Fear and Loathing On The Road to Virtual Reality

Ever since I saw Clouds Over Sidra, Mary Matheson's Mamie's Dream, a VR film about female genital mutilation, the New York Times Magazine's Walking New York (on Within app) and The Guardian's 6x9, I've been scratching my head trying to think of ideas for 'immersive storytelling' using virtual or augmented reality (AR).

As a complete newcomer to this aspect of storytelling, I don't want to jump on the VR or AR bandwagon just because it is the latest, coolest thing. My interest stems more from the fact that I recognised early on the power of good immersive storytelling. I was bowled over by the emotional connection I had with some of the first VR films I watched and how that stayed with me, so I want to try and create something as powerful.

But as much as making your first film may seem daunting, it's got nothing on VR. The headsets and cameras for immersive content are evolving so rapidly, it is easy to be confused in terms of the best place to start and how potential audiences are going to access/view your content.

Particularly as a freelancer contemplating immersive content for the first time, it can seem like you need expensive bits of kit, an unlimited budget and a cast of thousands to pull it off successfully. 

Increasingl,y film festivals like Raindance and Sheffield DocFest are embracing VR content. Raindance UK will have a VR Marketplace this September that will enable content creators to pitch their projects and benefit from VR market surgeries. 

All of that is great, but I'm even wondering if the idea I have would really work in VR. I went along to a VR masterclass in Creative Storytelling and Interactive Narratives that Raindance put on recently at the Century Club in Soho. The class was led by Resh Sidhu of Framestore, who talked about how they created the "wizarding world" on a Fantastic Beasts virtual reality experience for Google's Daydream platform. 

Resh's enthusiasm and passion for immersive storytelling is infectious. One thing that really came out of her talk is that in VR or AR you have to really think hard about the en- user experience. What are they going to be doing or what do you want them to do? Where do you want to guide them and how can you use sound to encourage them to move around a virtual environment? What is happening behind them, can be just as interesting as what is happening in front of them. 

“Map out what the user is doing, or what you want them to do. Guide them, don’t push the story on them. Anything that breaks immersion, take it out.”

— Resh Sidhu, Framestore

This may sound obvious, but when you're so used to thinking on a two dimensional plane, you suddenly have to get your head around thinking of content in a 'wrap-around' environment. That shouldn't be too hard as that is how it is in real life—things go on in front of us and behind us all the time, but I guess the trick is not to overdo it. Note to self: Keep it simple and don't have too many things going on at the same time.

Keep in mind that the end user is not necessarily a gamer. I have to admit being a newcomer to VR, there is an initial hurdle to overcome as a viewer of how do you watch or even access content.

There has to be a reason to do VR. Don't jump on the VR bandwagon. Should your story even be in VR? I have to admit that this where I come unstuck. I've watched a few VR films that could have just been made as documentaries without the immersive element, so it's not as if those stories couldn't have been told any other way. So does that mean they shouldn't have been done in VR?

I guess it's more a question of what is the VR or immersive storytelling aspect bringing to that piece of content and how you want people to feel?

Are there any good sounding boards out there for novices like myself that feel they have an idea that could potentially work in VR or AR, but don't want to fall into the trap of jumping on the bandwagon? Where do you find potential co-collaborators?

Filmmakers are not garbage collectors

"A storyboard is an instrument for cowards."

"Filmmakers are not garbage collectors—we are thieves."

"Film schools are expensive—you can learn filmmaking on your own in two weeks."

These are just some of the great quotes from the trailer for Werner Herzog's six-hour online filmmaking class.

No one could be as irreverent about filmmaking as Herzog. His go-to reference text for filmmaking is an obscure book about observing Peregrine falcons on the marshes of the Essex coast written by J.A. Baker. 

Herzog's films and documentaries, in particular, continue to defy what your told by film schools about less or no narration—in documentaries in particular—adhering to conventional story arcs with a clear beginning, middle and end, and borrowing narrative and visual devices from fictional filmmaking. 

