HOLIDAY, Misogyny, and Violence

#wokefilmmaking #cobaltmediaus

I read an interview with Rose McGowan in which she asserted it was not just the men in the industry that were misogynist, but the very product itself.  My feature project, HOLIDAY, is exactly about that.  I don’t care for films about women in captivity as entertainment, so I made a thriller that leeches all the joy from the standard thriller audience.

The abduction thriller genre is certainly one of the most rooted in misogyny and violence.  And here’s a truly sobering thought: the woman abducted is inconsequential to the story.  Many times she even dies by the end of the second act so the third act is righteous rage and revenge.

I based HOLIDAY on the oldest abduction story I knew: the abduction of Helen of Troy.  But Helen’s abduction was just a pretense to tell a glorious war story.  She meant nothing.  In fact, there are multiple narratives as to what happened to her after the Greeks won the war.  So there is a war story in HOLIDAY, but it is going on inside the head of the abductor – and there is Helen, the marked woman – in HOLIDAY’s case the Tattooed Woman thought about.  The abducted girl and her predicament are simply by-products of choices made by men who believe in women as objects.

And unlike many of these thrillers, she is on her own – no one is coming to rescue her. 

So can you tell an abduction thriller story which foregrounds the misogyny and violence inherent in the genre?  HOLIDAY attempts to answer that question.

I wouldn’t categorize the experience as entertaining.

So why would I want you to sit through 84 minutes of reminding you what you already know in your heart – that the abduction of a young woman as an opportunity for some entertainment does harm?

To bear witness to the violence.  How simple is it for a man in his 30’s to con a 17 year-old girl?  Watch.

To bear witness to the misogyny.  Do we want woman viewed as property to be bought and sold by men wallowing in some sort of self-absorbed, middle-aged male lunacy?

What then, does justice look like?

HOLIDAY, December 10, 7:30 pm Culver City Film Festival

hashtag spew: @culvercityff #culvercityfilmfestival #culvercity #indiefilm #losangelesfilm #venicelife #indiefilmmaker #arthousethriller #bobbyehall #iphonemovie #nobudgetfilm #deconstructed #humantrafficking #holidaythemovie #metoo #rosemcgowan #enoughsilence 

VR, Transience, and Art

If you work in a medium that is heavily, if not entirely, software dependent you will find it arduous and expensive to archive your work, if a retrievable archive is possible.  Much of the work I did in the 1980’s is irretrievable either because of physical problems such as a faulty JAZ drive (a special Iomega disc format for large files like digital video that was notoriously twitchy), or the operating system, hardware, and software, are non-existent (got a copy of DigiPaint on Amiga DOS?).

Of course, my photochemical film negatives for the last forty years are still available to me.  Much of my video work from the 80's and 90's is still available to me since it was done on Hi-8 and ¾ SP formats that most post houses still keep around, although I've transferred little of it and the tapes are certainly physically deteriorating.  A decade ago I paid to transfer some of my work to DAT format.  Now the DAT is pretty useless so I’ll have to go back for more transfers to some hard drive that I can continue to move the data to current configurations.

And after I’m gone?  Who will pay to keep all that data on line somewhere?  Most likely, no one.  And I don’t have that much digital work in terms of file size.  Early files were small.  Some of my friends have been working in digital photography for decades and have massive amounts of data.

The only saving grace is that what seems like massive amounts of data now, twenty years from now will appear quaint, and thus the cost of archiving could be minimal.  However, there would still be the need for some sort of software to open the files.  So I could continue to make updated archives of my DigiPaint files, but how would anyone ever open them?  Digital artwork is transient.

 

And that transience is a real problem not just for historians of the future: if you’re work cannot be archived, stored, and easily retrieved, it cannot be commodified.  And if it cannot be commodified, you cannot earn a living doing it because no gallery in its right mind would buy work that 5 years later no one can view.  Or think in terms of film making: if I make 5 films and do well with them, twenty years from now I can sell that catalog.  If I make 5 VR experiences, in twenty years no one will be interested in looking at them, much less paying for them.

VR art being done now will be uninteresting in 48 months and only of historical interest in two decades, if anyone will even be able to experience it.  And will they want to?  Keep in mind the experience will be “poor in quality”, similar to current VR users experiences of 1990’s Quicktime VR (if they have the correct version of Quicktime on a Mac OS that will run the older version).  So who will want that experience?  I suppose a few works will be maintained by art museums, but even those institutions come and go.  Pottery, mosaics, paintings, these have lasted thousands of years.  Digital, mmm . . . about a decade, maybe two on certain platforms.

