 But that sounds better. Even I can hear it now. That's great. Did you hear the, did you hear Noni's intro? No, OK, I'm going to re-hash that quickly. You know, when I show my slides, I'll, it'll do that. OK, Noni Dillapenia, but a major maker in this space, someone who's really defining it. Gee, someone should have raised their hand and, sorry, I should have, should have checked. Rainie Aronson, front line, the woman who makes it all happen there. And the person who's been really redefining their whole remit, bringing it into the digital age, moving it across platforms, across publics, and across organizations. And she's also a fellow, has been a fellow at our open doc lab here at MIT. Next to Rainie is Casper Zonen, someone I've known for a real long time. Casper is the, is a festival organizer and curator. And he founded the doc lab at IDFA, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. And this really is the place, the cauldron, the place that's defined more than anywhere else that I know of, the, the whole genre, I guess, of interactive and immersive documentary. So Casper is someone who's really always looking for the ways in which new technologies meet the documentary form. And I have to say, each November is a treat to just see what wild and wonderful things Casper comes up with. So he knows the field unlike anyone else that I know. And he's also pretty energetic. In addition to the IDFA doc lab, he is also one of the co-founders of Photo Stories and also the Open Air Film Festival in Amsterdam. So someone who's a curator to the bone. And finally next to me, Katie Morrison, co-founder and producer at Vertov, which is a VR studio, maker of, among other things, Ascent in the Turning Forest. So one of the, one of the real big innovators in this space, flown all the way over from Australia, still, probably lunchtime over there, or is it midnight. And a woman who's really done a lot to bridge the gap between traditional documentary makers, linear documentary makers, because she was one, and the world of VR documentation. So someone who really understands the different affordances of each side, the different manners of engagement, the different kinds of immersion and affect that both media are capable of, and who's really done a terrific job at translating one community to the other through her work as much as anything else. So what I thought we'd do tonight is start with, that's a lot of words and they sound great, but these are people who make stuff. So I thought each of them could give a very short presentation about their work. We'll start off with Noni. And then following that, I have a few questions up here, but please, this is really for you. This is an immersive interactive medium, so par excellence here, so you guys can think of your questions. We have mics and after a few rounds of questions, after a warm up up here, we'll turn it over to you. So Noni. Hi, you guys can hear me, right? Just a quick, I have to shout out to Bester Cramm who's in the audience here tonight who has worked with me on many of my documentary films and taught me so much about documentary filmmaking that I was able to bring into the virtual space. So it's really an honor, not only for the VRD MIT, but also if somebody was one of my great mentors is in the audience. So the first piece, one of the first earliest walk around virtual reality pieces I ever did was called Hunger in Los Angeles. I was working as a research fellow at the University of Southern California's journalism school and they were doing a kind of what I consider a traditional piece now with photos and video and audio all up on the web. And I asked the students in the class, you know, I really want to make this VR piece and nobody want to do it. So I'm knowing this was published in March of 2010, by the way, so this was many months before this. And nobody raised their hand. I think they all thought I was nuts. So actually I thought another intern from another place that a high school student who was graduating and with my own money, about 700 bucks, we went out and started recording audio at food banks across Los Angeles until one day she was at this long line and a man with diabetes who was standing there didn't get food in time. And he collapsed into a diabetic coma. And she came back and she played me the audio and was like, oh my God, that's what we have to build with. But again, we had no resources. So with virtual humans that were donated, as you can see on the slide, we rebuilt the street to the best of our abilities and in fact, the Photoshop of the street, you can see kind of the gum and stuff on the street, you could have gone and found that actually on the street that day. And here's a little video using that real audio of the walk around experience that we made. There are too many people, there are too many people. Okay. Somebody help you. Somebody help you. You don't see that people. Hey. Don't. Okay, he's having a seizure. Okay. You need to go to the n-charts. Somebody call up. You can see the guy on the right, you know, he's wearing the crazy goggles we are using in the lab at USC. And for him, he feels like he's in the room with that guy, right? Even though the graphics aren't perfect, whatever, he's very careful not to step on the seizure victim. He's looking down at