VR Playhouse's slate of summer classes kicked off this past weekend with a 2-day 360 Boot Camp, held at our studio in beautiful Los Angeles, CA. The class covered a...
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Lauren Ludwig, the director of our upcoming 360° narrative short, Girl, got a nice shout-out in LA Weekly’s year-end roundup. The immersive dance theatre dinner-party piece she directed, And The Drum, created with her company Capital W, was listed as one of the best and most innovative live performances of the year. See the list here.
Filmmaker Fifer Garbesi wrote a wonderful blog post on her efforts to bring VR to the artists and thinkers of Cuba; efforts that our very own co-founder, Ian Forester, had the opportunity to help with. They were recently in Havana shooting 360 footage for an upcoming documentary and hosting the island’s first VR Festival. It was, by all accounts, pretty amazing, opening the door for some great creations and collaborations to come! Read all about it here
A few months back, we got to work on a 360-degree music video collaboration with Honda, the production company m ss ng p eces and singer/songwriter Moses Sumney. And now, that video, “Music From Every Angle,” has hit the interwebs! We’re really proud and excited for this one. Technically, we got to take on some new challenges and perfect some new solutions. And we got to work with a tremendous musician and some amazing partners to create something truly unique for Honda. So give it a look! Watch Moses seemingly multiply into a whole army of soul singers, moving throughout the space, banging on Honda Civics like they were drumsets and using all 360 degrees to give us a truly memorable experience!
This is a guest post from VR Playhouse’s beloved Head of Production, Derin Turner. Sometimes he gets frustrated. Over the past year, we have been hard at work here at VR Playhouse, experimenting with virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, astral-projecto-realities. Some things have worked, others not so much. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve gone on spiritual journeys to rediscover ourselves and the meaning of life. We’ve broken a lot of things. All thanks to the wondrous world of VR. And through all of this, we have learned a lot. Things that we now want to pass on to you, so that we may spare you some of the pain that this gloriously sadistic medium inflicts. The first thing we’ve learned is this: At it’s core, the idea of VR is to transport your brain-noggin to alternate planes of existence. It is an illusion. And an illusion must be flawless….
Check it out! It’s a pretty great compilation of the work we’ve been doing. Big shout-out to VR Playhouse editor/legend/tha Gawd Derin Turner, who put it all together. Enjoy!
There are rare and beautiful places in this country, places filled with an inimitable natural majesty and grandeur, places that people come from all over the world to see and experience. These places are so special, in fact, that they have been set aside and protected as our national parks. Within the boundaries of those parks, the world moves at a different speed, unhindered by the pressures and stresses of modern living. If you’ve ever spent time wandering through one, away from all the lights and sounds and tumult of daily life, you’ll recall the distinct sense of peace and relaxation that washes over you. There is a stillness and a tranquility there that cannot be found anywhere else. VR Playhouse, along with experienced outdoorsman and spherical filmmaker Jay Whittaker, has set out to capture that amazing diversity in a series of short, virtual experiences. Jay has traveled across the…
Exactly one month ago, the Thursday of Burning Man, we brought out the GoPros. We arrived early to set up, been exploring for a week, and decided it was now or never if we were going to attempt to shoot 360 video at the infamous, beloved festival we call “home.” This is the story of how we did it, what went wrong, and luckily, what went right. BURNING MAN 2014. LOCATION: CAMPOLINE, 8:30 & C. We built our usual reflective foam board Hexayurt, this year with solar power so that we could charge the cameras and computer. We brought both of our 6 camera rigs (One is Freedom360, the other 360Heroes), as well as our 360Heroes 10 camera set up. We had 12 GoPro Heros, 2 tripods, one unlucky MacBook Pro, and a bunch of USB chargers. We shot Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was a particularly dust-filled year, so you can imagine the shooting conditions were less than…