The Changing Same
Directed by Yasmin Elayat, Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster Produced by Scatter and Rada Studio
It’s easy to see why New York-based studio Scatter’s follow up to its first VR experience Blackout picked up the Best Narrative Prize at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival: Their powerful new project The Changing Same allows participants to travel through time and space to witness the connected experiences of racial injustice in America.
Director Yasmin Elayat first met her collaborators Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster five years ago when they were working on their documentary, The Changing Same. “The documentary chronicled the town of Marianna in the Florida panhandle, which was the site of the Claude Neal lynching in 1934, which is considered one of the worst spectacle lynchings in the U.S.,” notes Elayat. “That film, this town and the story of Claude Neal is the origin of the virtual reality series. Over the years and in the co-creation process it’s turned into ‘hybrid speculative fiction,’ where the story is based on real events that have become abstracted.”
Brewster mentions that his own personal experiences informed this important project. “This journey began as our own personal journeys,” he notes. “Before this project, not only did I struggle with obstacles related to class and race as a Black middle class male, but I struggled to understand my privilege and the reasons why some of my friends ‘made it’ while others were destroyed by systemic racism and injustice. The Changing Same is my narrative and like most ‘makers,’ I share my story and hope that it inspires and informs others around me.”
According to the directors, the inspiration behind their project was that history is cyclical and that racial injustice hasn’t really changed, but has evolved. “Our goal with this project is for the audience to acknowledge our shared history, to bear witness to the past in order to heal and move forward,” says Elayat. “It was important to memorialize the unmarked sites of the Claude Neal lynching, for example, and it was also important to showcase Black joy, daily life and celebration.
Part of the approach to the world building and the creation of the virtual worlds was capturing the actual sites in the real world. We sent a team to Marianna to do a reality capture shoot, and using photogrammetry we captured the landscape and the sites. We then re-contextualized these real-world places and re-imagined them.”
The project brought together a team of international designers, technical artists, engineers, a reality capture team and volumetric specialists, Depthkit experts, lighting environmental artists and others. Episode one went into production last year, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was part of Tribeca’s Juneteenth curation as well. “Every concept, the characters, the environments and the mechanics we designed with intent to leverage the medium,” says Elayat. “With VR, you have multiple experiential tools to tell a story. You can completely restrict and confine the user’s space, and you can be completely expansive with camera moves and physics to add a whole other experiential dimension. For example, our time travel mechanic where you travel through this abstract symbolic space spanning 400 years of Black History, is meant to feel awe-inspiring and infinite. It has many layers and symbols and Easter eggs to discover each time you travel through it.”
Brewster and Elayat are both pleased that they were able to get their project off the ground during such a difficult year. “We resisted changing the content to make the story less painful,” says Brewster.“We resisted decreasing the complexity and size of the build. We made the story more painful, and that required more joy — a solution that makes the narrative stronger. We increased the complexity and the original build was close to 7GB, but we were again advantaged by this. I am most pleased that we remained patient and we are still happy artistically, as well!”
Adds Elayat, “I am quite proud of the strong storytelling, the uncompromising subject matter, the technological innovation and the beauty of the world’s we’ve designed.”
Website: scatter.nyc/productions/the-changing-same ◆