So do you quit working in digital and take up pottery?  No (unless you want to).  Do the art you do and be active in saving and archiving.  Besides, if you got into art to make money, well . . . good luck with that.

VR and the Death of the Close-up

New Narrative Opportunities

VR narrative will be different if for no other reason than it will lend itself to certain manipulations as a medium, that previous media could not achieve.  Just as the addition of sound radically changed cinematic narrative, so will go VR narratives.

It is far too early to say for certain what those new narrative ways might be, primarily because we haven’t yet seen how the mass market will use this new computer interface.  When personal computers first appeared on the market they did not catch on fast.  Computers were kind of nerdy and testy to work with on a daily basis (let’s face it, Mac or MS DOS, it didn’t matter).  And they were not connected to anything except maybe a slow modem that choked passing text back and forth.  VR today is sort of in that early, geeky stage.  Computers themselves, however, have become ubiquitous and are used in ways neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates imagined in 1984.  It will be interesting to watch this platform develop.

With that caveat, I have three general observations about VR narrative: location based stories, genre, and the death of the close-up.

Location-based stories

Stories like the early James Bond series that took American audiences to exotic locations, where the location is part of the narrative, will be more popular.  Think immersive story-telling, where the landscape/environment take on conflict building opportunities.  This is great for action, although action could be the most difficult to translate into VR.

Eclipse of a genre?

Having run a software department at a major VFX house in town, I can tell you action sequences are heavily dependent on the single point perspective you get with a camera used from multiple angles and a digital reality that is still expensive and difficult to create in 2D for theaters.  What does an action sequence in VR look like?

Sure, movie “stunts” will be digital, not practical, primarily because it will be MUCH cheaper and makes any view possible, but what is the experience of the genre in VR?  Part of the rush of action movies all the way back to silent films is watching the lunacy of stunt men and women who were willing to do crazy things in order to get a great, sometimes one and a half second, moment.

Action fatigue

Once everything originates in a green screen room with mocap, everyone will know that no one took any life threatening risks to get the character in the situation they might be in.  There may be moments where the audience can feel the experience of the hero, say, leaping from a tall building, but what does a car chase look like in VR?  Car chases in 2D can be exciting, but perhaps VR will lend itself to some other type of chase that will become a standard expected sequence in the genre.  VR might hit the action genre hardest do to its dependence on the adrenaline rush of a safe, cinematic peril.  Seems counter intuitive since VR has survived and developed the last two decades primarily by the game industry, but FPS VR games may replace the action genre entirely.

For the moment, I’m pitching a VR/2D love story set in Mexico.

Love stories

Love stories are great for VR because of their heavy dependence on at least two people in most scenes—the action genre tends to follow the lone hero and thus gives you less to work with in a 360 environment.

And of course, the use of romantic locations, giving the audience a “true” sense of those places—all the beauty and none of the humidity or insects . . . location-based stories are a natural for love stories.  And these are stories meant to be experienced in a passive mode with directed VR.

Directed VR narrative

Humans have enjoyed being told stories in a passive mode as entertainment for a long time so it is unlikely that will change any time soon.  Only a small percentage of the market will want to use VR for FPS action.

Most VR entertainment will be consumed passively, primarily as a break from what will undoubtedly become an active data frenzy of VR navigation as part of our work and daily life.  A massive audience out there will prefer to be “directed” through a 360-ish narrative with limited interaction. 

Imagine working with a 160 degree wide canvas—roughly what you can see naturally—with a true stereoscopic experience of 114 degrees designed for someone who wants to sit back, maybe even close their eyes, or check other media with the story as a background, “desktop image” to use on old, 2D metaphor. 

Standards will emerge that will codify a new visual rhetoric of trope-based shorthand conventions that are most powerful. 

One 2D visual tool that will go away is the hero close-up. 

The Death of the Close-up

While powerful in 2D, in VR, the close-up will feel “too close”—one of my arguments for love stories: they largely depend on two-shots, although the close up is certainly used in all love stories.  In VR the close up would feel somewhat creepy—well, to most people.  So the close up will go away except . . . in horror, maybe?  If it does, the star system will go with it.

The star system is built around the close up.  If you diminish the value and use of the close up in standard practice, then the power of the star machinery loses its stock in trade to draw audiences.  And if anyone can be mapped onto a mocap character, what will be the value of “real-life” stars?  When the mocap is one person and the “face” is a licensed image of someone else, how do you generate fame of any great value? 

It won’t be your “fifteen minutes of fame”, it will be your “fifteen dollars of fame”.

