Own a Medium

Thoughts on Virtual Reality and Career.

As I cast about for way points in the future of my career, I keep coming back to a piece of advice creative director Paul Hernandez gave me a couple of years ago: “Own a medium,” he told me, “its the key to success.”

That got me thinking.

The last 100 years were constrained by 4 sides in the shape of a rectangle. Everything takes after this shape — the movies we watch in theaters, our mobile phones, this laptop I’m writing on right now. Hell, books and magazines are rectilinear as well. There are some pretty well defined reasons for this. As an inhabitant of a round apartment building with rooms devoid of square angles — I’m intimately and unfortunately very familiar with the convenience of square angle interior design.

The thing is, the future of media (and don’t worry, not all media likely) will not be constrained by a box. Since Star Wars we’ve hoped for hologram communication, and since Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 in the 01950’s, we’ve dreamed of transporting ourselves to new and exotic worlds via an alternative, some might say, virtual, reality interfaces.

If holograms are the insertion of a human representation into a location, and Virtual Reality is the insertion of a location representation into the visual cortex of a viewer — we’re in for a wide ride folks. I’ve not seen the hologram work in person, but I spent 2 days at at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference this week, and let me tell you, its fucking awesome.

I explore what this might mean for the film industry here, but in the mean time, I’m going back to Paul’s advice: own a medium. Mediums are specific story telling systems — its not the Oculus Rift or the Samsung Gear. Those are just early iterations. No, in this case a medium is the ability to transport audiences into a space like never before, interact at an deeply empathic level with characters real and scripted, and critically, owning a medium means figuring out the next generation of artistic conventions, techniques and cheats.

What stories will be told? What lives wil be changed? What world do you want to live in?

Answers abound and the history is in the making — are you a maker?