A look at ARCADIA FLATS, the new VR horror experience from Electric Dream Factory
When I got to CoMotion Labs, a startup incubator from the University of Washington, they were hosting an event about the latest trend in cryptocurrency at the same time as my interview. I found myself in the middle of a far larger group of people than I expected. “Are you here for blockchain? … Are you here for blockchain?” I kept hearing over and over again. I was not, I was “here” to talk about Arcadia Flats, an excellent and immersive six-and-a-half minute short VR horror film, and the first release from Electric Dream Factory, one of the startups working in CoMotion Labs.
Electric Dream Factory was founded in 2017, and according to its website, “is a content studio that creates film, TV, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality experiences. We are story explorers who work with diverse creatives to impact audiences by whatever means necessary.” Arcadia Flats fits into that mission statement perfectly, and makes a great, first release to put into the world because it’s such an enjoyable, immersive, horror experience.
The leaders at Electric Dream Factor are its CEO, film producer Lacey Leavitt (known for producing Safety Not Guaranteed, among countless other great films) and Chief Technology Officer, and filmmaker/VR artist Joe Jacobs. Leavitt produced Arcadia Flats, and Jacobs directed it and both wrote it.
What I found so enjoyable about Arcadia Flats is that it beautifully captured the paranoia and claustrophobia of a horror movie in a format I hadn’t seen before. In 360 VR, they succeeded wildly in putting the viewer inside the middle of the movie, rather than as a passive spectator. FilmThreat said it’s “scary all the way around,” and I tend to agree.
Without giving away too much of this short film, I’ll copy (part of) the tagline from my press release that says the plot to Arcadia Flats is that it “follows Alice (Jessica Martin) as she attempts to outrun supernatural forces. Ivan (Evan Mosher) comes across her car on a dark, deserted road.”
Lacey Leavitt and Joe Jacobs had me over to the Electric Dream Factory where I was able to watch electric dreams come directly off the assembly line and talk about all things Arcadia Flats, plus some other things.
So, Arcadia Flats is that the first release from Electric Dream Factory that you have done, that people can see?
Lacey Leavitt: It’s the first VR film that we’ve made that’s had a wide release, yeah, that’s true. We’ve had other work that we’ve worked on play at festivals and on the festival circuit, but this is our first actual release.
Where did the idea come from?
Joe Jacobs: When we were first coming together and creating a bunch of different ideas and things that we could create in a virtual reality kind of cinematic space, Arcadia Flats is a project that I had been cobbling together as more of a feature project that stemmed from my perspective on the Ethan Couch case where it was dealing with affluenza, which is apparently a condition when some kid has just had it so good that we have to let him off when he kills somebody.
LL: Did you hear about that? Like, he was just so rich and so spoiled that he didn’t understand the meaning of life, a valid human life, so we can’t convict him for these horrible murders because he didn’t understand. What?
JJ: So it’s just kind of my kind of understanding of someone that has affluenza is almost like a superpower, because you know, you’re from this affluent family and that means that you can get away with a lot. And so I was kind of equating that with a superpower. So I was kind of creating this community where there’s these family members that had this kind of life and ability amongst other families that didn’t and how they were kind of able to secretly herd and control through these murderous tensions. And kind of playing with this idea, and developing this kind of rural community that was being governed this way.
And so I was developing it as a feature, and as we were starting to spitball those idea with virtual reality, I’ve always thought horror as a genre would be really great in virtual reality. Because you’re put in this thing where, when you’re watching stuff on the screen you’re like ‘where’s the stuff gonna happen from?’ And, this guy’s vulnerable. And you know, they better not go over there! So I just felt like it’s really apt for virtual reality.
So I had this particular scene in Arcadia Flats that I’d been developing and I could lift this out and make a thing that was this ten minute short film for virtual reality as kind of an experience, to kind of feel out this world and then experience it through virtual reality. So I started developing it as a virtual reality piece. And it just kind of started looking like, to the team, like this could be something that we should look into.
