LIFE VR’s Mia Tramz on the eclipse, Henry Luce, and when to make your own VR app
Mia Tramz runs TIME.com’s VR initiative, which over the past year has produced projects ranging from “Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways to Mars” to a special feature on Christopher Nolan’s latest film, “Dunkirk.” On Monday, TIME and LIFE VR in partnership with Mesmerise Global will be producing a 360 VR livestream of the solar eclipse viewable on TIME’s Facebook page and YouTube channel as well as on TIME.com. The stream will be broadcasting from Casper, Wyoming, where eclipse watchers have been gathering for days to stand in the path of totality of the Great American Solar Eclipse.
A detailed close-up shot of the sun is provided in the experience for maximum eclipse visibility, and narration by TIME’s Editor at Large, Jeffrey Kluger, will guide you through this historic cosmic event. Immediately following the eclipse, an edited version of the 360 livestream will also be available in the LIFE VR app for iOS and Android and in LIFE VR’s Samsung VR channel. You can read more here.
I spoke with Mia this week about her journey to VR and how the LIFE VR app came to be.
How it all started:
I joined TIME.com as a freelance photo editor over four years ago. After I’d been there for a couple of years, I produced Deep Dive, an underwater VR project. There weren’t a lot of tools to produce that sort of thing then; we tested the only underwater 360 rig I could find. We tried out a 360 player on TIME.com to display it, and that kicked off a love of 360 and immersive storytelling.
We started looking into if we were to produce a 360 experience for TIME, how we would do that. I called different production companies and tried to get quotes, but everything was over $1 million. But rapidly the costs started coming down, new companies started popping up, and there emerged a more viable ecosystem for us to play in.
Four people on the management team at Time Inc. recognized the power VR could have and thought we should have some skin in the game. They found Henry Luce’s original vision documents for LIFE magazine, which talked about taking readers through walls and seeing shadows on the moon, and it sounded like a VR pitch! So they decided to make our VR group an extension of the LIFE magazine brand. It’s an umbrella for all of Time Inc., so instead of 35 different VR apps, we have one destination. Since September of last year, we’ve published two or three experiences per month.
On working across different magazine brands:
Our company does have these brands that people have connections to, and tapping into that for something that could have this kind of impact was a great way for us to go. Soon after I was brought on, I did my little dog-and-pony show and met with people across brands and gave them a crash course in what’s possible. It’s become a collaborative process. A lot of the time I’ll have an idea, I’ll bring it to them and say “What do you think?” Most of the time they are excited, too. Other times brands will bring us ideas. PEOPLE magazine understood super early on what an opportunity this was for them with [movie] studios in particular, so now they are able to tap into what the studios are doing and to bring it to a wider audience.
On using resources wisely:
My team is very small — just me and one freelancer. We leverage existing resources at the company and we work with production companies like Framestore, 8i and Endemol Shine. We’re such a small team, so I have to be strategic about where I put my resources, and make sure the projects we’re tackling have a really big payoff. The other thing that was important to me in building this vision for VR was that we acknowledge the hurdles — you have to download an app, you need to have a headset to watch it in, you need to decide to spend some of your valuable downtime watching the content we’ve made. Anything we publish needs to give the consumers what they’re looking for once they jump through all those hurdles.
On deciding which platform to develop on:
It’s really been driven by the content. We started of course with the Google Cardboard. Quickly I saw that Samsung was a platform we needed to be publishing to. They worked with us and helped us set up a branded channel. I’m particularly interested in creating room-scale experiences. They’re quite expensive to make, and our presence on the Vive and Oculus Rift comes from wanting to create experiences there.
On measuring viewership and success:
I think beyond the viewership numbers for content we’re paying a lot of attention to shoulder content on social media and other platforms. Whenever we roll out an experience, we try to create content around the experience to help viewers understand what it is, to walk them into it from a different angle.
Elijah Allan-Blitz directed “Defying the Nazis,” a VR piece featuring a Holocaust survivor watching her own rescue in a headset, and published as its own video on TIME.com and TIME’s Facebook page as well as in VR.
Every time we launch a project, we see an uptick. Bigger projects get a bigger uptick — “Star Wars” obviously had a big uptick. But pretty consistently when we launch a new project, we get bigger numbers. That said, it’s nowhere near traditional video.
On making money from VR:
One of the things I think about a lot is the state of the industry at large. Media and news media are struggling more than we ever have before: How do we keep our ships afloat? How do we keep the revenue stream? How do we increase revenue? And I don’t think you can think about VR without considering the diversion of resources.
On distribution and whether to build an app:
For smaller organizations, I don’t think you need to build an app — you can self-publish to Facebook, Samsung and others. If you’re interested in creating content meant to be viewed in a headset, those are great mediums. For bigger organizations, if you have a sales force that can support an initiative like this and you have a revenue stream that comes into the app, which is branded and has the right look and feel for your clients, then I think having a place to house it that’s curated would be important.
I also think a lot about the nondigital methods of distribution — with “Remembering Pearl Harbor” and the Buzz Aldrin experience, my intention was to find public-facing locations to bring those projects, places where people who’d come to a museum for a related reason would be interested in seeing something like that. For “Pearl Harbor,” we had an event at the Intrepid aircraft carrier on the anniversary of the attack, and it was featured at the Newseum for a week. It was pretty amazing for context; people had gone there to learn more about WWII, and it was a rich experience combining ours with the museum’s. People who went loved it, but they aren’t going to spend $3,000 to have a Vive and the computer it needs to run on in their home. I have an interest in that market — museums and schools.
On working within a big media company:
Time Inc. has been incredibly supportive of letting me follow my nose — they let me try it. I think it’s been quite unusual in the way that they basically said we trust you, do what you think needs to be done. This allowed us to drive some of the conversation, too. But I do also think that while some of our brands are known for breaking news — TIME, PEOPLE, Sports Illustrated — we also have a legacy of quality content and of putting our historical stamp on things. I don’t know that creating museum-quality content makes sense for everyone, but it makes sense for TIME.
On where to find talent:
If different organizations are looking into experimenting with this or launching their own VR initiative, something that’s been surprising for me to find out is that it’s already being taught in schools. I hired [my colleague] Michaela right out of college. I do demo days with schools in the New York area because I love it and I’m always curious which schools are teaching this. I had kids come in from [NYU’s] ITP last week, and they did their final projects in AR and coded them themselves.
It’s great to give your journalists a new skill set and training in shooting 360, but it’s also really exciting to look at the kids coming out of school who really understand this technology. You want seasoned journalists working on anything getting that sort of attention, but pairing up-and-coming folks with experienced journalists is great for both sides.
