Virtual Reality Storytelling with Beverly Peterson
Storytelling for professor and awarded documentary filmmaker, Beverly Peterson, was always about exploring new platforms. In our now technology advanced world, there are always new ways for creative people like Beverly to a convey a story. In Beverly’s case, her true passion lies within the most unlikely new form, Virtual and Augmented Reality. This new technology may seem like it has just burst onto the tech scene, but according to Beverly, she started to dabble in VR story telling around the mid 80’s, going to workshops and seminars to see and hear how this technology can one day be used for storytelling.
Beverly began her exploration into alternative platforms of storytelling with video diaries that gave her a portal into a whole community that were exploring new technologies and using them in creative ways. “I liked that feeling” she told me as she smiled, giving me a deeper insight into her exciting early days as an innovative storyteller.
The Webby Award nominated documentary, in which she explored using the internet as a platform, was an investigative piece titled What Killed Kevin? It lives as an engaging website of short videos where people could explore and investigate this gripping story of suicide at their own pace while bringing about the topic of workplace bullying. It uses the internet in a truly imaginative way, letting users click in and out of testimonies that divulge more into who Kevin Morrissey actually was. This specific film is truly one of a kind and lends itself to how Beverly chooses to convey the stories that need to be told.
Within the past 10 years, new gear started slowly coming about that made VR storytelling more accessible. Technologies like Google Glass and cardboard VR headsets made it easier for filmmakers to try this form of storytelling out, and Beverly was the first to jump in. Her most recent and ongoing passion project, titled Memory Rooms, uses augmented reality to tell a story that is very close to her heart.
Beverly’s mother was passing and on a particular day in hospice, she instructed her daughter to look up at the ceiling at a house being built, drawing on a very biblical ideal that the ‘father’ is building a place for you in heaven. She then, all of a sudden, started referring to distant relatives in which Beverly had no idea of and was previously sheltered from. After this experience Beverly knew she wanted to tell this story, but make it as real as possible, and with VR, real storytelling is indeed possible. Beverly seeks to create the house and people her mother saw in hospice a reality, filling it with hidden stories and secrets under crevices and behind closed doors. She is looking to make this project with more than just virtual reality but with animation and augmented reality as well. She describes this sort of world as “mixed reality” in which everything can be interactive and come to life. She’s been working on Memory Rooms for over 10 years and as new technologies develop, more about how the story will be told developes.
Beverly will forever be changing as the technology of the world changes, which is what makes her such an innovative storyteller. It is rare to see an artist so completely aware of the fact that new technologies must breed new ways of expression and storytelling. Beverly reiterates this fact telling me “This is who I am. As the technology changes, your storytelling changes, the way you tell stories change….” Her love of telling her own and other people’s compelling stories will never change, however the way in which she chooses to tell them will, in fact, morph to fit the newer times ahead.