LL: It’s a project of Joe’s I’ve really liked for years. And I said, “Yes! Keep working on that.” Joe has this other, broader universe really sketched out. But okay, so if our restrictions are it’s gonna be less than ten minutes, it’s gonna be in 360, and it’s gonna be these kinds of characters, what — I don’t know if you even mentioned it, but you know, the thing with the family in this area is with their superpowers and their sort of murderous tendencies there. They’re werewolves, right?
So it’s like, how do you take one of those, perhaps somebody who’s just experiencing their powers for the very first time and be struggling with them? Who you’re around and who you maybe think is having this really horrendous experience and who actually is having this horrendous experience also ends up being the person, or the creature who ends up inflicting the harm. How interesting is that to sort of follow along with one person and then switch over and then be with somebody else who comes into the situation?
I have a VR headset but hadn’t really used it much, but I really loved watching this because you’re not really being hidden from anything. When you watch horror movies in a theater or at home, you might say ‘Don’t go in there!” to the screen or yourself, but here you an almost can check it out for yourself. It’s a completely different experience.
JJ: Were doing a lot of content that was very much documentary focused. And there wasn’t a lot of kind of cinematic movie storyline based kind of stuff. And that’s another reason why we were really interested in this, like, let’s try to do something like that. And you know, there was also a lot of these different groups throwing around all these rules of how you can and can’t shoot and edit things.
And to start experimenting and challenging those things, and that’s being able to treat something like you would a movie where you edit around and jump in and out of different places through the project, through the world, like you would in a movie is something we wanted to try out and feel out. That’s when we started going in to do Arcadia, it was to do just that, to break some of these rules.
LL: Yeah, it’s this birth of this new medium. It’s really similar to film, but obviously you no longer have close ups and a frame, whether that’s 4:3 or 16:9. You don’t have that frame anymore. So how does that change your cinematic storytelling toolbox?
When we first started working on this, it was very confusing for those of us who are classically, cinematically trained to be like, what do I do now that I have an entire 360 sphere? You know, it’s sort of a cross section between film, theater, and and video games. This 360, when it’s a passive experience it’s much more between film and theater. But as you start to move into more interactive experiences, then you’re also obviously getting video game-like narrative devices in there as well. So what happens to the way we tell a story?
And so with horror, some of the best, most terrifying moments of horror or cinematic history are what you actually don’t see. Like if the shark had worked as (Steven) Spielberg wanted, Jaws would’ve probably not have been as great of a movie if we had seen it early on, because the shark didn’t actually look all that good. So much of that movie is what you don’t see. So how do you keep that sort of same level of suspense when you can see everywhere? What does that look like? You don’t just get to crop out these things. So that was really fun to play with.
What I found was that you’re not a passive viewer, beholden to the director’s choices of what you can and cannot see.
LL: Right. Although we did still hide some things, right? What you can do, which is the other part of what you do when you’re identifying with a character in film, but it’s not quite the same level, is you feel like you’re there with them. You feel like you’re in danger with them.
When all of a sudden you’re in 360 and you’re literally right next to them. And when they look, you can look in the exact same way and you can look back at them. Now you really feel the sense of presence that you are also in danger. So we’re taking away one thing, but of course, then you get this other level of immersion that can be more terrifying. So you gotta be careful with that power.
How do you develop characters when you know it’s going to be in 360 and less than ten minutes long?
LL: Joe and I worked together on this. A lot of the same rules apply, right? Like, you’re going to be more scared for a character if you care about them. That’s hard to do in under six minutes.
In the track when you first meet Ivan (Evan Mosher), who, by the way, you don’t ever know his name because he doesn’t introduce himself like, “Hi, my name’s Ivan.” You might notice that’s what it says on his shirt, but you probably don’t. But we still gave him a name, because he’s a fully fleshed out character. We had this great production designer who put little touches like how there’s his picture of his wife on the dash. And here’s this, and here’s that. And then, of course, paramount is working with amazing actors.
