ART COME TO LIFE
Virtual reality is pushing the limits of movies, paintings and gaming
Gunman Ryan Marks has just fought his way through a nest of bad guys to interrogate one of the evil Sharp brothers, played by Jason Cheater. But a fellow with a machine gun interrupts their chat, and Ryan has to flee down the corridor, crashing though a window. After a slow-motion tumble, he finds himself clinging to the side of a neon hotel sign, several stories up.
It reads like a scene from a Hollywood movie, one that might star Matt Damon or Tom Cruise. And in some ways it is. But Blood & Truth is a virtual-reality video game, with the player in the role of Ryan Marks. Hanging from that sign, the player can look down at the dizzying drop or up at the London skyline — or to the side, where a ledge can be grabbed, offering a path to safety.
Blood & Truth is just one of the ways the line between video games and movies is blurring. There have first-person shooters with storylines, but VR delivers a level of immersion that makes the experience feel more cinema than game.
Not that either term is a perfect fit. Movies have been working for a while to craft a more engaging event — Canada opened its first 270-degree panoramic “Screenx” cinema in Toronto last winter, while “4DX” seats offer chair motion and vibration, along with simulated wind, fog, etc. And VR remains a more interactive activity than filmgoing. But you can find an IMDB page for Blood & Truth that lists directors, writers, actors — all the nuts and bolts of a movie.
The game, developed by London Studio, is based on a shorter shooter called The London Heist, released for the Playstation VR system in 2016; just like movies, some VR games start as shorts. It features most of the beats of an action flick — there’s gunplay and car-chases galore, a bit of exposition in Marks’ safe house, even scenes of comic relief, as when the character visits a gallery and can “accidentally” destroy a few pieces of art. And the ending teases a sequel.
Of course, it’s arguable that adding VR to the first-person shooter format doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel; it just puts you inside it. A more fascinating experiment in Vr-based storytelling is the “game” of Afterlife, created by Montreal’s Signal Space Lab and directed by Luisa Valencia. It’s also available for the Playstation as well as other platforms. Unfolding as a short movie, Afterlife tells the story of Emma and Ray and their teenage daughter Tessa, whose lives are shattered by the sudden death of their six-year-old son.
Watching a tale like this through a VR headset can be disorientating and uncomfortable, though I don’t mean either of those in a bad way. For one thing, the viewer is often at the centre of a room, and must turn his or her head (or choose not to) to focus on some detail. And when two characters are arguing, the sense of being an uninvited interloper in the midst of a family’s turmoil can be overwhelming. You almost want to avert your gaze.
This can have consequences. Valencia has structured her film so that the position of the VR headset creates changes to the story, but without alerting the viewer — with a few small exceptions, there are no “Choose option A or B” moments.
In fact, when I first watched the film I found the character of Emma so self-absorbed that I chose to pay more attention to her husband and daughter on my second viewing — and the film took a different path to a different ending. The branching nature of the narrative means there are hundreds of paths to reach one of several conclusions.
The expense of buying VR and the lack of consumer knowledge still makes this something of a niche market. And there are VR experiences that can never be had at home. In 2017, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu brought the astonishing seven-minute VR short Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand) to the Cannes Film Festival. It required an aircraft hangar full of sand to allow viewers to walk around and feel the story of a desert border crossing into the United States — not to mention two fulltime handlers to stop viewers from wandering into walls. The piece won a rare Special Achievement Academy Award; the last time one was given out was for 1995’s Toy Story.
Film festivals and art exhibitions are increasingly turning to VR as a way to tell stories. Vancouver’s Ollie Rankin recently took his eight-minute VR film Downloaded to the Venice Biennale. Inspired by the science-fiction classic Tron and the recent Netflix series Altered Carbon, it puts the viewer in the position of a digitized consciousness inside a computer.
This year, Montreal’s Centre Phi hosted the exhibit VR Cinema: Short Films on Canvas, which allowed participants to step inside paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Arnold Böcklin and, most amazingly, Édouard Manet. A Bar at the Folies-bergère put the viewer into the mind of the painter, the model, the characters in the painting, and finally a visitor to the gallery where the work was displayed.
Then there’s Draw Me Close, a co-production between the U.K.’S National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada. It played at the Venice and Tribeca film festivals, and comes to Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company next summer. Directed by Toronto artist and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill, it blends VR, animation and a live performance to tell the tale of a man whose mother has been diagnosed with cancer. Is Draw Me Close a VR experience? A theatrical performance? It’s difficult to classify, except in the broadest definition, one that encompasses everything from cave paintings to Blood & Truth. It’s a story.