And that does not make for a career.  Fame can, in fact, be brutal.  If the star system collapses, you won’t even get paid much for it.  Producers will license the image of whomever they think has the “perfect” look for the part in each particular story with no need to reuse images except on cheaper, lower budget projects for less and less pay, until you’ve licensed out all your options.  It will be all about finding the unique image for that character and that story, never to be repeated.

What genres work well in VR remains to be seen.  How the industry responds to a dissolving of the star system and what will take its place will certainly be interesting to watch develop.

VR is not a passing fad

If you are one of those people who needs to argue that VR is not just a passing fad, take a look at these two articles:

First, WIRED mag’s post Slickest Things Google Debuted Today

Among the announcements for further development of AI, Google is also developing a standalone VR headset—“no cables, no phone, no PC, just VR”.  As I said in my previous post we are entering a moment where the largest, most capital rich companies in the world are actively pursuing VR as a new revenue stream.  As the costs of the hardware falls and the capabilities of the software rise there will be much broader use and demand for VR experiences.  This includes VR as a non-commercial art medium, which brings me to the second article.

Variety’s post from Cannes: How Alejandro G. Inarritu Used Virtual Reality to Tackle Illegal Immigration

(Apologies to the incorrect spelling of Mr. Inarritu's name, but I could not figure out how to get diacritical marks on the blog editor)

The review of an Inarritu VR installation at Cannes by Variety’s Senior Film and Media Editor, Brent Lang, makes some VR claims via quotes Inarritu and his collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki made that need to be addressed.

To start with, Lang claims the 6 minute VR piece is a “shattering new virtual reality experience” in which “there’s never been an installation of quite this size and scope”.  Er, okay . . . considering Variety is the Hollywood hype machine par excellence I’ll let the hyperbole go, but I find the supporting quotes from Inarritu and Lubezki simplistic and revealing a lack of understanding of the VR medium.

Who knew VR was an art form?

First, Inarritu claims VR has been “used to hawk Hollywood blockbusters, not to tackle hot button issues”.  He goes on to say, “The big mistake of VR is that it has been considered an extension of cinema.  It has been considered a promotional tool.  It has been devalued.  This is an art in itself”.  This is what I might expect from someone who is a film director working in the studio system.

What he should have said was, “I, me personally, have made the big mistake of considering VR an extension of cinema”.  VR got its start in the digital world 30 years ago as part of a NASA project which had nothing to do with cinema.  Inarritu obviously came to VR through his work as a cinema director for movie studios and seems unaware of all the development that has happened (and continues) in VR in the fields of education, medicine, robotics, and a host of others.  This is much like President Trump stating, “Who knew health care was so complicated?”  As a personal note: I was creating “VR art”, whatever that is/was, 25 years ago using what was available at the time: QuickTime VR and VRML.  Welcome to the club Mr. Inarritu.

Brother, can you spare a dime for a VR project?

Lang comments, “The roughly six-minute experience is being backed by Legendary Entertainment and Fondazione Prada, neither of whom plan to make a penny on the installation”.  So what?  The reason VR is being developed at all is because there are now opportunities for monetizing the product that didn’t exist before.  Furthermore, with the commercialization of VR, there are new opportunities for VR artist because there are companies creating revenue-generating VR that can afford to fund VR for non-commercial use (e.g. art)—even for famous, wealthy people like Mr. Inarritu.

My past work presaged the whole VR craze, of course

Lang writes, “Lubezki believes virtual reality is a natural extension of recent works such as “The Revenant” and “Birdman” that used long takes to create a feeling of verisimilitude and plunge people into a frontier landscape or backstage on Broadway.”  Quoting Lubezki directly “We’ve been looking for this.  ‘Birdman’ and ‘Revenant’ were immersive.  There’s an immediacy.  This is all of that and even more."

That’s all fine and good, but “immersive” filmmaking has been around a long time.  I’m old enough to have grown up seeing John Cassevettes’ and Stanley Kubrick’s films and I can’t think of more immersive works than “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”, “2001”, or “The Shining”.  Even my own recent feature, “Holiday”, is highly immersive and very much about experiencing a “place”.

Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Inarritu seem to want to set themselves up as creators of proto-VR in order to legitimize their very first foray into VR, which only makes them sound naive about a medium in which they have no prior experience.

VR is the future, stupid

Lang writes, “Lubezki claims returning to traditional filmmaking will be difficult”.  Hmm. Okay, but be aware the pay for DPs and directors in VR is not what you are used to receiving from the studios.  Just sayin’ . . . 