him, he's walking around, he's looking at people talking on the mobile phone. All right. So that piece gets into Sundance for January of 2012. This is the fall of 2011 now, which took quite a while for me to get my C-sharp coding up and become a better Unity programmer and beg and borrow a lot of favors, get it made, gets into Sundance, but there's a problem. The only goggles we have are called the Wide 5 and they're $50,000 a pair. And the head of the lab is like, you're not taking those anywhere, right? So what are we gonna do? So there was this funny little team of people hanging out and we started making goggles. This one kid had already been making some goggles in his garage. That's the one who's got his face planted in that mask there. And if you kind of look at the screen, if you look at the little two black dots, those are your eyes and we're trying to figure out where to put what's called the IPD, where the eyes should go, blah, blah, blah. And a great guy in the back test tie fan who's really unsung. Anyway, we show up at Sundance with something that looks like this, duct tape goggles, right? And I really don't know how people are gonna behave and this is opening night, right, at the festival. Oops, sorry. What'd you think? Oh, you're crying, you're crying, Gina, you're crying. I'm completely shocked, right? But this happens over and over again. People trying to touch the seizure victim, trying to speak to him, take care of him. It just is another little quick look at those goggles because it's kind of a historical moment now. You'll see in the bottom it's signed Palmer Lucky, who William mentioned. Nine months later, at this point Sundance is like crashed in my hotel room and driving the truck back and was like kind of the intern of the project. Nine months later, he starts the Oculus Rift. And two and a half years later, he sells it for $2 billion to Facebook, okay? Ends up on Time Magazine and gives us the most memed Time Magazine there ever was in history. So in the same time in that lab, there were these guys who were making what were called the FOVs to go. And they were fold up viewers for mobile phones, right? So again, this is back in 2012. So this is me in April of 2012 at Facebook at an event called Tech Wrecking for Journalists that was run by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Google, and I'm handing these things out and saying really, really, they're future. You can kind of tell from my BDI look. I swear it's the future. But then this fall, of course, we get the Google cardboard delivered and millions to people. You know, this is what showed up at my house. Crazy, crazy. This is four years later, you guys. Like nothing, right, time-wise. So four years, what's happened? So now I'm gonna give you just five little predictions, I think, for the future, and I'll move off stage. I think that kinematic virtual reality in which you walk around will become the new cinematic. I think it will become the most common place thing. All of the new headsets coming out, the Vive, the Sony Morpheus, Oculus, they let you walk around. And even things like cardboard and gear VR are gonna have controllers that are gonna let you move around. And the Oculus VR guru, the guy who helped start Oculus, John Carmack, thinks that positional tracking is gonna be just as important for mobile VR. So that's one thing. Two, scan environments. They're gonna be really important, how we're gonna do them, and supplemented by Google Maps. Instead of you looking at a flat view or even Google Earth View, you're just gonna be walking down that street you wanna see, literally with your goggles on. So how does this sort of thing apply? When we did Project Syria, let me give you a little sample of what that was about. Construct a street in like a Bible, and then have to make it physically, right? In the virtual world. So having spaces that we can actually just be made for us and go, oh, it happened there, and it's already done for us in Google Maps, and then we just put the activity in, you know, the action that's gonna help all of us documentarians and journalists be able to tell us stories in a volumetric, kinematic way. I'm gonna skip this slide, a little behind, I'm sorry. Witness and characters will be scanned readily. In this story, where a guy was beaten and tased to death by the Board of Patrol. This green footage that helped define what really happened, where this man was 60 of our deputy patrol officers beaten and tased him to death. We took the witness who hid some of the footage in her pocket, and we brought her in, and we scanned her, right? In order to make a full look-alike of her in the scene, and then we put a motion capture suit on her, so she re-enacted her own memories of the night instead of us asking her questions. Well, everybody's phone is gonna allow them to scan people now. Qualcomm, Intel, all those chips are coming this summer, that you're gonna be able to just walk around somebody, and in three minutes have a scanned version of them. Of course, then you have to animate them, which at this point is still a little bit harder. And you'll be able to scan environments too, wherever you are, on the right up there is Project Tango, which is a big Google project to let you scan things. Right now, this is the kind of thing that we have