for folks who might want to initiate those conversations.
“We hope this platform will allow people to meet each other, and bond inside a space of art,” said Shari Frilot, chief curator of the festival’s New Frontier program. “We’re hoping to put them in rooms with the buyers, sellers, other filmmakers…we’re hoping they will be able to have those conversations with people who will help them launch their career.”
A $25 Explorer Pass grants access to New Frontier with several spaces that can be explored as an avatar, and some only viewable in VR. There’s the New Frontier Gallery with a range of works including AR and VR projects to be shown 24 hours a day during the festival, with social functionality active from 11 am to midnight Mountain Time as well as Film Party with six screens available in an interactive bar-type setting. There’s also the Cinema House with short films being shown with the following schedule:
1/29 8 pm Mountain Time:
This Is the Way We Rise
My Own Landscapes
Tears Teacher
The Fourfold
A Concerto Is A Conversation
1/31 3 p.m. MT
Station to Station
2/1 7 pm MT
Users (2021 US Doc Competition) – 2/1 7 p.m. MT
2/2 5 pm MT
Mother of George
You can purchase a pass here and be sure to check out the trailer for a sense of what the experience will be like:
The event represents a very notable test of WebXR as a technology and a potential preview of how more conferences and festivals will look in the future. For those unfamiliar, WebXR turns a page more literally into a site you visit. For Web developers, the technology offers a path to VR content creation while freeing them from store-based distribution. For users, a well-implemented site that is WebXR-enabled could enable viewers to access content on their phones, PCs, and VR headsets with no pre-downloading required.
The Sundance Film Festival runs from January 28 to February 3, 2021. We’ll be visiting the festival to check it all out and hope to see you there.
The Sundance Film Festival returns later this week and just like previous years, the event will play host to plenty of immersive premieres, with everything now online of course. 2021 features both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) works with some exciting and thought-provoking content to experience.
This year there’s a scaled-down selection of titles to view, with Baobab Studios’ Namoo one of the highlights. Only revealed last month, Namoo is Korean for “tree”, taking viewers on a journey through a man’s life with each branch a different memory. Created using Oculus’ Quill,the project will be coming to Oculus platforms later this year.
And then there’s Prison X, Chapter 1: The Devil and The Sun, a new VR series from Quechua filmmaker Violeta Ayala. The first episode takes you into Bolivia’s infamous San Sebastian Prison as Inti, a young man imprisoned after his first job as a drug mule. “It was my world but it wasn’t a world you could capture with a camera,” says Ayala who grew up three blocks from the prison. “And I needed technology that wasn’t yet invented – virtual reality.”
Prison X, Chapter 1: The Devil and The Sun
Tinker, on the other hand, is a live performance piece about Alzheimer’s disease by director Lou Ward, a participant of the Oculus Launchpad Program as well as co-founder of the Seattle VR/AR Meetup. This interactive experience sees: “you grow up alongside Grandfather in his workshop, tinkering, playing, and creating new memories together. As time passes, so do the moments,” the synopsis explains.
Other works to look out for are 4 Feet High VR,The Changing Same: Episode 1, Nightsss, To Miss the Ending and AR project Fortune!
Sundance Film Festival continues the necessity for remote attendance which saw the likes of the Raindance, Venice VR Expanded, the BFI’s LFF Expanded and Cannes XR Virtual all provide online viewing for the first time. While all the Festival, Day, and Awards passes have now sold out, the Explorer Pass is still available for $25 USD which gives you access to the Indie Series, New Frontier, and Shorts programs all on-demand.
The festival runs from 28th January until 3rd February 2021, with the New Frontier Program starting from Friday 29th. You can also buy single film tickets for $15 if any catch your eye. For further updates on the latest XR festival content, keep reading VRFocus.
The annual Sundance Film Festival begins this week on the 23rd of January and will feature a variety of VR and AR experiences, as part of the festival’s ‘New Frontier’ lineup. The festival runs for just over a week at Park City in Utah, through to the 2nd of February.
All of the VR and AR content will be available at Sundance’s two ‘New Frontier’ venues, the New Frontier at the Ray and New Frontier Central. Both locations will host a ‘VR Cinema’ and panel discussions, with New Frontier Central also including the ‘Biodigital Theatre’ that is described as “a cutting-edge presentation space that will feature a rotating schedule of large scale VR theatrical works including a feature-length livestream game telecast.”
Looking at the New Frontier program, there’s a mixture of experimental VR experiences, some of which sound quite bizarre, out there and appropriately arty. Hypha, for example, is an “immersive virtual reality journey to heal the Earth-by becoming a mushroom.” Intriguing! There are also some social VR experiences available, such as Metamorphic, and some mixed reality experiences, such as Solastalgia, which is an installation “set in a mysterious future exploring the surface of a planet that has become uninhabitable.”
Cutting-edge tech utilising VR and augmented reality is inspiring new narrative forms. And creatives at Sundance festival’s New Frontier are excited
What will storytelling look like in 20 years? Will it still be on your television? Will it printed on paper or projected in 3D? Prophesying the future is hard. But, like fortune telling with tea leaves, sometimes the future can be glimpsed in what’s here right now.
Last year, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch – a nihilistic choose-your-own-adventure style film with five main endings – introduced Netflix viewers to a term that has only recently entered the TV lexicon: interactive storytelling. Following up-and-coming developer Stefan as he works tirelessly to create the most complex video game of 1984, Bandersnatch calls on the viewer to make his choices. Do you angrily douse your computer in tea or yell at your dad to blow off steam? Do you visit a therapist or shirk the session to follow a mysterious colleague? Sugar Puffs or Frosties? Bandersnatch is an example of a growing trend in storytelling space: too interactive for traditional TV, not quite interactive enough to be a video game.