Lang also states, “Inarritu thinks that soon traditional films, with their flat screen and traditional plotting will seem anachronistic to a rising generation looking for something more experiential.  He warns that studios ignore the medium at their own peril.  ‘If the studios don’t get into it, they will be irrelevant soon . . . Filmmakers will be very attracted to this’”.

Wow.  Okay, first of all, as far as I can tell ALL of the major studios are developing VR in some capacity or another.  They are not ignoring the medium, they’re simply figuring out how to monetize a medium that at the high end is very expensive.  It is their charge to make money off entertainment.  They are in the entertainment business, not the art business.

Stylizing the ugliness

One last commentary on the VR piece itself.  It is described as an experience of attempting to illegally cross from Mexico into the United States.  Perhaps the elite crowd at the world’s most glamorous film festival will get a sense of the terror of that moment.  I haven’t experienced the piece, but I think the piece misses the mark at a very basic level.

Lang suggests that the work, entitled “Carne y Arena” is an “empathy machine”, as Roger Ebert claimed was the case for movies.  Lang writes, “’Carne y Arena’ is trying to make viewers appreciate the risks that refugees take in search of a better life.  Inarritu . . . said that many Mexicans are fleeing gang violence that has made the country the second deadliest in the world after Syria.”

It seems to me that what should be experienced is the violence these people need to escape from.  Show what their lives are like when they are the victims of criminals, not criminals themselves (attempting to cross illegally).  But violence in VR is a tough sell.  A little fake cat and mouse entertainment after a few martinis is all good fun, but watching your family be gunned down in front of you, well that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

What I find odd is that this is a director with no problem including savage violence in his movies, but shies away from it in another medium.  Don’t be coy with your political art, Mr Inarritu.  My film “Holiday” is about the abduction of a young woman from Venice Beach.  I force the audience to experience the gritty horror of that act.  I didn’t stylize the violence so it looked cool or entertaining.  I kept the whole feature very concrete in its imagery, privileging experience of the moment over character empathy.  It makes for a film most people don’t like, but I’d argue it more of a proto-VR narrative experience than any film by Mr. Inarritu.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Mr. Inarritu’s films, I just feel his very first VR work is not quite the landmark in the medium his PR team is pitching it as.  Hopefully he will choose to do more.

VR will come on strong, soon

I read an interesting article today in The Atlantic by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Weird Thing About Today's Internet.  Madrigal lays out a brief 10 year history of the internet with its impact on both business and culture.

She states that in 2007, the year Apple introduced the iphone, almost no one owned a smartphone.  She then points out, "Now there are 2.5 billion smartphones in the world.  That's more than double the number of PCs that have ever been at use in the world."  With those sorts of numbers, in the near future when VR goggles are given away with your purchase of a phone and those phones are running an OS designed for a 360 3D interface, 2D media will quickly become the "only if I have to" choice of younger audiences.

It's all about large amounts of customers and capital

25 years ago VR got off to an arrested start and was doomed for the time being for a number of reasons.  Experience of VR in the 1990's required all sorts of special OS platforms and viewers, such as QuickTime VR for Apple (released 1995) and VRML for Silicon Graphics (WWW approval 1994), thus the number of people who could even access VR was extremely limited.  None of this would lead to wide acceptance and predictably these formats faded out.  Today, however, with the integration of VR into smartphones, billions of people can access the environment easily.

Furthermore, in the 1990's there was very little capital available for development of VR.  Now the world is very different.  Madrigal points out the five most valuable companies in the world today: Apple, Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.  Madrigal states, "In mid-May of 2007, these five companies were worth $577 billion.  Now they represent $2.9 trillion worth of market value!  Not so far off the combined market cap ($2.85) of the top 10 largest companies of 2007: Exxon Mobil, GE, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, AT&T, Citigroup, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, and Bank of America."

The implications for this shift are dramatic in a number of ways, but from a VR development perspective, this shift means VR will develop much more quickly in the coming years.  All of these companies are developing media production arms and all are investing in VR hardware and software development.  This is the first time in the history of VR that the top corporations in the world were all heavily invested in VR development.  The result will be a rapid expansion of this new GUI.

VR in Reality is a GUI

This seems painfully obvious and yet is rarely considered beyond the rooms where software and hardware peeps building these things.  The sizzle is the emotional space the interface puts you in, not the steak that gets you there, so that—the recreation of reality—is what gets put forward.  Additionally, there are so few interface hardware products out there that the differences between them are relatively small.  When we finally have a range of hardware products to choose from that extends from a used Toyota to a Bentley, then we’ll see more discussion of VR as a GUI in the public sphere.