We have a really good actor base here in Seattle. And Joe — you auditioned for Alice, but we just hired Evan because we knew Evan’s fantastic. We’ve worked with Evan many times over the years. He’s got some role in just about every Megan Griffiths and Lynn Shelton movie that we’ve done. Safety Not Guaranteed, too, he’s got a little cameo in the beginning as well. And he’s a great theater actor as well. He’s one of the leads at Café Nordo which I used to be on the board of.
And so we knew that he had this great sense not only of how to show up well and how to act well on camera, because that’s different than theater, but also theater we know he can hit his marks. We know he can do similar actions again and again, because that’s what you have to do in 360 and VR filmmaking. You have to plot it out. And then we’re not slicing around the best part of the takes anymore, it’s about getting one long take that we like. So he was great at that. And then do you wanna talk about finding Jessica?
JJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same thing as just being able to find somebody that’s going to be able to roll through a scene and be in that character through broader strokes, and her ability to make that commitment into getting in the zone as well as the project, technically, because in this project, specifically to virtual reality but also specifically to us being a very scrappy, low-funded thing. Like, we’re basically leading her with a camera system, in a car, and you know, everyone’s walking away.
And just to her to kind of roll with the punches was a huge component. Along with her just being able to kind of adopt Alice as a character in her situation and to kind of bring life into it. Her being able to kind of roll with virtual reality and I’m gonna kinda do this thing all by myself in this kind of weird atmosphere, because I have this weird camera and everybody’s gone, which is very nontraditional, was important.
Another one of the components of making films with VR is that you’re not shooting all of these explosive little takes and moments that you’re gonna string together. They’re gonna be a lot longer pieces that have to work together. So it’s just something to consider, is that you’re gonna wanna be able to have people that are going to be able to carry it a lot longer and be a lot bigger. And you know, and I think that’s where theater starts nodding a little bit to virtual reality production is that. Their presence is a lot bigger. The subtlety, like you would in a close up in a feature film isn’t as necessary. The kind of bigness of that performance that you would see in a theatrical performance is actually kind of something that is needed a little bit more.
It must be crucial to finding good actors who can play these parts because you don’t have access to the same tricks of using cuts or lighting to cover things up…
JJ: Yeah, you can do a little bit of that. But — and even in our circumstances, the technology to get the camera system streaming for previewing like you normally would didn’t exist. So it was all done blind. And we did very little playback. The problem with playing back on set, you know, even kind of what they did back before even digital cinema cameras, doing playback cost time. And we had a five and a half hour window to shoot a majority of the whole thing.
Playback cost time that you don’t really have, so primarily what Ivan, or, well, Evan, Jessica and me had to kind of work with, is we had to just talk a lot up front. And communicate what we were hoping to see, and what the character was really experiencing, and what we were trying to convey. Because we weren’t gonna have a lot of time to review shots and take a lot of stuff. Because we just didn’t have a lot of time.
So a lot of it had to be kind of getting into the head and the mindset of what the character was going through and kind of how we wanted to experience that on screen. And you know, and there’s a lot — it would’ve been nice to be able to thoroughly go through the takes and experience them in a headset, which the technology is actually a lot more available now to do stuff like that.
LL: It’s like you hire the best actors and then just do multiple takes and you know one of those is gonna be the one you’re gonna have to use. Joe was, like, directing blind, but listening to everything. So every single one of those shots were all hiding behind the cars or just in the bushes. Our sound woman was in the back of the truck… she’s under a blanket in the cab hanging out there, because she really needed to be close to the sound. So it was it was really scrappy. In a fun way.
I want to ask one more thing about Arcadia Flats. What can you tell me about the music?