to do when we do a facial capture on an animated model. This is from a piece we did on What Happens to Young Women they tried to go into health clinics like Planned Parenthoods. You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a whore! You're a little whore! How about stop being a whore? You whore? Shame on you! Start closing your legs! Start having some respect for your body! Maybe your parents should have aborted you! So that was like a facial capture of somebody actually trying to create the audio for us. Number four, how are we gonna stop doing that where we're trying to replace the animation? We'll do something called videogrammetry. High fidelity, volume metric capture, and video will rule the space. We just captured a guy who is part of a community of kids who were from the LBGTQ community who were thrown out by their families. And if you look in that green, hidden in that green area are those little black cameras. There's multiples of them, I think it's like 46. And they capture in video from every angle so you can actually walk around video. I know that's sort of hard to conceive of what that's like, but that is ADI is a company we're starting to partner with and in our partnership with Frontline we've already begun a project together using exactly this technique. And finally, my last slide, the future. I think that after the HoloLens where we're being projected into each other's rooms we're actually gonna occupy bodies in two places at once. Do you hear me now, Nani? Where we were playing with that. Nice to meet you, Moldoghurst. Welcome to Barcelona, Baminguda, Barcelona. I don't know, Nani, if I could ask you to raise your arms. I would ask you to check out the arms. I'll check them out. Keep them up, because now we'll show the robot. And now we'll go and see the robot. Can you move them a little bit more? Let's see if I can move them a little bit more. Up and down. So you can see that the robot reacts perfectly with Nani. Nani, I'm ready to interview you now for a few minutes. We'll do an interview with Nani to see what this experience looks like. You're a journalist, and you're a journalist, and it's a scientific interview from Barcelona. You just interviewed a researcher from Barcelona but in a body of robot. What was that experience like? The next time I come to speak at MIT, I'll be here without being here. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'll just talk for a couple of minutes and send it out. Okay, I'll stand away from the mic. Hi, is that better? So I'm Rainie Aronson, as William said, from Frontline, and how many of you guys watch Frontline Documentary is the linear form. Okay, that's a large number. Do you guys, are you aware that we're doing work in 360 and VR? Some of you. Well, that's understandable. So we are new to the world of VR and I would say that partnering with Nani has been really extraordinary for us because we're moving from cinematic VR, which is what we've just been trying to figure out what the right words are for what we're making right now to volumetric VR. And one of the things that Nani and I, Frontline and Emblematic are really tasked with is looking at some of the journalism ethical questions that arise when we're creating new filmmaking tools, especially when you're going into a frameless space like we do with VR. And we can talk about that if you're curious. The other thing for Frontline has been that over the last couple of years, we have been exploring all sorts of new visual storytelling tools. And I think the reason for that is that we're naturally visual storytellers through and through inside our shop. So for us to look at the new space that people were creating in, to be honest, VR was the best and sort of closest kindred spirit. For me, as a filmmaker, I understood it. And I wanna explain that because of course, William and Sarah Woolison were kind enough to ask me and I begged them frankly to become a fellow a couple of years ago in the open doc lab. And I can remember the very early days, not understanding, I don't know, Sarah, maybe 75% of what you guys were talking about because I'm a linear filmmaker. But once we started to talk about VR, I started to really understand it. And I decided that was really what we should explore. So we look at VR as filmmakers, as visual storytellers, and importantly as journalists. And I am convinced over the last number of months in particular as the technology becomes more accessible and the barriers to entry become lower. And that's really important to me because I'm in public media and I believe that media should be affordable. I believe people should be able to experience this without having the entry point be too expensive. I do believe that this will radicalize and change storytelling in the world that I live in, which is the world of journalism and journalistic documentary. So I wanted to show you a clip from something that we've done out of the South Sudan. It's simply just wonderful to look at and we can talk a lot more as well. And I wanna give my colleagues time. So I'll show you this and I'll sit down and we're here for questions. Does it take to fix, change the, the display? Can we go into display? That's hysterical. You're spying, I say. Over to him. There you go. I'm gonna sit down too. This plane is taking food to