Virtual Reality
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IFP Film Week: Gabo Arora and the UN’s First Virtual Reality App
“We’re great with empathy, but we really want action because we’re the UN. We need to shift the needle on things,” said filmmaker and United Nations creative director Gabo Arora about the UN’s first virtual reality app, UNVR, which launches today. The app launches with four VR films, including Clouds Over Sidra, which was created by Arora and filmmaker Chris Milk as a collaboration between the UN Millennium Campaign and UNICEF Jordan. Shot at the Zaatari refugee camp, Clouds Over Sidra tells the story of life inside the camp through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl named Sidra. The Sidra Project, which uses the […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 15, 2016 -
DP Eve M. Cohen Discusses Virtual Reality and Crowdfunding
In part I of this interview, cinematographer Eve M. Cohen talked about working on the independent feature Be Somebody. In the second part of the interview, she talks about her experience with shooting for virtual reality projects, as well as Seed and Spark, a crowd funding and community site for filmmakers. Filmmaker: You’ve started working in virtual reality. Can you tell us about that? Cohen: Virtual reality is really exciting and I think that it’s important to differentiate virtual reality filmmaking from 2D or linear filmmaking. Virtual reality is a completely new medium and it takes place completely surrounding you, […]
by Michael Murie on Aug 26, 2016 -
Sundance Institute New Frontier / Jaunt VR Residency Program Inducts Three New Projects
Sundance Institute and Jaunt Studios have announced their latest class of creatives to join the Sundance Institute New Frontier | Jaunt VR Residency Program. Daniel Arsham, Yung Jake, and Lily Baldwin & Saschka Unseld will participate in the six-month immersive residency. During the program, the artists will experiment with new ways of delivering narrative through cinematic virtual reality. They will also receive a grant to make their virtual reality short films. In addition, they will receive post-production support and access to Jaunt’s professional cinematic VR camera, Jaunt ONE, as well as its suite of production pipeline tools, and Jaunt Cloud Services (JCS), which include […]
by Paula Bernstein on Aug 18, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Exploring the Virtual Arcade
Tribeca is still a young festival — its fifteenth edition just wrapped last week — and though originally traditional films constituted its entire focus, soon transmedia, interactive work, and then virtual reality gained enough prominence that by 2016 they were as integral a part of the proceedings as the film screenings. This year more VR was on view than ever before at Storyscapes, the Interactive Playground, and the Virtual Arcade that together ran the length of the entire festival. By and large, the breadth and quality of the projects testify to the burgeoning craft of VR artists as the medium continues to […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 25, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Patrick Osborne on Winning an Oscar and his Animated VR Piece Pearl
Patrick Osborne came to national attention with his animated short Feast, a delightful film about a food-loving dog that screened with Disney’s Big Hero 6 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short for 2014. It dealt with family, loyalty, and growth and change over time, particularly the strain and eventual reward as new loved ones enter the circle of a previously cohesive relationship: it’s initially difficult for Winston, the dog, to accept his owner’s new girlfriend, but ultimately it is he who makes the decision to save the relationship and he enters a much wider and more loving world as a […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 22, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill on their VR Piece The Ark
One of the most moving exhibits in New York last year was a lone Galapagos tortoise in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History. Lonesome George was the last Pinta Island tortoise in the world, and after he died in 2012 the only way to encounter this entire species was to view his mounted form through glass in a museum. With a mass extinction at least as great as the one that killed the dinosaurs happening all around us, many other species will soon be visible only in the same way. But now Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, a […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 19, 2016 -
Gary Hustwit Launches New Virtual Reality Content Studio with Top Filmmakers
There’s so much buzz about Virtual Reality technology, but to really catch on with a broad audience VR needs compelling original content to drive the new medium. “It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing,” filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) told Filmmaker. “You’ve got to have enough players out there and headsets out there for people to be able to watch VR and for people to understand what it is. At the same time, you’ve got to have content that gets them to try it and also hooks them.” With the launch of Scenic, a new Virtual Reality content studio focusing on […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 7, 2016 -
SXSW: Career Opportunities in Organized Crime in 360-Degree Virtual Reality
Billed as “the first ever feature-length film shot with 360-degree virtual reality cameras,” Career Opportunities in Organized Crime will premiere at the VR/AR Experience Expo at SXSW from March 16-18. The debut film from Alex Oshmyansky, Career Opportunities is a mockumentary that follows the filming of a recruitment video for the Russian mafia. Oshmyansky isn’t your typical first-time filmmaker. An inventor, entrepreneur and radiologist, he earned a PhD in mathematics from Oxford and a medical degree from Duke before completing residency training at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins. When writing the script for Career Opportunities, which he also produced, Oshmyansky always had VR in mind. “The VR […]
by Paula Bernstein on Mar 15, 2016