It reminds me of Errol Morris and his documentaries such as The Thin Blue Line, The Unknown Known and The Fog of War, which feature an inordinate amount of interviews to camera and fictional narrative devices such as re-enactment, which are also discouraged at film schools.

Given his diverse catalogue of films, Herzog, of course, can get away with breaking these conventions, but I guess you have to understand the conventions first and why they are there, before you can break them, or perhaps in the case of Herzog, he just went out there and said this is the way I'm going to make films and I don't care what anybody else thinks. 

OramaFest

I recently attended an amazing two-day Oramafest on immersive storytelling in news and documentaries using virtual and augmented reality at the Frontline Club in London. As well as learning about some of the challenges of making good VR that is immersive and impactful—avoiding motion sickness; being cognisant of how the VR experience is going to make the viewer feel emotionally—we got to see some great work including filmmaker Mary Matheson's Mamie's Dream, a VR film about female genital mutilation, and WaterAid's Aftershock, about the water crisis in Nepal. 

A lot of interesting VR documentary work is being done by charities such as WaterAid and Plan International. A number of charities have found that telling stories using VR is a powerful tool—if done well— for making potential donors more emotionally connected and immersed in a story. In some cases, the VR experience resulted in people donating more money.

But with the powerfulness of VR storytelling, comes a certain amount of storytelling. Some talk about VR altering people's brain chemistry, and because it can be such a personal, immersive experience, you cannot be 100% certain about how people are going to react when they're in a headset. Frankly, I was a little freaked out watching The Guardian's 6x9 VR experience about solitary confinement. It really did feel like you were in a prison cell. I guess it's a question of trying the content out on various people before you launch it to the wider world. But, as a maker of VR content, you also need to think more about how someone is going to view the content, more perhaps than you would if it is on a big screen at a cinema of film festival.

There still seem to be challenges around getting VR content distributed—after all most of us still don't have a VR headset. High-quality VR headsets are still really expensive, although I still have a pretty immersive experience watching stuff on my Iphone with Google Cardboard. 

Deciding what to shoot, and what not to shoot in 360 video can also be challenging. As speakers at the festival pointed out, there is a lot of stuff out there on Facebook and YouTube that is shot in 360 but it doesn't necessarily add anything to the story. But I guess you won't know what looks good in 360 until you go out and start shooting and experimenting with different content.

The post-production side of things still seems to have some ways to go in terms of stitching the footage together so it appears seamless. 

On the whole however, I'm excited about VR and immersive storytelling, and I'm trying to think how I might be able to use it in short films. In the meantime, if you're interested in VR, I highly recommend the United Nations' Clouds over Sidra—considered to be a pioneering VR film—and the New York Times Magazine's Walking New York—I really did feel like I was on top of skyscrapers in New York looking down on people below. Both are available on the Within app for Apple iPhone. Watch them with a Google Cardboard headset if you can. 

Errol Morris's Demon in the Freezer

In signature Errol Morris style, the filmmaker interviews some quirky US scientists about the US's reluctance to destroy stockholds of the smallpox virus, which, if it were to fall into the wrong hands; namely terrorists'; could prove disastrous.

The US Department of Defence has substantially increased its investment in synthetic biology, which will enable defence labs to modify bacteria and diseases to make new genetic codes that do not exist in nature.

Whilst this kind of biology could be used to defend against attacks using biological agents, mishandling or misuse of these viruses could also create severe problems in terms of accidental leakages.

Little Birds Research Journal

I kept a research journal for the last two years documenting my journey in making Little Birds—a documentary about a drone testing site in west Wales—from initial concept phase, through to editing and post-production.

Filmmaker/Photographer Edward Burtynsky

Epic in scale, Burtynsky's photographs and films help us see the world—in all its beauty and destruction—in new and more meaningful ways. He can make the most banal subjects—water,  ship breaking yards—seem other-worldly.

Gillett Square, Dalston

A good example of the power of photography and sound. This audio /photographic slideshow is about the people that hang out in Gillett Square in Dalston East London.