philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Filmmakers Look to Virtual Reality and Oculus as the Future of Storytelling

Virtual reality company Oculus has been building momentum since it launched the Kickstarter campaign for its Oculus Rift headset two years ago. At its developer conference Saturday, it launched its latest prototype — while filmmakers made a convincing argument that VR is the dawn of a completely new form of visual storytelling.

...“I think the next step for us as filmmakers is to figure out what narrative filmmaking looks like in virtual reality,” said music video director Chris Milk, who created a virtual reality concert experience with Beck that showed at Sundance earlier this year. Up to this point, he said, the focus has been on documentary-style work — putting viewers into an experience, rather than creating a fully-realized narrative. Now is the time to figure out how to tell human stories — and that involves questioning fundamental concepts that may be taken for granted when it comes to uses like gaming. "The profound thing about virtual reality is the immersion of it," Milk said, "and how interactive it has to be immediately is up for debate."

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 "Playing with the tension between points of interest is something you can play with that you couldn't before," he said.

For Milk, it's a case of exploring a totally new narrative art form. "I don’t think this is cinema," he said. "I think this is something completely new."

“We’re experimenting with story interface,” he said, explaining that, with 10 years of Star Wars films in the company’s future, they’re looking at the movies as a “portal” that can bring fans into other experiences that they could interact with.

See the full post here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/filmmakers-look-virtual-reality-oculus-734500