Saschka Unseld and Lily Baldwin explore the phases and facets of love in Through You, a dance-infused VR piece that premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Unseld is an animator who directed the Pixar short The Blue Umbrella and is a cofounder of Oculus Story Studio, a VR media company. Baldwin arrived at filmmaking by way of dance, having worked with everyone from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet to David Byrne. As a creative challenge, the two decided to edit Through You themselves. Below, Unseld and Baldwin discuss the roughly 150-200 hours they spent editing a 14-minute VR experience. Filmmaker: How and why did […]

During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Tree transports users into the body of a rainforest tree, where they can experience not only its splendor but also its untimely fate. One challenge we faced was how to communicate with our audience without using traditional dialogue – and to keep that message and execution organic while in a CGI landscape. Essentially, to “show,” via real-time experience and interactivity, rather than “tell.” In order to immerse users […]

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I approach and pull away from objects. […] I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them […]

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 […]

Since the 2012 Sundance premiere of Hunger in Los Angeles — a virtual reality piece derived from an actual incident in which a man had a diabetic seizure while waiting in line at a food bank — Nonny de la Peña has become one of the most celebrated artists in the VR world of immersive journalism. With One Dark Night, the “godmother of virtual reality” (as Endgadget dubbed her) has set her sights on another in-the-blink-of-an-eye tragedy — the killing of Trayvon Martin while the unarmed African-American teen was visiting his father’s fiancée’s condo complex in Sanford, Florida. Through 911 […]

Oculus Rift  Just reaching stores is the long-awaited Oculus Rift ($599), the highest-end VR headset presently on the consumer market. Launched in 2012 with $2.5 million in Kickstarter funding and purchased two years later by Facebook for $2 billion, Oculus Rift in this early iteration is focusing on gaming, with EVE: Valkyrie bundled with the kit. The company is developing film applications too. There’s Oculus Video, an app allowing viewers to watch movies in either 2-D or 3-D from within a virtual cinema space. (You can even select your seat and angle of view.) And there are already dramatic VR […]

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 […]