Analogue and Digital Immersive Experiences: What should digital creators learn from live theatre makers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Forschung an den Übergängen / Research at the Transitions (Nummer 8), 2018
Wolfgang Brückle: Traditional TV appears to be doomed in the eyes of many experts, whose opinion is based on how little interest the medium generates among young audiences. At the same time, not only individual directors but also media corporations have in recent years started to embrace the possibilities of technically advanced filmmaking, and 360degree cinema and VR seem to be a promising field for experiments today. The BBC's production lab is active in the field; the CineGlobe Film Festival at CERN is encouraging experiments in the fields of both fiction and documentary; a team working at the Hochschule Luzern is currently cooperating with the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG to enhance the quality of narrative 360degree filmmaking. But it is not always clear whether these activities are driven by similar ambitions and dreams. Are we merely wit nessing a modern variation of the spectacles that panorama paintings once pre sented to an audience attracted by the lure of extreme realism? Or is this the rise of new ways of storytelling that bring unforeseen disruptions to what our senses used to consider the real, and that allow new forms of combining the fictional and the factual? You probably don't want to see storytelling limited to traditional con cepts of literary narrative in our discursive context… Fred Truniger: Actually, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the way storytelling functions in VR filmmaking, and we probably want to think about what we can hope to get in exchange for the disadvantages that VR filmmaking has in relation to traditional cinema. A general notion is that we have yet to understand what VR can actually achieve. Do you consider what you're working on right now simply the beginning of a new practice and an apparatus that's bound to change, and are you constantly envisioning what this change could be? Florian Krautkrämer: Thinking about the present and the possible futures of this format has a lot to do with how we see our present and past media. We're always comparing it to cinema. But what exactly is this cinema that we hold up in comparison to VR and 360degree filmmaking? My impression is that when we contextualize VR and 360degree filmmaking, we unnecessarily limit the discus sion to the paradigm of mainstream movies, where you offer the audience all the answers on a silver platter. Blockbuster cinema may be the most visible type of cinema, but it's only a small part of the whole thing. We have the films of Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso, Chantal Akerman; we have cinema that raises more questions than it answers. Discussions about 360degree filmmaking often revolve around how we can draw the attention of the audience to this or that detail just because we don't want them to get frustrated in the act of watching. But I would like to suggest that we focus less on finding ways of how to satisfy the viewer's desire to be guided through a linear narrative, and more on how we can grow a culture of higher frustration tolerance. We need to find ways to accept frustration, and from this starting point develop new questions and interests on the side of the spectators.
VR and the Dramatic Theatre: are they fellow creatures
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2018
This paper describes an experimental project that aims to investigate the scope of methodological and technical possibilities of using 360° videos for experiencing authored drama. In particular, it examines how a work written for the medium of theatre, with a traditional audience-drama relationship of viewer invisibility and non-participation, might translate into a viewing experience as a VR drama. The technical and dramaturgical issues arising from this are discussed. Specifically, the shared voyeuristic quality of both media is examined. Is the invisible viewer of VR drama in the invidious role of Glaucon’s iniquitous shepherd Gyges, or does the medium give invisibility a cloak of aesthetic value?
Body Space and Technology, 2020
The most recent emergence of relatively inexpensive VR technologies has received an enthusiastic attention from the entertainment industry, visual and multimedia artists, and academia. The world of computer gaming is thriving with the new VR platforms and the number of VR games is multiplying exponentially. Similarly, quite a few research projects have been funded in order to explore the potential of the immersive technologies in disciplines as wide and different as health care, nuclear decommissioning and nonfiction immersive documentaries. Similar to the advent of its various digital predecessors at the end of the last century, the encounter with this highly interactive and immersive technology has stirred up the discussion about the nature of the medium and its relation to its predecessors. A particular interest seems to be placed in the narrative possibilities of the medium. Parallel to this shared enthusiasm, however, one can also easily sense equally shared disappointment with the current state of affairs when it comes to the artistic climaxes delivered in the VR medium. The voices from both the entertainment industry and creative academia are clearly dissatisfied with the rather rudimentary narratives presented in the most of VR games, as well as more artistically ambitious immersive experiences. The medium which claims the highest technological level of immersion still struggles to keep its audience truly immersed in its fictional realities. In this article I argue that the answer to this challenge might come outside of the world of immersive interactive gaming, and that the key for understanding the nature of immersion might come from the realm of theatre. My study of Complicite’s performance The Encounter demonstrates that this work manages to achieve the level of immersion unconceivable for any existing VR experience. The key elements for this success are the profoundly relevant subject matter (the narrative based on Petru Popescu’s Amazon Beaming), ingenious use of binaural immersive sound, and extraordinary story-telling performance delivered by Simon McBurney. In other words, it is the combination of the performance’s intertextuality, the multimediality of its means of expression and the intense presence of its narrator/protagonist that accounts for extraordinarily immersive viewers’ experience. If the medium of VR is ever to achieve a comparable level of narrative and formal complexity, it needs to break away from the vacuum of the games-logic based interactivity and shift towards a more intertextual, multimedial and narratorial aesthetic.
The Spectator’s Seat. Movement and Body in Immersive Cinema., 2023
The way that conventional cinema guides the spectator around the image constitutes a very different form of immersion from the interactive immersion of all-encompassing media experiences. By considering such differences when studying immersive media, we can explore the full range of its potential benefits and how they can be combined to create new narrative formulas. Beyond virtualizing scenes, every immersive medium repositions the movement and the body of the spectator in the represented space. How these elements are redefined in each production is central to the viewing experience. This article studies immersive audiovisual storytelling, particularly in 360-degree video, from the perspective of the frictions between conventional cinematography and immersive media. These tensions are expressed through the different ways in which movement is depicted and the different positions of the spectator’s body in the image.
