How You Will Be Pregnant and Kill Zombies in Just One Night
You are a 25 year-old man, developing your business in a big city and you like spending time with your friends and exercising during the week. If I tell you that you will be pregnant and kill zombies tonight, you might say I’m crazy. You might wonder how could two crazy actions like « being pregnant» (when you are a man) and « killing zombies » happen to you at all. « In your dreams! » would you say. Actually, it could only happen to you while dreaming or acting in a movie. But if you are not an actor nor in a dream, wouldn’t it be possible to live your dream or someone else’s experience?
As human beings, we were born with a brain allowing us to conceptualize, dream, invent, and create. These are exclusive human capabilities that consist in taking a step back from the physical experience and try to analyze, rationalize and transform it.
Hence, our passion for story-telling comes from these mental faculties. We love to hear a good story: feeling the goose bumps as the mystery clears out, putting ourselves in the character’s shoes and picture the scene « as if we were there ». « So, what happened next? » as we have asked at least once in our lives.
Technology, coupled with story-telling over the years, has allowed us to create new ways of engaging crowds: first books, then stage performances, 2D and 3D motion pictures, video games. I would even say because of technology, we were forced to adapt our story-telling so it would fit the technical changes of the restitution. For example, inventing sound recording and allowing the creation of talking films made the 1920’s Hollywood industry — then producing silent movies — adapt the technical aspects of movie creation, so viewers would still feel engaged. Stanley Donen’s Singing in the Rain demonstrates how struggling it was to suddenly make a script meaningful, record voices but without microphones showing in the video. Hence, starting the production of talking motion pictures put a stress on the importance of dialogues, and Hollywood made scripts a necessary component of a good story.
This phenomenon of putting an industry against the wall and giving it a sole alternative to death — reinvent itself - is just called disruptive innovation.
The same thing is now happening with what we call « immersive entertainment » — in reference to Escape Games, Virtual Reality, Immersive Theater and Video Games. As I have been focusing on understanding live shows creation, I wonder; what would be the best immersive experience? For Brent Bushnell, CEO of Two Bit Circus, a Los Angeles-based experiential entertainment company, the answer is right in front of us: « Real Life! ». What if people could actually put themselves in the character’s shoes and feel, touch and taste the experience using all their senses? Saying that, stage performances can appear very limited and closed-minded: while spectators are sitted to enjoy the show, they only experience the latter through a certain extent. They don’t get close to the artists, nor exchange with them. They don’t have the same perspective of things as they are physically far. Last, they see the story from a distant eye but don’t really live through it nor act upon it.
We still don’t know how immersive experiences will look like as they are disrupting entertainment; only explorations in the field will create the format and will end up determining how we see things. To refer to Brent Bushnell again, in the early days of movies, no one really knew how they were supposed to be made. It took the production of Star Wars, Citizen Kane and other masterpieces to determine the film production standards that we all know today: « long shots, fast cuts, the 22-minute TV show and the 90-minute movie». They have become a rule, a dominant design, and their use is now what makes a film « good ».
The world is shaped by those who act upon it. If you create something, you will design the world as you want it to be, even if your creation may not look like what you’ve imagined at first. Immersive entertainment, which emerged about a decade ago, is yet to be defined. The years to come will be the time for experimentation and it’s exciting!