Frequent visitors to major film festivals will have spent the last few years tracking the improvement not only of virtual and augmented reality pieces, but also of how they’re shown. Throughput has increased, displays and decorations gone from relatively slipshod to professional, and most recently entire groups of viewers have been accommodated simultaneously in group viewing sessions through synchronized headsets. In the meantime, commercial venues—some permanent, some pop-ups—have sprung up around the globe, offering VR games and films as part of a new wave of location-based entertainment (LBE). The Paris-based Diversion cinema is at the forefront of developments like these. […]

It’s been quite a year for composer Nathan Halpern. He had four films at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival—the feature-length documentaries After Parkland and One Child Nation and the narrative features Goldie and Swallow—and while he hasn’t slacked in his new output, all four of these projects have gone on to impressive post-festival activity. One Child Nation (directed by Nanfu Wang, a previous collaborator of Halpern’s) premiered at Sundance in 2019, and was acquired by Amazon Studios for a theatrical run in August; it’s now streaming on Amazon Prime. And three of the films are hitting theaters right now: After Parkland (directed by Emily Taguchi and Jake […]

“We are on a path to where eventually there will be no fish, and we will have spent billions of dollars to get to that point.” This dire warning is from one of the many experts in Artifishal: The Road to Extinction is Paved with Good Intentions, a new documentary from director Josh Murphy and Patagonia that opened on multiple platforms this past week. It premiered last spring at Tribeca, followed by screenings at Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride and the Seattle International Film Festival, near the heart of the film’s action. From there it’s moved into a series of 550 festival […]

Films and video games have been moving closer together for years now, including open world games that mimic cinematic storytelling and videos that include viewer input in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The mechanics of the latter have often been intrusive, however, making viewers click a link or—with the recent flowering of virtual reality—direct their gaze at an icon indicating their narrative selection. While this can result in compelling products, like the 2017 VR film Broken Night, many filmmakers in the space miss the immersion of a traditional film and want to mask the more game-like control mechanics in […]

Since 1895 films have had at least two distinct advantages over live theater: the ability to be reproduced and watched at times and in places where the action did not actually take place, and the ability to direct the audience’s attention to precisely what the filmmakers desired. Conversely, after more than a century of cinema’s evolution, these have become precisely the reason that theater remains vibrant: it’s live and it’s present, and audiences can look wherever they want. Now virtual reality is mixing these experiences in a new way. While still prerecorded and edited (generally), it expands the audience’s range […]

Perhaps the most innovative virtual reality work I’ve seen this year has been Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light, which premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jackson, an Anishinaabe artist working out of the National Film Board of Canada, has spent years exploring issues of First People identity and language in her work, which includes documentary and fiction film, animation, installations, and other media; in fact, Biidaaban: First Light was designed as a corollary to a multimedia installation. The film’s narrative is minimal. It could be described as a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the viewer witnesses how nature has reclaimed […]

For a few brief shining years Howard Ashman was one of the most influential filmmakers in Hollywood. With the composer Alan Menken he had already created an Off-Broadway hit with Little Shop of Horrors, and, at Walt Disney Animation Studios in the late 1980s, he was a pivotal force in creating The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—films that galvanized an industry-wide animation renaissance—as not just a lyricist but a producer, writer, and director. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, however, while the latter two of these films were still in production: Beauty and the Beast was dedicated “to our friend Howard, who […]

If you don’t know Michael Muller‘s name, you do know his work. His posters for Deadpool 2 are the most creative bit of film advertising in the current market, and he’s also shot artwork for Marvel films like Captain America: Civil War, Dr. Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 as well as dozens of other films, innumerable portraits, album covers and ad campaigns for brands like Nike and Sony. But in 2006 he began training his camera on a very different subject, wild sharks, and since then shark photography and marine environmental activism has become his primary cause. His still photos of great whites, hammerheads, and […]

Ariel Marx is a film composer to watch. It’s early in her career, but her credits already include an impressive variety of dramas and comedies on both film and television. She’s assisted on projects like Wonder and Amazon’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, and her own scores have been in the films West of Her, By Jingo, and The Tale, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and runs on HBO next month. She’s even worked in augmented reality with Armen Perian’s The Angry River, a piece about human traffickers that changes with the direction of the viewer’s gaze — an impressive challenge for a traditionally linear form […]