As Hollywood is rightfully called out on its underemployment of women, virtual reality companies like Mechanical Dreams Virtual Reality (MDVR) are actively courting underrepresented voices. The Seattle-based virtual reality content company housed by the University of Washington and the start-up incubator CoMotion is producing six innovative 360 films, five of them directed by women. The company’s first production, Tracy Rector’s Ch’aak’ S’aagi (Eagle Bone), one of the first VR pieces ever by a Native American filmmaker, was recently selected as one of five VR projects to screen at TIFF as part of its inaugural POP VR section at the festival. MDVR is currently raising money on […]

Calling all creators working at the intersection of film and technology: Sundance Institute is accepting applications for the next New Frontier Story Lab. Now in its tenth year, New Frontier at Sundance Institute provides support to artists working in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and other new storytelling forms. The Labs and Residency programs at New Frontier work to identify and foster independent artists and creative technologists who are developing interactive, immersive or experimental projects that aim to create rich and resonant experiences for audiences. Past participants include Roger Ross Williams, Yung Jake, Chris Milk, Cory McAbee, Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari, Karim Ben Khelifa, […]

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 […]

[Editor’s note: this is a guest post from Taylor Cohan, the creator/director/producer/writer of the webseries Newtopia and a partcipant in this year’s IFP Screen Forward Labs.] Before the IFP Screen Forward Labs started, we received a sheet asking us to rank the different workshops taking place at the lab in terms of our interest. We hadn’t ever thought about incorporating VR into our project, but I still ranked the VR workshop as #2. Our first activity at the labs was a group screening of our films for the fellows and IFP staff. Our project screened and then we got feedback from […]

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 […]

From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]