LL: It’s so good! We worked with Jeramy Koepping. And he was one of our composers on The Off Hours. Megan (Griffiths) and I worked with him on a couple of those films. I didn’t realize until we started doing the VR filmmaking, because I knew him as being in this really amazing band called St. Kilda, and I’ve done film scoring with him. And then when we were posting on Facebook like, “Hey, we’re getting into VR filmmaking,” it turns out he’s also got this whole other background as doing video game composing and sound design.
For several of our VR films he’s done composing, and/or the sound mix as well. The sound design. Do you wanna sort of talk about what sort of references and things you were going for there?
JJ: Yeah, it just was all very atmospheric. We had some conversations, but he would just kind of go off and do his own thing and present a lot of stuff. And it really was just a couple passes of like, more of this, less of that. So a lot of the soundtrack really is a nod to Jeramy kind of coming up with it a lot. And I would kind of give him some atmospheric cues, but most of that was Jeramy.
LL: Obviously sound is so incredibly important in any film. But I think horror especially, right? The soundtrack to which you’re getting gripped is so key, so…
JJ: It wasn’t just the soundtrack. It’s also a lot of the foley and putting the squeaking of, the crunching of the cars and the trampling of the bushes and the growls and the, you know. Just little nuances. And you know, personally, I love that stuff. And I would want to, if we had more bandwidth for it, I’d say let’s do a lot more of that. I just want more of that atmosphere.
We’ve talked a lot about Arcadia Flats, longer than it would take to watch Arcadia Flats, so can I ask about other projects you’re working on? The website lists a whole slate of projects you have coming up…
LL: . So Sadie was our first feature film as Electric Dream Factory, and that just had its world premiere at South by Southwest, and Megan Griffiths wrote and directed that. I took that to the Sundance producing lab years ago. And really happy that that’s starting to go out in the world.
Outside In (opening in Seattle this Friday, April 6 at SIFF Cinema Uptown) is not an Electric Dream Factory project, but I produced that as well.
I just got a screener sent to me yesterday and I’m anxious to get to watch it…
LL: I love Lynn (Shelton)’s work. I mean, I loved her first feature. I loved her experimental films. I’m not only friends with Lynn, but I’m a big fan of her work. But I think very justifiably so she’s getting some of the best reviews of her career for this film. And I think it’s just a really beautiful, and it was a really risky film for her to do. It’s still got some humor, but it’s definitely more of a drama than what she’s done before. And I think she’s really — don’t wanna say matured as an artist, because that makes it sound like she wasn’t mature before, but I think this was an evolution in her filmmaking that was really exciting to be a part of.
And with Sadie, it’s like, that film, we’ve been, like I said, working on it forever. That was a film that we’ve been trying to make for years. Megan wrote the script for that while we were trying to produce The Off Hours. Because we thought that would be a really easy next feature to do, because it’s so much more contained. And, of course, it took us eight years to make that one as well.
But unfortunately, it’s a film that’s just become more relevant since the time she wrote it to the time we’re now, it’s actually hitting audiences. It’s so much about what’s it like for a young girl who’s been raised in a — you know, who’s only been alive during a time that we’ve been at a state of perpetual war overseas. And what does that sort of culture of solving problems through violence in America do to young people? And that’s sort of the macro, obviously. There’s micro drama and interpersonal connections in the film.
Obviously that’s not a conversation that’s gotten less relevant in the last few years. It’s only become more relevant, sadly, in the last few years.
Months and weeks, even…
LL: I mean, truly though, it’s like every time … I don’t know the statistics on how many mass shootings there have been in the last eight years, but every time one comes up, Megan and I, we’re always saying to each other this is so horrible. And geez, do we wanna put Sadie in the world? Not that Sadie’s about a mass shooting, it’s just whenever these high profile cases of young people turning to violence or young people obviously being affected by growing up in this sort of environment. Yeah, we wanna put Sadie out there as part of the conversation.
So I’m glad that it’s finally getting out there. And I would really love it to be incredibly irrelevant very, very soon. Where we maybe don’t have these problems anymore. I don’t know if we’re gonna get it, but I would love that.
