Virtual narratives
dead Center Film Festival, Woody Guthrie Center showcasing VR storytelling
deadCenter Film Festival, Woody Guthrie Center showcasing VR storytelling.
Spanning the wall of a derelict building in Melbourne, Australia, the epic portrait of a woman’s face towers beyond my range of vision, prompting me to look up, which sends the wooden swivel chair under me gently tipping and turning.
The chair’s movement reminds me to rotate my neck slowly to the left and right, the better to see the crumbling urban landscapes among which internationally acclaimed street artist Rone creates his monumental murals.
Viewed through a virtual reality headset, director Lester Francois’ 360-degree short film and interactive VR art gallery “Rone,” a 2018 deadCenter Film Festival selection, conveys the stunning scope of the street artist’s large-scale works. But only if the viewer remembers to move.
“We honestly had a debate
about whether or not we were going to use those chairs, but we all agreed that it is that swivel that reminds you … to move,” said Lance McDaniel, deadCenter executive director.
“Last year, after we had done the first round of the VR films, we took them to SixTwelve (community art center) and showed them to some campers there that were all quite young — and not one of them looked around. All of them just looked straight ahead. … I do think people are so used to just having entertainment pushed that you really have to give them triggers to make them look around.”
Coming off a record-setting 2018 edition in June, deadCenter opens its call for entries for the 2019 festival this month, and one area organizers intend to keep bolstering is its virtual cinema showcase.
“We’ve been going to Sundance (Film Festival) for eight years and seeing tons of virtual reality, but it never felt like storytelling. It always felt like the immersive environment. So, it was only the last couple of years that I felt like filmmakers have really started figuring out how to enhance storytelling and not just create these beautiful worlds,” McDaniel said. “We look at dead Center as a storytelling festival through film.”
Emerging technology
McDaniel credited Kim Voynar, CEO and founder of Wonder Tek Labs in Seattle, with ensuring that dead Center’s virtual cinema programming the past two years showcased VR and 360 short films that were more than just hightech gimmickry. He presented the Oklahoma City native with one of dead Center’s 2018 Oklahoma Film Icon Awards during the festival. “It’s a tremendous honor … and it’s really cool how deadCenter and Lance have really embraced virtual reality as a new storytelling medium and how open he has been to bringing it into the festival,” Voynar said.
“A lot of the content that has been available feels very early demo, content of an emerging tech, which is what it’s been. … For me, the fact that we had content that’s as mature as it is to share in 2018, to be able to show at deadCenter, is really remarkable.”
For a decade, Voynar worked as a film critic, reviewing movies for Cinematical, Movie City News, Indiewire and Variety, and in 2011, she ventured into filmmaking. In 2014, she founded WonderTek Labs, a boutique virtual reality content and consulting studio, with her partner, Nathaniel Pinzon.
“We’re still not very much past ‘The Arrival of a Train’ stage of the film industry,” Voynar said, referring to the seminal 1896 French short film. “It took 120 years for the film industry to get from ‘The Arrival of a Train’ to ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Star Trek’ and all these big tentpole Marvel films that we’re seeing. It doesn’t happen overnight. Storytelling in a medium doesn’t evolve over the course of four or five years, which is really all this space has had to evolve.”
Location-based entertainment
One sign that the needle is starting to move on the development of VR storytelling came in January at Sundance, when the festival saw its first major VR acquisition, as VR financing and distribution venture City Lights bought the threepart space series “Spheres,” a VR project narrated by two-time Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain, and executive produced by Academy Award nominee Darren Aronofsky. Also during Sundance, documentary distributor Dogwoof acquired “Zikr: A Sufi Revival,” a 15-minute song-anddance VR experience.
“I don’t think anyone could accurately say they know what VR is going to be when it comes to storytelling … until we figure out more what are the best ways to deliver content,” Voynar said.
The main method of delivering VR storytelling currently is location-based entertainment, she said, which ranges from VR short film showcases at dead Center and other film festivals to Oscar winner Alejandro G. Inarritu’s (“The Revenant”) traveling mixed-reality installation “Carney Arena ”( or “Flesh and Sand”), which has sold out its runs in Milan, Mexico City and now Washington, D.C.
Dust Bowl tale
An ominous dark cloud creeps relentlessly into my field of vision. Little birds, exhausted from trying to flee it, fall to the ground twitching, while jack rabbits zip under the replica of an wooden porch I’m sitting on and out of sight. The wind howls menacingly, and dirty particles seem to smatter against the VR headset I’ve donned inside Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center.
Oklahoma historian Michael Wallis narrates the first-person account of April 14, 1935, the day of dust storms now known as Black Sunday. Produced by Tulsa-based Steelehouse Productions, the multisensory, location-based VR short film experience opened in spring as part of the nonprofit center’s fifth anniversary festivities.
“Since we opened, we were considered a state-of-theart technological educational resource, so when we turned
5 ... we had to start thinking about what new technology we were going to add to stay on that cutting edge. Of course, the first thing that occurred was virtual reality,” Woody Guthrie Center Executive Director Deana McCloud said.
“Other museums have been toying with the idea of installing a virtual reality experience. But for us, we have this moment in our history that we could explore more easily through VR and allow people to experience the trepidation and fear that one would have felt had they been watching those dust storms appear.”
She said it’s difficult to overstate the effect the Dust Bowl had on Guthrie.
“He lived through Black Sunday and then went to Los Angeles, saw the migrant workers, saw his people suffering through all of these things. They created him as a social
activist,” McCloud said.
“Our five-minute excerpt from the Ken Burns documentary (‘The Dust Bowl’) has been just really captivating for people. We have lots of folks who will sit in there and watch it two of three times. … But there’s a huge difference between watching something on a flat screen and then being able to experience in the virtual world where you’re in the middle of what’s going on as opposed to just an observer. You’re no longer an observer; in the virtual world, you are there.”
High-tech ballet
In downtown Oklahoma City, the first VR lounge at the 2017 deadCenter Film Festival drew about 800 people and plenty of positive feedback. For its 2018 edition, the nonprofit festival launched a full technology conference called techCenter focusing on VR, augmented reality and drones. McDaniel said this year’s slate of VR films attracted about 2,000 viewers.
“People are interested in virtual reality, but I think part of it is that people are interested in what’s new, what’s next, what’s happening,” he said. “But I give Kim Voynar tons of credit because when she programmed our virtual cinema last year, she was so inspiring to me personally that I raised the money and went out and did a virtual reality film.”
McDaniel’s “Homecoming: Seduction” was one of 11 VR selections screened at this year’s deadCenter. The finale of his “Homecoming Trilogy” of short films he helmed in his hometown of Alva, “Seduction” uses the language of dance to explore the temptations of drug addiction, the highs of using and the inevitable lows that come after.
“Once we went through the whole process, having not done it before, we realized VR/360 was going to be very effective at telling a different, kind of enhanced version of the third story,” said McDaniel, who is working on another VR film project. “I think it’s a new way of approaching storytelling, and it’s always good for any artist working in any medium to be aware of what’s next and how that will affect how they will do their own work,” he said.