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Inside The Massive VR Intersection At Sundance Film Festival

This article is more than 6 years old.

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We're about mid-way into the power-packed Sundance Film Festival currently taking place in Park City, Utah, and certainly, one of the biggest buzzwords on the ground is Virtual Reality (VR).  The creativity and discussion and behind the intersection of this tech plaform and film is even bigger this year than last Festival.

Sundance Institute curated a collection of cutting-edge independent experimental media works by creators who have leveraged VR, AR, mixed reality (MR) and/or AI.  Naturally, competition is stiff when it comes to be included at Sundance, no matter what the medium. In fact, the Festival received over 13,000 submissions from both offerings in both the traditional and new tech categories.  A mere 24 of those were selected as documentary and narrative virtual reality works that would be included in Sundance 2018.

Robert Redford, President and Founder of Sundance Institute, stated in a press release, “Technology-enabled storytelling continues to develop into a thriving industry. It’s essential to protect the creative spaces where creators can develop work and reach audiences independent of commercial pressures. The work that we showcase at New Frontier sets the agenda for the year in creative cross-media storytelling.”

Indeed, the works were experienced at either New Frontier Exhibition, held at  Kimball Art Center or at The Ray. Filmgoers and techies are able to view not only innovative  VR and MR works at this location but also immersive dance, as well.  As a companion offering, The New Frontier extends to a site called The Ray where works ranging from VR, MR, and AR to AI and new media technologies are also currently on display.   Of particular note is an area called The Box which is a 40-seat mobile VR cinema showcasing a number of various film projects and was created by an experiential entertainment company called Two Bit Circus for Sunance. A number of break-through projects are being shown at the sites.

For example, Awavena, a film about an indigenous Amazonian people called the Yawanawa. The project tells the story of  Hushahu, their first woman Shaman. The technology renders visible the luminous world this tribe has always knownRosie Lourde, Investment Manager Online Production, Screen Australia which provides grants for digital series and immersive and which partially funded Awavena, was on hand for the film's debut at Sundance.  She also noted that the film has been invited to European premiere and the World Economic Forum at Davos in order to help key decision makers to experience the journey of Hushahu becoming the Yawanawa's first female shaman. The team hopes to influence global policy around indigenous land rights and broader issues of gender parity. Such is the power of new technology.

In addition, Frankenstein AI: A Monster Made by Many reimagines Shelley’s seminal work to examine the cultural ramifications of pervasive, ubiquitous technology. Participants interact with an artificial intelligence, co-creating a shared narrative around the implications of unleashing this naive, intelligent "monster,” both mythical and imminent, into the world.

Dinner Party is  short virtual reality thriller that dramatizes the incredible story of Betty and Barney Hill, who in the 1960's reported the first nationally known UFO abduction case in America, and was created and written by Charlotte Stoudt whose writing and producing credits include Homeland  and House of Cards.  "This process is very challenging but exhilarating, " Stoudt told me. "Because VR can be so intimate and yet so alienating at the same time, we knew that it was the perfect platform for such a story. It's simply ideal since the medium lends itself so well to something that continues to bewilder and perplex us."  Dinner Party, which is produced by Skybound Entertainment, RYOT, and Telexist, is actually a pilot for a proposed upcoming series called The Incident.

Chorus, co-created by production notable Chris Milk, shows how six people can band together to battle evil through an epic journey.

Masters of the Sun  is the latest project by globally-acclaimed hip hop group, The Black Eyed Peas. The project expertly uses the voices of a hip-hop cast including such giants as Rakim, Queen Latifah, KRS-One and Slick Rick as well as comic-book legend Stan Smith to create a comic book-style adventure that moves through a battle between good and evil. 

Finally, The Sun Ladies is an impactful project from notable actress Maria Bello. Fitting for the growing female-empowerment narrative of today, the film is an in-depth look at the personal journey of Xate Singali: from her roots as a famous singer in Kurdistan, through ISIS sex slavery,  to her new life as a soldier on the front lines as she starts a female-only Iraqi fighting unit called the Sun Ladies. 

Many members of the teams from the above, rubbed shoulders with those from the traditional theatrical filmmaking work during the packed opening party for the Festival which was held at Sundance TV HQ, further signaling the rise of the tech-infused filmmaker.

Once the celebration was over,  a whopping 63 panels kicked off the official programming, and much of the focus of such panels provided an even deeper dive into the current state and future of VR and film. For example,  Mozilla and Sundance Film Festival presented, VR the People: The importance of open access to tools for creators and publishers. The panel focused on how artists and creators can explore ways in which technology can be used to push the limits of storytelling.

YouTube also hosted a VR panel and evening reception on its location on Main Street premiering new content and discussing the future of VR video and why producers and entertainment brands use YouTube to test out the platform and engage with their audiences in new ways.

A bit further up Main Street, Intel hosted a panel of industry leaders from Intel, Paramount and Adobe, as well as filmmaker Eliza McNitt to discuss the capabilities of immersive media and how it can push creative boundaries in entertainment and filmmaking. The panel addressed how our culture is moving from flat screens to immersive experiences involving VR in order to create content even more life-like experiences.

Diego Prilusky, Head of Intel’s new LA Studio revealed how the company's state-of-the-art studio is dedicated to the production of large-scale, volumetric content for the next generation of immersive media. The Studio is enabled by Intel’s technical resources and expertise, computing power, and data center processing to bring data to life.

Intel aims to drive the growth and adoption of volumetric video and immersive media experiences through the studio and with partners and brands that share our vision. "We are truly the base technology that drives innovation for the rest of the ecosystem,” Alyson Griffin, Head of Global Brand Marketing, told me. This is a point not lost on those deep into the VR game given that the level of complexity and sophistication of the computing processor either makes or breaks the manner with which VR technology can be harnessed to tell stories.

Chris Bobotis, Director of Immersive at Adobe added, " At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Adobe Creative Cloud was used in  more than half the VR projects at the festival were edited with Premiero Pro. While there’s still hurdles in technology, the artists will always find a way to overcome current boundaries. As leaders in VR hardware and software, it’s our job to be transparent and provide solutions, all while letting the content creator do what they do best and that’s tell stories."

A panel that the techorati is looking forward tomorrow will include that of Kevin Cornish, founder and director of virtual reality agency Moth + Flame. Entitled Combining AI and VR to Empower Conversational Cinema, the panel will be held at the Dell Den and will also include Gary Radburn, Director of VR at Dell. Panelists are set to discuss the technology that drives VR further toward first-person conversational cinema.

With the proliferation of virtual reality in almost every entertainment vertical, the field is exploding for storytellers, game designers, narrative filmmakers, visual artists and beyond, and growing into a multibillion-dollar industry, and Artificial Intelligence is a major factor within this explosive opportunity.

For example, Cornish’s project Fall in Love utilizes voice recognition software for speech-based interactivity. When the user asks a question into the microphone embedded in the Oculus Rift headset, the talk-to-text program interprets it and triggers an emotionally intelligent response from the virtual actor. Moth+Flame has also produced VR content for brands ranging from Google, Oculus, AMC, Discovery, MTV, AT&T, Ram Truck, and AMD and worked with talent including Taylor Swift

In a statement, Cornish said that Fall in Love takes the step of bringing conversation into virtual reality. Said Cornish, "On a bigger picture level, I believe this project is important for a number of reasons. Mainly, conversational video is bigger than virtual reality."

He added, "It’s still very early in exploring what is possible with conversational video, but there is something unique that happens when you speak and someone on a screen answers, and I could not be more excited about what lies ahead for this new medium.”

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