What do you see as the future of VR/AR? Will it usurp feature films?
LL: We decided our tag, our unofficial company tagline, is that we’re story explorers who work with badass creators to tell stories by any means necessary. So, and that’s really how we’re sort of approaching — we’re definitely not moving away from feature films and only doing VR and AR. We’re definitely wanting to continue to make feature films and episodic series.
But you know, as we have all these more storytelling platforms and mediums available to us through innovative technology, it’s like okay, when we have story x, what are the platforms that make the most sense for story x? And sometimes that’s one versus the other, and sometimes that’s three different ones. So we’re working on this sort of … I guess I’ll say like a documentary experience that we’re working on it as a podcast, a traditional documentary, and as a VR component.
As technology gives us so many more tools, how do we use these to actually enhance story — but also not just shoehorn, like, oh, here’s a new technology, let’s do a thing with it. That’s not the best way to look at it. And I think that’s how sometimes things happen. For us it’s like here are all these fantastic stories we’re working on with these fantastic creators, now what makes the most sense? Like, what will be the most exciting, most engaging experience for audiences to interact with these stories? It’s a really exciting time to be a storyteller. We have so many more tools in the toolbox.
JJ: I mean, it’s not just the tools, plus the different distribution models. It used to be about like any filmmaker can pick up a really affordable camera, and you can go and make a movie. But there still was this distribution complication. But now even the distribution is becoming more of a home-grown thing. Especially when you’re talking about podcasting.
There’s new ways of becoming a superstar and getting all your material out to massive worldwide audiences. It’s super interesting. And especially with stuff like this, there’s all these new types of technology. You know, so exploring what those are.
LL: And at the same time, you know, Arcadia Flats is one of my favorite pieces of content that I’ve ever produced. And yet, it’s hard to get people to experience it the way we really want them to experience it. Yes, you can go to the website and move your mouse around and watch it in 360, but what I want you to do is put on the headset and be there. It’s just not very many people have these headsets yet. But as the technology gets easier, cheaper, sleeker, not so darn bulky, that’s just gonna continue to get better and better and better.
JJ: That’s the thing, we really need the technology, the peripherals that support this new tech to become more invisible, and to not feel like you’re being constrained by it being uncomfortable, or my peripheral vision’s blocked off. The sounds kinda weird. The quality is really limited because the bandwidth is really limited. So you know, you get companies that are helping out with fattening up the pipes and optimizing the streaming experience. And then you’re getting the new headsets that support higher resolution.
I can easily see it becoming far more ubiquitous. I have the Samsung Gear VR, which I think I got free when I bought my phone. And there are other inexpensive ways to watch things in VR, like Google Cardboard. I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy a $400 Oculus headset…
LL: Yeah, for sure. And with Arcadia Flats you can have a Google Cardboard, download the Jaunt app, and watch it for free. Or you can watch it through your Gear, or you can watch it through the PlayStation Jaunt app. There’s lots of different ways of getting it. Because thankfully, it was so great to partner with Jaunt because they’re one of the few 360 film distributors who are on almost every single platform. That was really exciting, because they’re one of the best distributors out there. It could be pretty big.
We’ve been talking for a long time now and I know you both are very busy and have a lot to do, so is there anything you want to address before I turn off my tape recorder?
LL: Just that we’re working with a lot of really amazing people and exploring. And so much of this is working with innovative technology in some ways. I actually went to school here at UW. It almost feels like going back to school in a way.
Not because we haven’t retained anything we’ve learned for the last 15 years but rather because it really is about just trying and failing and learning and trying again when you’re working with these new technologies. We had to change things along the way with the process, like we had to change the script for what we actually had, and we had to change shots for what we actually had time for. We had to change the VFX for what we did. But at the end of the day, I’m just so excited and proud of how it turned out and how it actually stands on its own.
For more information on Electric Dream Factory and their projects, you can visit their website. To find Arcadia Flats, it’s on the Jaunt VR app and is free to watch.
