Malaysian Tsai tests new tech in ‘Deserted’
Tsai believes that every movie should have its own independent narrative characteristics and the audience does not need to get involved in the story.
VENICE: Kuching-born, Taipeibased director Tsai Ming-liang is having a blast experimenting with virtual-reality technology for his movies.
Tsai, who turns 60 next month, is an art house celebrity known for churning out quirky hits.
If you come across a Chinese movie with camera shots lingering for minutes on something as boring as a girl brushing her hair, it’s probably Tsai behind the camera. And he’s not snoring away either.
Tsai’s baffling brand is about painstaking slow shots and minimal action, not flashy cinematography or hyper-kinetic editing.
Those who prodded him into action include former Venice festival boss Marco Mueller and HTC, the tech giant based, like Tsai, in Taiwan.
Tsai said that his initial contacts with the new medium were head spinning. But not in a good way. The image quality was “unbearably digital and unrealistic (and) the headset was heavy and clumsy to use,” Tsai deadpanned. But after another industry contact presented Tsai with a gloriously detailed, static image, Tsai was prepared
Liu Szu-Ming, vice president of HTC VR and the film’s executive producer
to reconsider. The result, The Deserted, renews the Venice connection and plays this week through the festival.
Made on a budget of US$ 1.6 million ( RM6.88 million), it was produced by Tsai’s own company, and HTC Virtual Reality Content Centre, and co-produced with Jaunt China, an offshoot of US virtual reality pioneer Jaunt. Jaunt China provided the cameras and the stitching and rendering services. The whole thing is best viewed with the Vive VR headset developed by HTC and Valve Corp. The headset uses room-scale tracking technology that the company says “allows the user to move in 3D space and use motion-tracked handheld controllers to interact with the environment.”
In such an environment, story is a fluid concept and Tsai’s description is appropriately elliptical. It involves a man recovering from an illness, who is unable to communicate properly and communes with a fish.
“Tsai believes that every movie should have its own independent narrative characteristics and the audience does not need to get involved in the story,” says Liu Szu-Ming, vice president of HTC VR and the film’s executive producer.
The film’s title in its original Chinese means “The Home at Lan Re Temple” and is a short ghost story stripped from a longer novel. Tsai says that the setting matches his own decampment to the countryside where he now lives next to an abandoned temple.
HTC intends the movie to live on after the festival. “In addition to delivering the movie, we’ve built the movie set in a 3D virtual environment. Audience may move within the environment and interact with the object within. Our idea is to integrate the story with the virtual character, to produce an immersive interactive movie through the head mounted display,” Liu added.
Tsai says that he was energised by making the film and that he enjoyed the ability to experiment and push boundaries. One of these is the length of the picture, which comes in at 55 minutes. Although the post production process was laborious and unfamiliar, and there was significant quality loss along the way, Tsai said he remains essentially optimistic. “I hope that in three years time, there’ll be a more ideal way of presenting my work, The Deserted.” And, under the right circumstances, he would do another.