During two hours in the Virtual Arcade at the Tribeca Film Festival you can swim with whales, ride a dragon, become a rabbit, fly by Pluto and dodge spurts of blood unleashed by a machete attack. More exciting than any of those individual experiences, however, is the sense that you’re in a room full of possibilities and of creative people still in the early stages of figuring out what those possibilities are.
The arcade is where the festival is showcasing virtual-reality films, the still nascent art form made more accessible by a new generation of viewing devices that turn a movie into a 360-degree experience rather than something watched on a rectangular screen.
Eighteen projects are gathered in a space at the festival hub downtown, and the sheer diversity is impressive.
Especially if you’ve never watched a film in this format, it’s rather mind-blowing. But you may need a neck massage afterward from looking up, down and all around.
Two animated films, Allumette from Penrose Studios and Invasion! from Baobab Studios, are the crowd-pleasers, each a brief but delightful toe-dip into immersive viewing.
Allumette is a bittersweet wordless story about a young girl in a multilevel city in the clouds.
As with the other offerings, you don a headset to experience it, and when the city appears, you are inside it. You can walk paths, look up at the sky, peer down at other levels of the city below.
The film is viewed standing up, and you may find yourself ducking so as not to hit your head on that virtual bridge or stepping awkwardly to avoid treading on the vagabond sleeping under the bridge. When the ship carrying the young girl to the new land docks, if you walk over to it and stick your head through the side, you’re suddenly looking at the interior rooms of the vessel.
A step furtherInvasion! goes a step further. When hostile extraterrestrials land on Earth, only an intrepid bunny can save the planet. Or, actually, two bunnies: Look down toward your feet and you will see that you have acquired a rabbit body. The story doesn’t last long, but the sense that you have fur lingers awhile.
Other projects are essentially documentaries with a 360-degree perspective, like My Mother’s Wing (Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz, from Vrse.works), about one Gaza family’s painful loss and The Click Effect (Sandy Smolan and James Nestor), about divers researching the communication systems of dolphins and whales. (Full disclosure: The New York Times has a project here, Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart , about the New Horizons spacecraft. The Click Effect has been released on The Times’s VR app, where Invasion! will also be available.)
A few explore the possibilities of interactivity, giving the viewer a role in the experience. “Dragonflight” (Blackthorn Media) allows you to climb on a dragon’s back for a fly-about; hand controllers let you scorch the landscape with fireballs if you feel the need. “The Crystal Reef” from the virtual reality lab at Stanford University has two films — one is a standard look at the problem of ocean acidification, but the other lets you deep-sea dive yourself and collect samples from the ocean floor.
Yes, you make a swimming motion with your arms to make this happen, which might make you look a little ridiculous to anyone nearby who’s not encased in a viewing helmet. But the swim will be far more dignified than the shaking and shimmying you may find yourself doing while watching Old Friend (Tyler Hurd/Wevr), a sort of music video in which you’re surrounded by dancing creatures.
Overall, the room invites you to contemplate the implications of this radical shift in how movies might be made and watched. It’s all so new that everything on display is essentially an experiment in one thing or another. Eugene Chung, who created Allumette , said part of the purpose was to see whether an animated character in this format could evoke sympathy.
Sheer experimentalismThe sheer experimentalism in the room is exhilarating. You can feel the various content creators exploring what can be done in the medium, whether educationally, artistically (“Ashes,” a dance film by Jessica Kantor is an example) or in terms of storytelling. What kinds of tales can be told, and from what perspectives?
With the potential to now pull viewers inside of the film, will there be pressure to turn the story over to the viewer entirely, so that VR becomes just a more sophisticated selfie?
The headsets that make all this possible are just hitting the market, and of course they also have creators wondering about the delivery system for virtual reality content. It’s easy to see this further depersonalizing us — we’ve already retreated from real life into our cellphone and tablet screens; will we next disappear into our helmets?
But perhaps the effect will be the opposite. Is there something akin to multiplayer gaming to be developed in virtual-reality filmmaking, so a movie becomes a shared participation in a story? — New York Times News Service
