How VR Filmmakers Can Make Classics in Their All-New Medium
Virtual reality is clearly different than film, but it might need to emulate it for a while in order to catch on, Georgia Tech media scholar Jay Bolter says.
Currently VR is caught in a dance between genuflection to—and disruption of—cinematic storytelling. Chris Milk’s experimentation with documenting protests in the streets of New York and Syrian refugee camps via VR, for example, is both in dialogue with and in defiance of cinéma vérité.
The Naïve Spectator Phase
And not only should we expect VR to stand on the shoulders of storytelling giants as it strives to earn legitimacy, we should also expect the self-consciousness of VR to subside as audiences adapt to its conventions. Like the first forays into VR storytelling we’ve seen in recent months, early cinema was obsessed with its proximity to reality, and even carried this obsession over to its plot lines by placing a “naive spectator” in those preliminary films.
Milk even pays homage to this in his work. In his Evolution of Verse, a train is shown rushing towards your retinas, begging you to flinch the way theater audiences did during 1895’s L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
As Denise Mann, a media professor at UCLA, points out, television really began to take off when it figured out how to create stories that fit into the daily lives—and physical spaces—audiences occupy.
...television actually adapted to the contemporary structure of the American home. Soap operas, for instance, featured predictable plot lines that allowed a housewife to ignore the show for a while and complete a domestic duty without losing the thread.
Where VR finds its viewing “space” will also influence how it develops story. ... Real success, though, may depend on creating stories that really fit the activities audiences tend to do in those spaces.
Dan Archer, a graphic novelist and fellow at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, meticulously recreated the suburban St. Louis scene and police evidence from the Michael Brown shooting to create the interactive and VR experience “Ferguson Firsthand.” But then he faced an even bigger issue: What role would the audience play?
Good animators are obsessed with this “in-betweening,” Saschk Unseld says, because “they understand the emotional impact of changing these.”
This simple understanding, which Unseld is using as a demonstration of how his team is trying to get the main character in their new film Henry to react to your (virtual) presence in his story, may be emblematic of a larger moment in VR storytelling history.
“We’re currently labeling it ‘audience-aware storytelling’ or ‘audience-aware acting,'” Unseld says. Every story requires that you relate to its hero (or antihero), but rarely—if ever—have they met your gaze while doing it. The effect is gripping. You’re still a naive spectator in Henry’s story, but the first time he looks you in the eyes (and he does), you’re also an empathetic one too.
If you believe that Roger Ebert was right when he said that films were “empathy machines” (he was), then immersing yourself in a world where a lonely hedgehog looks at you before popping his new balloon animal friend with a hug might be the starting point for some of the greatest movies we’ll ever see.
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