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.
Let’s be real. Virtual reality is having a moment. Headsets are shipping, people are talking and VR is popping up all over pop culture in weird, interesting ways. It feels sweepingly omnipresent all of a sudden, like there was this plan in place to make VR a part of all of our lives and now that plan is in motion. And so people ask me what it’s like to work in the virtual reality industry. This is a hard question to answer in an interesting way. It’s difficult? It’s exciting? It’s crazysexycool? Yes. But also: Working in virtual reality is like being a first year resident on a primetime medical drama Not that I ever watched “Grey’s Anatomy” because for sure I never did but somehow I know that the pilot episode covered the first 48 hours in the residency of Meredith Grey and friends, just like the pilot episode…
I saw “Death Of A Salesman” for the first time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1997. I was 16 years old and just starting to stumble into what it meant to be an adult and as I watched Willy Loman, crumbling under the weight of so many different familial and societal pressures, miraculously, I started to recognize myself. I saw myself in that 63 year old salesman and in that 50 year old play. And so even though the play is a tragedy, I didn’t walk away sad. I was instead reassured because I knew that the same fears I was just then facing lived in everyone else too. I knew I wasn’t alone. One of the great joys of interacting with art of any kind is the journey you take to find yourself in it, to uncover your own reflection there, as hidden as it may be, and…
PART III: SWAG, OR SCIENTIFIC, WILDLY AIMED GUESSES There’s always been a kind of implied power dynamic that exists in visual storytelling, a power that the storyteller is meant to have over his or her audience. And it’s more or less defined by the frame in which the story plays out. Because there’s always a frame. And the existence of that frame means that the storyteller has the ability to locate the components of his or her story in the space that the frame prescribes. He can compose a shot or a moment on stage and he can then juxtapose that with other shots, other moments. However you may or may not interpret the things you see, what, in fact, you are seeing is always up to the storyteller. Except not in VR. With immersive, 360 content, the frame is the entirety of the user’s field of vision which means, at any given moment, they’re creating their own frame…
The emergence of a new means of narrative happens, on average, about once every twenty-five years or so. This is a very inexact estimation, about as inexact as my definition of “narrative means.” Let’s just say that the means is the way in which a person receives their stories. So, for instance, in the 20th century, there were three big ones that emerged. First, there was film. Then came television. And then came video games. You could maybe also argue that comic books constitutes its own system but there have been serialized adventure stories with illustrations for quite awhile so is that really its own narrative conveyance? You can see what I mean about inexact. But so anyway, the point is that each of these systems came with their own rules and parameters and ways in which they function in partnership with the human brain and it took awhile for everyone to figure it all out. We’re…