Historical context in order to demystify the product called VR

So just briefly, let me historically contextualize computer interfaces and photographic imagery.

Computer interfaces

I’m old enough and was exposed young enough that I remember when computers didn’t have monitors.  You typed your program onto punch cards, fed the program into the card reader, which in turn created a spool of yellow paper tape with holes punched in it, which was then fed into the computer, which ran the program and printed a result on giant green and white paper.  Then came monochrome monitors, then color, blah, blah, blah all the way up to where we are today—VR goggles—the latest computer interface.  And one thing that hardware can do with the right graphical user interface (GUI) is fool the brain’s senses of sight and sound into believing it is somewhere other than where it is in reality.

But if you are not trying to fool the brain, you don’t need goggles. Goggles (which will become glasses) to recreate reality are just one possible use of a 360, 3D space projected in front of your eyes and very quickly will become your just your portable system.  Your home system will be much different.  How about a curved display you bring in front of you on a reticulated arm?

Photography

There is a focus on recreating reality with this product at the moment because it is a new image-based media.  It was the same when photography was invented, then movie projection, then television.  All were pitched as devices that made the viewer feel more like there were “there”, in reality.  But people very quickly adjusted to those media as only representations of reality (it didn’t take long for audiences to figure out the train was not going to come out of the movie screen and run over them—but they did at first).  The same will happen with “virtual reality”.  As it does the market for this new GUI will grow. 

The best thing to do is not call binocular vision GUI VR at all, although unfortunately that ship may have sailed.  In part, that is a result of VR being taken up by gamers in the 90’s when it was abandoned by everyone else.  Of course, and rightly so, the gamers wanted a more “real” experience and one of the possibilities of this new GUI was to expand the experience of being “in a place”.  That has gotten us to where we are now, but the end game here is not the replication of reality, but the development of a new interface between humans and computers.  The recreation of reality is just one possibility of this new interface.

360 3D display

Owning a home computer was once nerdy territory and working with them was a frustrating experience even for those who knew how to deal with them.  Who would want that in their home?  But you could play games on them.  Now everyone has a computer as a phone in their pocket and many seem lost without one.  People say the same about VR goggles—uncomfortable, nerdy, difficult to work with.  The way out of that moment is to stop focusing on the recreation of reality and begin thinking of possibilities of new interactions with the machines we build.

Getting stuck in the recreation of reality trap creates a limited bandwidth of possibility for this new tech and should be avoided.

VR and Catharsis

What are we after in VR, movies, storytelling in general? At its best, storytelling is transformational.  And a powerful way to that transformation is the emotional charge of catharsis, built through an escalation of emotional tension in the audience. But it is the experience of the storytelling that gets you there, not experiencing the hero’s journey personally as you would in VR.

The safety of cinematic peril

One reason for narrative fatigue in VR products is that it is difficult to engage the viewer emotionally in the same way the character is emotionally engaged.  The inner conflict driving the character doesn’t exist in the viewer—it’s not the viewer’s conflict—and they don’t want it to be.  Safe, cinematic peril is fear and safety all rolled into one and that’s what the audience wants.

In a 1986 article I discussed the use of “safe cinematic peril” to elicit emotional audience responses.  The simple version is audiences love feeling the fear of death while intellectually and physically not having to experience it.  The gag is to overwhelm the intellectual and physical with pure emotion.  Audiences are delighted because they know they are smart enough not be in danger, yet are fooled into a momentary reaction.  This is done through projection of the audience onto the hero which is easier when they are distanced from that character and their situation.

VR can still support a storytelling roll, but how the audience follows and why, is certainly changing.

In VR it’s not just Tom Cruise hanging over the street a hundred stories up—it’s Tom and you.  And that’s not all—now there is confusion as to who is the hero, you or Tom?  I’m using action as an example because the case is much more foregrounded than a genre like drama.  The corollary to be aware of is: the more the audience feels “in the scene” the less important the “hero” becomes—but the hero is functioning as the character that makes the choice you would never make, thus giving you the emotional charge without the danger.

Here’s the other thing: if Tom jumps, so do you because Tom is driving the story.  Will audiences jump off with him once they become accustomed to not dying in VR, no matter what they do?

To experience those events along with the character, might induce a heart attack at worst, at minimum the loss of some sort of bodily fluid.  Furthermore, if the storytelling is good, the character who goes through the action “for real” might only have a small cathartic release at the end, while the audience’s catharsis is massive.  How does one generate catharsis where death is at stake for the character, but not the viewer, yet the viewer feels they are part of the moment?