The Language of Immersive Cinema
Immersive cinema was made for modern storytellers and has inspired innovative ways to create films. Unrestricted by boundaries, an immersive film maker places the audience at the center of a story revealing each scene through manipulation of our perceptions. Storytellers and technicians are inventing a new language for this immersive cinema which may be expressed in many ways. This evolving experiential language is a synthesis of jargon and techniques from many disciplines, each contributing its own idiosyncrasies to our conversations. As a common language for immersive cinema is translated and adopted, we should become more proficient in communications with our peers and will give our audiences more meaningful immersive experiences.
Finding the message : exploring the new conventions of VR experience
Since 2014, a new wave of Virtual Reality (VR) development has been on the rise, calling for more artists to utilize this new technology in creating art works. However, there is still room for improvement in both the technology itself and its application in art creations. Firstly, the lack of clear definitions in VR results in many problems. Usually, the term 'VR creators' is used to address all of VR game producers, 360 filmmakers, and VR experience designers. This prevents the 'creators' from clearly defining the realm of their roles, thus the communication between them becomes less efficient. This inefficiency in turn prohibits the establishment of design patterns, forcing artists to acquire technical skills. This, in most cases, intensifies the difficulty of transdisciplinary collaborations, which are usually seen in big-budget projects promoted by big companies or famous studios. Due to the hybrid nature of this new medium, the outcome of the artwork is hard to predict. Participants' experiences can vary widely based on their decoding performance. What is more, there is a big chance that the work will not receive credit as artworks but will be criticized as frivolous toys. This paper builds on my experience of creating a thesis project, Captive Memoirs, in which I explore the multiple dimensions of designing an VR experience. Starting from the theoretical study and analysis of various artworks, I attempt to define, for further reference, the design elements that a VR experience is composed of. Through the presentation of this thesis, an operational system is established that investigates the design conventions of VR experience. This work also examines the relationship between the audience and the interactive art installation to investigate why the audiences' interaction is the key to VR experience. Above all, rethinking the creative practice of VR based artworks reveals the inspiration for new art forms and creates the opportunity to question the new standards of art.
The rise of virtual reality in filmmaking and evolution of storytelling in modern cinema
Interest in the development of virtual and augmented reality (VR) has surged in the last decade. Recent advancements in this technology have created a market for fully-immersive VR that becomes more accessible and less expensive with each yearly iteration. The profound immersion offered by these systems is unparalleled by any preceding technology. Although the first industry to meaningfully utilize VR was video games, filmmakers are beginning to take advantage of the new avenues opened up by limitless visuals, lifelike audio, and haptic feedback. While still in the early stages of development, VR in cinema has the opportunity to significantly impact visual storytelling. This research aims to investigate the ways in which cinema could become a fully-immersive medium. By surveying the current literature and reviewing interviews with industry experts, this paper will hypothesize about the potential ways in which VR will impact cinematic production and storytelling methods. Throughout this research, we will analyze current and upcoming projects in VR as the benchmark of our analysis. Using VR as a tool for narrative filmmaking proposes new challenges. VR filmmakers will now face audience distraction, the direction of attention, and the proper utilization of plot in an immersive world. In order to achieve a cohesive experience, films may have to closely replicate life events. Classic film techniques, such as frequent jump-cuts, would jar VR audiences. Based on these and other challenges discussed in the paper, we will offer hypotheses about the impact of VR on cinema as well as practical suggestions for those interested in utilizing this new technology as a medium for passive storytelling. Keywords: Virtual Reality, VR Storytelling, Immersion, 360 Video, Immersive cinema
Perception and Poetics of VR Documentaries
As virtual reality (VR) headsets like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, Google Daydream View, HTC Vive, and other devices begin to enter the marketplace, documentary filmmakers are using the new medium to record events and tell stories. VR is a distinctively different medium than cinema as it generates a 360-degree view of an environment. Proponents have described VR as an immersive experience, one that approaches reality much more than traditional cinema. However, VR remains a mediated experience. The gulf between VR and real experience opens up opportunities for developing an aesthetic of the medium. While audiences have experienced cinema for over a century, only recently have scholars begun to understand how we perceive moving images. Cognitive film studies and the burgeoning field of neurocinematics have examined how the brain responds when perceiving sequences of moving images and sound. Likewise, understanding how viewers perceive VR is a first step to defining its aesthetic. Both cinema and VR hack into our senses that had evolved within a natural environment. More than sight and sound, VR also engages our vestibular and proprioceptive senses, but limited haptic feedback, the fixed camera position of 360-degree video, and the absence of interaction beyond directional gaze prevents a fully immersive experience. How might documentary VR authors use these limitations to construct narratives and convey meaning, as opposed to merely presenting experiences? As more documentarians tell stories in the VR environment, new aesthetic traditions will emerge. A systematic study of the perception of VR can help determine how those traditions will develop.
Virtual Reality and the Theatre: Immersion in Virtual Worlds
Digital Creativity, 1999
The Institute for the Exploration of Virtual Realities (i.e.VR) is a project group at the University of Kansas dedicated to exploring the uses of computer technology in performance and computer-generated images as a scenographic medium. Three recent productions are described which aimed to use VR technologies not to simulate reality but to achieve 'engagement' of the audience. This is described as immersing the participant through engaging storytelling. The three plays were The Adding Machine, Wings and Tesla Electric, and they have provided a wealth of information on the art and practice of immersing a theatre audience within a fictive world.