Slow Down 360°
Don’t start with GTA, start with Pong.
In the past months, I have discovered a lot of fast-cut cinematic VR films. While this works when you watch them without an HMD, they are, for me, hard to watch with an HMD.
Some fellow 360° filmmakers and producers argue that there are many viewers experiencing 360° films without a HMD. Therefore, you need to edit it for non-HMD viewers, they say. But why should you commit such a big compromise just because the technology isn’t here yet? It’s like doing VR, but without being interested in the potential of VR.
When compromising in a big way, you’re also compromising your career because when HMDs start hitting the mass market hard, content needs to be ready too. Additionally, they will only really hit the market hard when the content is ready. Therefore, creating a spherical film and then adapting the editing for non-HMD viewing is short-term thinking.
The sustainable way is much harder. There are more obstacles in the way and you possibly reach a very small audience in the beginning but you will find out what true VR is. This will pay off in the future. Since there is a hassle in the technical world, there shouldn’t be one in the creative world. A lot of them are trying to be the 360° version of The Matrix or zombie blockbusters. I try to visualize how perplexed the visitors of the Lumière Brothers Cinema would be if the first movie they had seen was 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s what some big VR content creators are trying to do right now. I think the following quote from the VR game industry could be applied in our case too: Don’t start with GTA, start with Pong. That means that we should rather try to create L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat from the Lumière brothers than Birdman.
I think that a precise minimalism approach could lead to interesting projects. One ‘flatty’ example could be the Robert Bresson movie A Man Escaped (1956). Not to make things simplistic and stupid, but rather try to not do an over-ambitious project in terms of mise-en-scene yet. The danger is that we miss all the opportunities to discover elements which are true-VR during the time we take creative shortcuts, because we find ourselves in a fictional race — also known as the hamster wheel — to create the ultimate first true cinematic VR film.
Since a lot of first-time HMD viewers have a sensory overflow by wearing a VR headset, you shouldn’t need to give them a bigger overflow by adding zombies coming from all around with fifty cuts per minute. Take for example following cinematic VR experience Above & Beyond from JauntVR
While the thematic of sailing and the “spherotography” from this 360° film is perfect, the Michael Bay-esque editing and sound design makes it really hard to watch with an HMD. I would really like to be able to follow the movements of the crew longer and discover how they interact with each other on the boat. Unfortunately, I am heavily guided from the fast-paced editing which cuts down the 360° experience into a 40° one. If you dare to look at an angle outside of the 40° of your front, a cut will punish you and set you in an unknown space where you have to find orientation before you will be lost again. I think the editing was surely not made for an HMD VR screening but the spherotography definitely was. There are shots where I can discover things all around but POOF! CUT! Where am I now? Ah, next to the captain BAM! CUT! Sheeeeeeit! Give me a break!
My vision of a true fictional cinematic experience is a 360° Theatre with the audience as a fixed camera in the center and very naturalistic mise-en-scène that contains a lot of everyday life with multiple stories in it. That’s what I understand under the hip buzzword “story enabling”.
An important thing that I would consider when creating a nice cinematic VR experience is to plan all your cuts in your script before shooting, edit your 360° film with a HMD, and test it with another person that hasn’t used a HMD yet. If you hear following comment: “Oh, where am I now?” You failed. Finally, don’t let any ‘flatty’ editor edit your film.
My vision of a good cinematic VR experience goes in the direction of theatre and flatties inspired from the Italian Neo-Realism. For example, the movies from Roy Andersson. In his living trilogy, he demonstrates his unique style that he developed in a long series of experiments without creative shortcuts. He stages long scenes that are precisely organized like a painting. The camera does not move and he tells his stories using only wide shots in deep focus. The scenes are not interrupted by cuts in the same room. Andersson gives you plenty of time to discover the frame. Here is an excerpt of a scene from the last part of his living trilogy named A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)
There are no close-ups that are showing us what is important. We should find the essential information ourselves like we do it in our everyday life. Of course, we are partially influenced by his mise-en-scène. There are a lot of tools we can use to direct the attention of the audience. There is, for example, speech (sound) or movement. These tools are heavily used in theatre too. We are used to orient ourselves by them in our reality. That means, we can use the same approach in a virtual one.
You can’t obviously do a one-on-one translation of this since A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) is a flattie movie. But, I think that an adaption of his approach behind his trilogy could be very inspiring.
My vision of a true fictional cinematic experience is a 360° Theatre with the audience as a fixed camera in the center and very naturalistic mise-en-scène that contains a lot of everyday life with multiple stories in it. That’s what I understand under the hip buzzword “story enabling”. It is to integrate real life and not chipping everything away like in a flatty close up. In Andersson’s movies you can follow multiple small stories in a fictional world or in his case a moving painting. Therefore, we should leave the audience with much more freedom of what they want to follow, and not try to guide or punish them through editing or if they have missed something important. If the majority missed out on something, it is the director’s responsibility. Give them enough time to explore the sphere and if you have vital details to show, try to guide them with elements they are used to use in their everyday life.
Mastering this in 360° needs a lot of experience and knowledge in psychology and filmmaking. Therefore, we should start very simple like the Lumière Brothers and collect experience on our way until we can create a 360° mise-en-scène that can “lead” the audience in a natural way through a cinematic VR experience. Give yourself time to collect experience in this field. If not now than never. Don’t let anyone seduce you taking creative shortcuts by offering you a lot of money and views. You may be going to regret that later.
BUT!
In my case, our team from the Swiss Television tried out this approach in Inspector Crazy Schuss & Kuss. There we have long scenes shot with theatre actors without cuts in the same scenes. But (!) in our recent 360° film (see below) we experimented with jump cuts and a fast-paced editing, and it seems to work. We did a reenactment of an accident and tried to only integrate the bits, that the person who had the accident remembers in his ‘off-voice’ commentary. He remembered only fractal parts of the accident and tells us that everything happened so fast. So, in my opinion, we had a reason to do it. In the rest of the 360° experience, when the point of view goes from subjective to objective we slowed down the pace drastically and gave the audience time to explore the emergency room.
As a rule of thumb, I would say, the faster the editing the shorter the field of attention (where you place the interesting things in space) should be. But I will to talk about this field of attention in a later entry. This rule like any other thing that I wrote about in this article is probably wrong tomorrow. And I can’t wait until someone proves me wrong! Only through collaboration and sharing our experiences can we find out together, how a true cinematic VR experience could look like. This field is not a shark pool (red ocean) full of competition. It’s a pioneering field in which we all contribute to something. Therefore, I can’t thank JauntVR deeply enough for their contributions in this field. If a 360° filmmaker succeeds, all 360° Filmmakers succeed.
Thank you for reading.
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