VR and Narrative

Narrative in VR, at core is a problem of agency.  There is not only a problem of exactly who is TELLING the story in an interactive environment, there is the issue of whose conflict is DRIVING the story—the hero or the viewer?  Traditional novel form of the hero’s journey is one of the hero being in action, not the audience.  The primacy of Western, Aristotelian plot-driven structural narrative strategies will have to diminish.  VR will also require a radical restructuring of traditional 2D film making since in that case the director is the storyteller, not the viewer.  These are issues many have pointed out from academia to the latest conference on interactive storytelling, but warrant discussion because although much of what is out there covers the challenges, few offer any suggestions.  The game industry is where most of the story development has happened since the 1990’s.

There is much that can be learned from the extensive research done in game story development.  Games are the big money makers now.  VR gear has grown out of desire from gamers for more realism, not moviegoers, and so it makes sense that their narrative construction insights might be useful.  But game narrative is like porn or Greek myth—the point of everything is to get to the next action moment to do battle (or whatever).  Most game “story” I’ve seen (which admittedly isn’t all that much) is very basic, despite multi-level branching plots and characters.  Part of this is determined by the economics of production and the impossibility of accounting for the infinity of possible narrative lines.  Another is that players are generally concerned about the action in the game, not the plot used to get there.  Although we’ve come a long ways from Space Invaders, that is not a storytelling bar anyone wants to be referencing.

VR and Joseph Campbell

The first casualty of narrative in virtual reality will be the hero and his (usually HIS, still even in 2017) journey.  The point of the hero in Western narrative is to be a flawed character who makes choices we would find too bold to make, and then to suffer for those choices until, when life is at its worst, make the enlightened choice and transcend themselves.  I have a lot of issues with that story structure, but even still when it comes to VR and narrative, it is not a simple matter of putting the viewer in the scenes of such a journey and expecting the audience to respond the same as if viewing it from a distance in 2D. 

The basic formal structure of current storytelling codified by Aristotle demands a beginning, middle, and end, following a singular hero burdened with a singular issue existing for the sole purpose of transcending that issue and thus generating catharsis in the audience.  Narrative experience, even if passive, is/wiil be very different in an immersive environment.

One challenge is the experience of place and time.  Traditional storytelling accomplishes this via a complex construction of interactions between structural and visual rhetorical tropes.  At its best, narrative is the compression and expansion of place and time, a distillation and condensation of reality in order to express an idea.  VR is experienced in real time.  Can we find ways to compress and expand time that will be understandable in VR?  Sure.  They just might not look/feel like what we’ve done in 2D to date.

Not all will want to shoot bad guys or go flying through the air.  Many (in fact, I would say MOST) will still want stories TOLD TO them.  Stories that they don’t have to do anything but sit back and experience.

I do expect viewers will want the option of choosing being automatically placed in pre-determined places for the best view of the scene.  I would also expect more interest in ensemble stories, where multiple characters have their own arc that could be explored individually.  This has many natural connections to current game story structures that might be useful.  But this sort of narrative still requires “following” a character.  As a consequence, very quickly some acceptable visual standards and conventions will be established that have nothing to do with storytelling in 2D.  These cannot be pre-determined because those practices have to do with the way many, many VIEWERS, not the creators, over time respond to VR. 

Not all conventions will be replaced, some will simply be repurposed in a different way with a new emphasis, e.g. portraiture has been around since the beginning of photography, but very few photogs turned the camera on themselves.  Ten years ago no one knew what a “selfie” was.  Now it is the most used genre on the internet (okay, maybe cat videos still lead, but not by much, I’m sure).

The hero’s journey will always have an audience, but new experiences of narrative will open up in VR.

VR and Cinema

It only takes 24 frames a sec to fool your brain into thinking it is seeing continuous motion.  Today, our brain is also oblivious to the raster lines of display diodes that are tinier than we can see and scanning faster than we can notice.  Both are tricks on your brain.  But in 2D we are always in the third person because we are not in the action of the scene.

There is a language of 2D cinema that only lets us see what the director wants us to see, when they want us to see it.  Something as simple as a Guy Ritchie cross-cut between two locations would be almost incomprehensible in VR.  The immediate shift from one location to another is a visual rhetorical device that everyone who was born after the invention of television has understood since childhood and works great in 2D.  However, the experience of abruptly shifting from one reality to another, then back and forth, will be annoying at minimum, at least as we can imagine it being experienced at this point.

