Virtual reality won't save the cinema, says one of its most high-profile producers, because it really isn't cinema at all.
"VR is its own medium and it has its own language, much of which we don't even know yet," says writer-producer-director Eric Darnell. "We're discovering that language as we go."
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Scenes from the virtual reality experience, The Turning Forest.
Darnell is so excited by the possibilities of virtual reality that he ditched a fabulous career at Dreamworks Animation, where he directed Antz and wrote and directed the long-running Madagascar franchise, to take a leap into the unknown with Baobab, the VR start-up he founded with producer Maureen Fan.
"When I first put on the headset, I thought, 'Oh my God, this is the future'," Darnell says of his Damascene moment. "I started in computer animation in the 1980s, and it was the wild west, everyone was trying to figure out how to do it. It was an exciting time in my life and career, and I saw an opportunity to dive back into that kind of environment with VR."
In virtual reality, users don a goggle-like headset and headphones and become immersed in a close-to-360 degree, 3D viewing experience.
Darnell's first completed effort in this space is Invasion, a short CG-animated movie in which an alien spaceship comes to Earth with ill intent, only to be outsmarted by a bunny.
I first saw it in April, at a showcase of VR touring the world under the banner kaleidoscope vr. Three months later I saw it again, and the new version (screening at MIFF as part of a VR showcase) is a significant advance, illustrative of how quickly things in this space are moving.
"We learned a ton from Invasion, through the process of making it and testing it with audiences" Darnell says. "If we had made the VR experience we first set out to make, it would have been awful."
Eric Darnell has ditched animated movies for the wild west of VR with Invasion.
One of the things he and his team learnt is the enormous potential for the viewer to look the wrong way.
"In cinema, the viewer is captive, there's nothing else to look at but that rectangle you've placed in front of them, so you can control that, build tension with the timing you think is best," he says. "But in VR, the attention can wander very quickly, and if they spend the entire six minutes watching clouds roll by, they're not going to have a very satisfying experience."
If we had made the VR experience we first set out to make, it would have been awful.
Eric Darnell
He soon realised the importance of using directional sound and other cues to suggest where the viewer ought to look. "Hopefully, if I've done my job, where they look feels natural, and they're rewarded for that."
The work being done in VR is as varied as that being done in any other medium: there's documentary, there's narrative fiction, there's interactive storytelling. Some use real-world footage, some use polished computer-generated images, some use relatively raw graphics. All attempt to take the viewer deep inside the worlds they have created for an experience that moulds elements of gaming, cinema and choose-your-own adventure into something undeniably new.
VR isn't merely an extension of cinema, it's an entirely new way of storytelling in a simulated spatial environment.
Two works from Melbourne-based VRTOV, run by director Oscar Raby and producer Katy Morrison, offer a glimpse of the range of possibilities VR offers. The Turning Forest is a fairytale, its animations set to a "score" of sounds recorded by about 20 uni-directional microphones dotted around a large room (unusually, the soundtrack came first). Easter Rising: The Voice of a Rebel is a piece of oral history, one man's account of fighting in the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916. Both are collaborations with the BBC.
Also in the pipeline for VRTOV is Travelling While Black, a collaboration with Oscar-winning American documentarian Roger Ross Williams, which is set to debut next year.
I spoke to Williams the day after he'd had his head 3D-scanned by Raby and Morrison; his face will be an integral part of a work that aims to capture, he says, "a sense of the experience I have travelling around America, the fear I have, the history I carry with me". "It will embody me and my experience in a way that I hope will make viewers more empathetic with my experiences as a black man in America."
Williams originally conceived his project as a crowd-funded web series but, he says with a laugh, "That seems so old-fashioned now."
Travelling While Black is based on a popular touring guide of the same name that flourished from the 1940s until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s (it identified places where "Negroes" were welcome to stay, eat or refuel while travelling through the racially segregated US). Though conceived as part of a touring museum exhibition, revisiting that part of history "is so timely", he says. "We're dying. It's almost like we're being hunted and killed in the streets.
"I'm stopped constantly by the cops when I'm driving. I'm asked where I'm going, what I'm doing. And you have to be very, very careful because the cops have this image of a black man in their heads, and, any sudden move, you could end up dead."
That's the experience he hopes to capture in his VR foray.
The VR selection at MIFF offers experiences that range from an interactive film noir (A Day Before the Night) to a documentary about the plight of the world's most endangered animal, the northern white rhino, of which only three survive (The Ark). There's also a powerful film about Britain's system of indefinite detention for asylum seekers (Invisible), a tale with distinctly Australian echoes.
The Ark looks at the fight to save the northern white rhino.
But VR is also finding applications in practical spaces, too.
Ben Horan works in VR research in the school of engineering at Deakin University (which is also home to the Motion Lab, where the work takes a more artistic bent), and has recently helped develop a simulation tool for the school of nursing and midwifery.
This tool combines a headset, headphones and a synthetic torso to mimic the environment in which a midwife might help to deliver a child.
"You see the [computer-animated] pregnant woman in a hospital room, her partner is there as well, there are various distractions," he says. "You can even change the weather outside, the noises in the room."
The point of it all is that a midwife needs to know "how to push down on the fundus of a woman in labour". "Current practice relies on theory and textbooks, then they apply it on the job, but they really need to know it beforehand."
Horan says the system they have created – and hope to take to the global educational market – "is not real but it's getting much closer".
And that's VR in a nutshell. It's not real, but it's pretty darned close. And with headsets within reach for many of us (you can get Google's basic Cardboard set-up for about $10, Sony's Playstation VR headset, available from October, for about $650, and a top-of-the-range Oculus Rift for about $800) it's only going to get closer.
Katy Morrison and Eric Darnell will talk VR storytelling at MIFF on Saturday, August 13. Oscar Raby will participate in a VR masterclass the same day as part of Virtual Reality Symposium. Details: miff.com.au
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