Reflections on immersive storytelling from the Sundance Film Festival
After the Sundance Film Festival last year, I was convinced the future of immersive is social; there was a clear trend in projects that put multiple people together in a space, interacting virtually and physically, experiencing the same thing together but also apart. Projects like Frankenstein AI, which solicited a conversation between strangers to educate an artificial intelligence tool, made me think about our connection to each other (I’m even still in touch with the stranger I was paired with!) and the machines that have become ubiquitous around us.
A year later, there’s been a clear shift not necessarily away from the possibility of experiencing things communally in VR, but towards how we can incorporate a variety of technologies — AI, AR, and even live action — into immersive experiences and make these experiences accessible more widely. There’s also the hint of an understanding that maybe — just maybe — more people already have access to headsets and experiences at home and in places beyond museums, galleries, and festivals. Sundance, which just wrapped up this past weekend in Park City, Utah, has been a huge supporter of the immersive space. They host both a New Frontier Lab, which incubates innovative projects within the Sundance Institute, and a New Frontier section of the festival itself, showcasing dozens of projects across a range of new tech innovations.
As a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I’ve been looking at the relationship between immersive experiences, conceptual art and artists and how this type of creative thinking can be applied to journalism. How can we create experiences that have a lasting effect, that involve all the senses, and that are accessible beyond exclusive spaces? A few of the projects that I was fortunate enough to experience at Sundance this year started to address these concerns and certainly sparked my interest and imagination — which is why we go to these things, right?
Get out of the headset-only mentality
While headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were still the methods of choice for viewing projects, this year’s crop took a clear turn to show off new technology and ways of experiencing content that go beyond VR goggles. Reach from Nonny de la Pena’s Emblematic Group [full disclosure, I worked on the platform last summer] is a VR photo booth — a WebVR technology that allows people to be filmed in front of a green screen and then transports that conversation into a volumetric environment — viewable anywhere you can load a web browser, be that your phone, computer, or ideally in a headset. One can easily imagine using this technology to place interviews into hard-to-access places, for example being able to see a conversation taking place along the U.S.-Mexico border or at the Supreme Court. Reach scanned over 200 visitors at Sundance and you can see the technology at work here.
Get out of your head
I have been practicing yoga for over a decade and tree pose — balancing on one leg with your arms outstretched above you — is challenging even with your eyes open in a bright room. I was moved and relaxed coming out of Melissa Painter’s gorgeous Embody experience. You take your shoes off and go through a series of yoga poses, growing nature around you alongside another yogi in the headset next to you. When tree pose came up, I was scared to balance, thinking that the VR headset would never serve as a substitute horizon. I was wrong; the image you look at keeps you steady and you really are transported. You even maintain the sense that someone else is in the room, doing the poses with you. It’s a meditative break that uses technology to get us out of our heads in a creative way.
Make being in the headset worth it
The most straightforwardly journalistic of the Sundance New Frontier projects was the New York Times Op/Doc Traveling While Black, which comprises conversations about the Green Book used by African-American travelers in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1960s and the African-American experience today. It’s set at Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in Washington, D.C., which joined the Green Book in 1958, and is the most artful inclusion of archival footage in a VR piece that I’ve seen yet. Director Roger Ross Williams (“God Loves Uganda”) worked with VR studio Felix & Paul to create the nearly 20-minute long experience, which represents a really smart approach — mix the foremost VR studio with a documentary director who understands the story and give them the freedom and time to figure out what works. The setup at Sundance was clever and lent a feeling of community to the piece — a recreated diner set of Ben’s Chili Bowl (as a D.C. native that was super fun for me) and you sat at eye level with the patrons in the film — but I think you could watch it at home and have just as impactful an experience.
Other projects at the festival experimented with everything from Shakespeare in the Magic Leap AR glasses to a fanciful feast of sweet treats consumed while in a headset (I’ll refrain from telling you about the unicorn smoothie that dripped down my sweater…).
But for journalism specifically, it’s the idea that VR can exist in a variety of ways that makes me excited about what’s to come in this space. That concept of transporting people into other places and other ways of thinking is still something we’re only able to do once we think more broadly about the technology we have now and the technology that’s to come, and these creators are doing just that.