In 2D we do not see what the camera does not see.  This has two implications: pragmatic and aesthetic.  On the pragmatic side, the simple illusion of “natural light” requires multiple set lights, generators, crews, etc. all outside the camera frame.  If the consumer can see 360 there is no place to put those support items.  You could shoot 360 with available light and digitally remove unwanted camerapersons, equipment, etc.  Or shoot like Mr. Cameron, in 360 greenscreen with actors moving around a built set (remember the “jungle” scenes in 40’s black and white movies—real trees and real water in a pond, but with a fake backdrop?  Same, same—but WAY more expensive).

Certain genres, let’s say horror and thrillers, depend greatly on what the camera is NOT showing you—the monster, the thing hovering just behind the character but they don’t turn around, the thing/monster/killer just out of frame as the victim backs up.    Other genres, like action, depend on frenetic editing and the perfect camera shot to keep you interested.  If all you have is the experience of riding in the car as Vin drives his fast and furious supercar like a maniac, that holds a certain amount of excitement, but will quickly become annoying and/or boring as the novelty wears off. 

But more importantly, what those stories are about are the characters experiencing those moments FOR the audience, not the audience themselves having the experience and related emotions.  Successful narrative at the emotional level doesn’t work by showing the audience the character crying—it is about making the audience cry, that is, catharsis.  It is generated by vicarious emotional manipulation, not personal lived experience.  Sometimes, once in a while life gives us a moment so intense we get that same emotional discharge, but audiences today expect that cathartic feeling every time they watch a feature film.

We are at a point where we are creating a monster by placing this old way of storytelling onto a new tech and wonder why it isn’t quite working.  This is quite normal.  Eventually the tech itself will reveal its own best practices different from 2D.

VR and Immersive Experience

Page 1, MA thesis, 1995

VR and Immersive Interactive Experience

When I say VR in this blog, I mean immersive interactive experience.  I don’t really know that virtual reality means anything, really.  This is what I wrote in my 1995 MA thesis:

Virtual reality is an existence in the domain of cyberspace . . . defined variously from Michael Heim’s critique of VR and cyberspace as an ontological Zen dream, and Arthur Kroker/Michael A. Weinstein’s pseudo-Marxist rant of VR as the ultimate paranoiac’s nightmare, to the hip, pop writing of R. U. Sirius’s version of VR as techno-voodoo funk.  One of the most inclusive definition is Marcos Novak’s . . . This definition is useful in that it defines the limits of cyberspace as a domain, an environment fabricated via computer software and hardware . . . This is merely another in a series of computer interfaces from punch cards and paper tape, to . . . data gloves, headgear and CAVE’s—yet one with exciting possibility.  (pg 32)

So who knows, really?  However, immersive tech is branded today as virtual reality and that’s the way it has been since the glove/visor combo appeared in the 1980’s.  Perhaps once we get away from that particular hardware configuration we can stop calling it VR.  It is not a virtual reality.  It is an extension of 2D computer graphical user interface display into 360 degrees of view with depth and interactivity.  It doesn’t have to remotely resemble reality.  What we call a VR, an immersive interactive experience, is just another part of reality.  When confronted with the technology of photography, then later silent film, people mistook them to be reality for a while.  We will move on.  Until then, I’ll use the vernacular term VR so people will understand what I’m talking about.

VR and Place

Still from “How the West was Won” 1998 Interactive QuickTime VR format

This is an example of using VR to experience the idea of the American western landscape.  The interface offered representations of the west, both appropriated and my own work as a “menu.”  By touching 2D images in the VR space you could move to an experience more of what you might call “natural” videos of Yosemite.  All of this was still in a fairly crude 2D display.  It was a decade before Oculus visor was in development.  You can imagine the looks I received from gallery owners when I tried to explain the medium I was working in.  Ah well . . .

VR and place

What I was commenting on in that piece was the importance of a sense of place within VR, that is, the relation between sensory experience and subjectivity.  Instead of placing the viewer in Yosemite Valley, I placed them in representations of that space.  They still could experience the videos I shot around the valley, but how they got to those experiences was via an interface without instructions or menus.  Which is not what most people were doing with QTVR.

The easiest way make a VR experience understandable is to make the VR space look like the reality already experienced (including conventions such as animation).  Back in the 90’s most QTVRs were basically what you see with people’s 360 camera posts today—360 views of the world around us.  These are shared so others can “experience” the place and are thus left with a sense of having “been there.” That makes perfect sense and it makes the extension of that, immersive VR, an easier sell.  There are animated product and combos of real image and animation (which includes augmented reality), as well as simply recorded places from prison cells to rain forests. 

