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.