Five Minutes With: Charlotte Mikkelborg
We sat down with Charlotte Mikkelborg, film director and immersive experience creator.
“Five Minutes With” is a regular feature that gives you an insight into some of the greatest minds in the immersive industry, all within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee.
Charlotte Mikkelborg is an award-winning British director known for directing gripping character-driven film and immersive experiences. Charlotte’s first VR short, ‘Born into Exile’, screened in the US Houses of Congress and at the first UN Special Summit on Refugees, while her 360 film ‘The Journey’ premiered at SXSW and was winner of the 61st Cine Golden Eagle Award (2018) for Best VR Short.
In 2019, Charlotte worked with an Oscar-winning team to create ‘Fly’ — a multisensory, interactive VR narrative — sponsored by British Airways. Fly was shown at Saatchi Gallery London and had its US premiere at (a virtual) Tribeca Film Festival in Spring 2020. The experience went on to win the Best Documentary Experience at Raindance Film festival 2020 and a Lumieres Award for Best VR Edutainment 2020. It was also selected to headline the first Best of British Immersive Arcade.
Charlotte is a StoryFutures immersive fellow, mentor on YouTube Immersive Creator’s Lab, and a mentor/part-time tutor on UCL’s Immersive Media course.
What’s exciting you most about the immersive industry right now?
Too many things! Personally, what I find most exciting is the largely untapped potential of multisensory immersive experiences. I started dipping my toe into multisensory experiences with ‘The Journey’ in 2018 where we presented the film at SXSW with a fairly DIY multisensory set-up.
The main character in that story lived in a kind of igloo in the Ethiopian desert and so we reconstructed that igloo at SXSW. We put down heated matting and then traditional reed matting over that. So, when people took their shoes off and walked in, it felt like the heat of the desert sand was emanating up through the floor.
We also covered the interior of the igloo with goatskins as they do in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The Afari people live off their goats — milk, meat, skins and it’s a relationship that really seeps in through all the senses when you’re in the community — so we wanted to find a way to try to recreate that in this very high-tech hall at SXSW…to make people feel like they stepped into the hut and into a very different environment 1000s of miles away. The hut was surrounded by rocks (to anchor it down) and those rocks were delivered to us at SXSW by the boy from Boyhood, who — believe it or not — was one of two amazing production assistants working for our set designer.
The experience that we made with the support of BA in 2019, Fly, had the luxury of a larger budget to explore how we could do multisensory in a more sophisticated way.
A couple of current projects I am working on explore multisensory experiences out of headset — one is multisensory AR (Tudors Augmented) and another is an interactive LED experience (The Lazarus Project).
What and/or who is your source of inspiration?
Oh my goodness, there are too many! Some inspire me as a person (my daughters are infinitely kind and that inspires me every day), others inspire me as a female creator (other female directors who are getting recognised at the highest levels of the film/immersive industries as they are charting a course for all of us, so individuals like Emerald Fennell and Chloe Zhao) and then other inspiring creators — I am a big fan of the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast and their beautiful and moving efforts to draw attention to the natural world through their work.
I feel inspiration can come from anywhere and it can be a slow burn or more like a lightning bolt. Sometimes you know where an idea’s come from (for example, I loved the use of colour in Fennell’s film ‘Promising Young Woman’ so I used it to inspire colour choices in my upcoming VR Short ‘Violating Peace’) and other times it feels like it drops straight out of the sky and into your head (which is how it happened to me with Fly or with a new project, The Lazarus Project). What’s important is to keep refilling that creative cauldron so you have ideas and inspirations to draw from. I think the more of life we experience as well as the more we read, watch and listen, the richer our seam of ideas is to extract from.
What is your favourite thing about what you do for a living?
Definitely the diversity and the novelty. Every project is new, not only in terms of content but in terms of the creative, technical, and production challenges it throws up. You have to be both a creative and a problem solver, especially when working in the immersive field because pipelines for creative content creation and, more importantly, for how to bring that content to an audience are not yet well established. We are laying them as we go. So, getting to be a pioneer is probably what I enjoy the most.
The immersive community is also — for now at least — a relatively tight-knit group and so people are largely collaborative and helpful — we share tips and advice all the time and that gives a great sense of community, even when working alone in a home office during covid.
Just for Fun
What are you reading/listening to right now?
I’m pretty eclectic in my taste and like to digest a smorgasbord of media so — in terms of what I am reading — I have three books on my bedside table just now — ‘Queen Meryl’ about the life of the awesome actress/activist Meryl Streep, a drama by Lucy Foley set in 1918 Istanbul and a book about multisensory VR experiences.
As a former BBC radio/TV correspondent, I am a bit embarrassed to admit I don’t consume a ton of audio media. But I tend to listen to podcasts on film and immersive. The Director’s UK podcasts are brilliant so I listened to a great podcast recently on the creation of the film ‘Nomadland’ with Chloe Zhao and another with Regina King on directing ‘One Night in Miami’. I also occasionally listen to Alex Ruhl’s podcast because, on a personal level, she’s an awesome individual and it’s fun to hear her insights on the industry, as well as to ‘Kent Bye’, the VRARA podcast with Tyler Gates or the Story Futures podcast if there’s a person or a topic that interests me.
What is something you think everyone should do at least once in their lives?
It’s a tie!
First, I’d say the trek from Cape Town to Cape Point…which is the most beautiful hike I’ve ever done (and I love to hike!). It’s a 5-day hike so you camp along the route (but the South African National Parks campsites are definitely more glamping than camping, which is honestly how I like it!)
The hiking itself is pretty demanding and you come up close and personal with nature — baboons, penguins (and my friends and I had a close encounter with a cobra when we last trekked the route!) but as much of the trek sticks to the ridge of the mountainous peninsula, you are treated to unparalleled views of the Indian Ocean on one side and the Atlantic on the other.
My other not-to-miss thing to do is get lost in Rome. I lived in Rome and got lost many times and can highly recommend it. I’ve lived in 6 cities — London, Rome, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Stockholm and Durban and travelled around a fair bit but Rome is still — by some distance — my favourite city. The beauty of the city and the way the stones are soaked in history (blood, sweat, and tears) is just something I find (a little gory) and completely awe-inspiring.
What’s the mantra you live by?
It’s literally in my email sign off and that is ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’ Slightly unexpectedly this quote is from St. Augustine and by coincidence, my catholic primary school was also called St Augustine’s, though I wasn’t aware of the origins of the quote when I found it and am not particularly religious. But thought it was a great quote.
If you could be someone else for the day, who would you be and why?
Oooh! That depends, does it have to be someone from today? If no, then having just talked about Rome it’s got me imagining life in ancient Rome, so I’d probably have to try being Caesar for the day (Yikes! What does this say about me? Whatever it is, it ain’t good!) If yes, then perhaps Spielberg’s personal assistant, to observe a real master of his craft at work first hand. (Spielberg’s name could be interchanged with Soderberg, Bong Joon-Ho, Chloe Zhao, Barry Jenkins…etc).
Whilst you’re here, is there anything you’d like to plug?
You can find me on social media (Twitter, Insta) as @cmikkelborg or you can follow what my company is up to on Instagram or on Facebook.
Watch for news of the release of the new interactive film ‘Violating Peace’ in the Autumn!
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