Unfortunately, at the moment any ability to invite others in VR into that space is via simplistic avatars, at best.  But that will change very quickly.  Facebook has already announced this capability and as people use it, they will want more options, finer grain detail.  This ability to create a space and invite others will bring on a major shift in web and social media interactions.  Additionally, news, pro sports, concerts, and other live events will become very energizing in VR. On the opposite end, dreamy, relaxing meditative spaces will also be wanted.

In all of those spaces, however, the user is extremely limited by the physical space in the real world and the complexity of interface device in use—and thus, very passive.   Many are going to want active experiences.  Adventures.  Stories told.  But the old narrative models dependent on unique rhetorical structures will be ineffective in virtual reality, primarily due to our current relation to place and time in VR.

VR is (almost) Here

Forgive me blog-gods for it has been a year since my last post (almost an eon in blog years).  I thought the VR Expo event in Los Angeles warranted comment.

Ghost of VR Past

I was introduced to virtual reality due to a chance meeting 30 years ago with Scott Fisher and the headset/data glove he developed for NASA AMES.  He was creating a control system for robots working in space to do certain tasks and thus avoid dangerous and expensive human spacewalks.

All this was pretty cool in the 80’s, but also very crude tech compared to today.  Fisher was using some HP 3000 computer the size of a mini-bar refrigerator with a whole 8MB of RAM.  All I saw were simple wireframe renderings.  But it was VR.

Everyone was very excited.  There were artists claiming to be working in VR, although I was never really convinced.

Academics were studying it.  My master’s thesis considered ontology and VR.

And then . . . not much happened.

Ghost of VR Future

Although it was clear VR would replace 2D mediums such as photography and film, as both spaces to create in and experience, it was not clear when.  30 years later we are still waiting, but getting much closer.

At the point when the cost of a simple VR headset is low enough that it can be given away with your smartphone purchase, there will be a redesign of the OS for those phones to use a VR GUI.  There will then be a crushing demand for 360 experiences at minimum for everything from advertising to scripted production.

2D entertainment will begin an accelerated decline into oddity, then relic, “that old, retro, 20^th century tech”.  This will happen soon.  Nothing drives tech like consumer demand.  Television will stay around—radio is still alive and kicking—but all visual production will have to be geared for VR, even if only in 2D.

For example, imagine watching your favorite 2D television re-run in a VR room and television appropriate to the time period.  Or as a producer, you could purchase a pre-fab VR drive-in environment for your no-budget 2D horror feature distribution package.

A continuum of product will develop from consumer-produced 2D only at the low end to complex, interactive, live and scripted entertainment at the expensive high-end.

Ghost of VR Present

When it comes to revenue the product will generate, that continuum will not be a smooth curve.  There will be a massive amount of production out there—most of it bad and done for free or minimal pay.

And face it, audiences like it.  Ask this question in the present: How much time do people already spend consuming expensive scripted entertainment versus on Snapchat watching free video of their friend vacationing at Venice Beach?  There will very quickly develop two tiers of production—the very high-end, involving only a few players making 90-95% of the industry income, and everyone else, struggling at bottom dollar rates, regardless of visual quality.

This began happening in the music industry in the 1980’s, then photography in the 1990’s, and is now happening to 2D production.

In 1975, 29 different music acts held the number one hit slot.  Digital home recording was “studio quality” by 1980 and got cheaper—and better.  By 1995, only 10 acts had number one hits. In 2015 it was 8 acts—and yet there are far more bands with high-quality recordings out there than ever before.

Photography as a profession is now almost impossible.  Editorial day rates are half what they were when I quit commercial shooting in the late 1980’s—in real dollars.  At the same time, the cost of professional camera gear/tech is far beyond what it used to be, forcing everyone into keeping up with the new tech.  I used my $800 Nikon F3 rig professionally for over a decade and no client thought anything of it.  If you were to show up today at a commercial shoot with camera and computer from a decade ago, you would be fired.

Most filmmakers who actually get a project completed and out there are still “one and out” players due to either being unable to raise the funds for a second project, or the second project is a failure and loses money.  Storytelling is a time consuming process, no matter how good you are at it.  And you need to get paid for your time or you will be forced to do something else.

Twenty-somethings already know it is challenging to earn a living producing content, and not likely to get easier.

VR Reality

One thing is for certain if you are doing production: you need to include VR in your planning, at least.  For a time, the tech to do VR at the high-end will be expensive, especially design and integration of interactivity.  But all of that will drop in price and/or become part of production software.

My phone already shoots 4k video.  Phones are taking advantage of the fact that there is a camera on both sides, creating 360 views.  Most clients for still advertising shoots also require video documentation; soon a VR component will be added.

The bottom line: if you are doing production, get on board with VR or risk becoming irrelevant.