Meet Eugene Chung, Penrose Studio, The D.W. Griffith Of Virtual Reality
I was blown away by his sixteen-minute narrative VR masterpiece Arden's Wake at the Tribeca Film Festival's Immersive Arcade in April so I jumped at the chance to meet Chung at Penrose's San Francisco office, and to experience Arden's Wake again.
Arden's Wake was even better the second time I saw it. It's a completely new, original approach to immersive storytelling that mades me think differently about how third person narratives will work in this new medium.
Arden's Wake takes us inside a Waterworld-like post apocalyptic world, where a teenage girl lives in a Nemo-like lighthouse built atop a decaying underwater skyscraper. When her inventor father is lost while diving, she takes his underwater vehicle into the ruins to find him. The 3D animation is simply amazing. We follow the tiny characters and their narrative as if we are giants looking into a dollhouse.
It has main characters, though they are stylized like the stop motion maquettes featured in the movies Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Certainly, like all VR, we experience it, though experience doesn't quite capture it, either. Escape Rooms are experiences, too. "Sleep No More", the smash hit New York show now entering its sixth blockbuster year, is called immersive theater, which Chung says strongly influenced him, along with the operas in which his father performed. He says he is also inspired by video and strategy games, whose miniature style suggested the god-like perspective of his narrative VR experiences.
Chung's eclectic background uniquely suits him to this unique moment in time. He grew up in suburban Washington, DC. His mother was a CPA and his father a professional opera singer.
For Chung and Penrose, 2018 will bring the next installment of "Arden's Wake", which ends with a cliff hanger as our heroine is swallowed by a sea monster the size of a skyscraper. "No one knows the ideal length of the VR experiences of the future," the director said. "What we're doing is not glamorous. It's just the hard work needed to move the medium forward."
Allumette is available on Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, Steam VR, and Viveport. A release date and platforms for Arden's Wake have not yet been announced.
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2017/08/24/meet-the-d-w-griffith-of-virtual-reality/#429340d727a7