remote villages in South Sudan's lowland swamps. It's the rainy season and roads are washed out. The only way to get food here is to drop it from the sky. Can you hear me guys? Is my microphone on? Yeah, okay, cool. So thank you for the invitation and it's a privilege to be here in Boston as William said, I've just come from Australia so please forgive me if I doze off or say something very unusual during the course of this evening. It's a long flight. So basically I'm gonna take you through a little bit about who we are and what we do. I run a independent production studio called Vatav with Oscar Rabie who is in the audience here. He's the creative director and I'm the producer. We are a very small independent studio that comes from that kind of tradition of being an indie and when I say small, there's like two of us normally. There's 12 of us at the moment but we kind of range in that very kind of small space. We started Vatav in about, I would say we started it in 2013 off the back of this project here which was Ascent which was made primarily, well it started off as a master's project that Oscar was making as a master's in interactive media and it was finished its first version in 2013 and went on to kind of have a premiere in 2014 and took us a lot of places. It went to Sundance in 2015 and it's kind of still continuing to have a life. It is actually here at the exhibition over the next couple of days for you guys to see. Ascent is an autobiographical documentary about Oscar's family and an event that his father witnessed in 1973 while he was an officer in the Chilean military which at that time was dictatorship. So it is a really personal story. It's made as a interactive real-time VR documentary which is the way that we work in contrast to some of the other people here today. And I think when we first started to kind of think about how we were gonna do VR, we never really had a conversation about all the different options that we had available to us and we chose interactive real-time for any particular reason. But in kind of in doing these presentations and thinking about the art trajectories towards this position, I think it actually makes a lot of sense that we have ended up in the place that we're in and I just kind of wanna take you through a little bit of that thinking because I think it's as important as the technical kind of side of it. Oscar is a visual artist by training and I, as William said, am a documentary maker. I worked for a long time in TV. But before I did that, I was actually training to be a historian because I thought, yeah, I'm gonna make myself a lot of money and I'll be a historian. And then I decided documentary was more lucrative. But you know, while I was studying history and I did my undergraduate degrees in history and I did a postgraduate in history as well, I was really interested in historiography and the ideas about how we ascribe meaning to events. So I was less interested in, you know, a very sort of fact-based approach to history as a more kind of interpretive approach. And I think thinking about the way that we work now, that makes a lot of sense to me that we've ended up in an interactive format and doing real-time VR because we've both been very interested in the kind of the space between the user of a text and the text itself and that kind of relationship. So our approach to VR is in interactive real-time and it's also what we're starting to call operational documentary. So we're interested in the operations that the user makes that tell the story as much as what happens in front of their eyes or all around them in the case of VR. So I'll show you a little trailer from Ascent, but as I say, it is here at the exhibition. So. Hi, dad. I'm glad you could see this. I thought the instructions might have been a bit confusing, but here you are. So I guess it worked. I wanted to send you something real and oddly enough, look what I came up with. Look around. If you stare at certain things for long enough, something happens. We're looking back to 1973. Right on this spot, you have just been notified of a chord marshal taking place up the hill. But today, I want you to take the time you didn't take back then and stay with me for a little longer. We went on to make our next project, which has just been at Tribeca. It isn't actually a documentary, so I'll just quickly show you a slide from it to show you what it is. It's a fiction fairy tale, which was an interesting project that again, allowed us to work in interactive real-time VR and this project was actually a research project together with the BBC Research and Development Department based on their experiments in binaural audio. So our kind of main investigation in this particular project was how to turn that interest in audio into an interactive mechanic that we were able to bring into the experience. So we ended up creating this quite beautiful fairy tale that where the main user interaction is in kind of triggering the soundscape. We are coming back to the documentary space now. We have a project which is launching at Sheffield in June, which is a great project which is a documentary about the Easter uprising in Ireland with the BBC, I wonder, again, working with a broadcaster, which is something that we should touch on a little bit later on, how it is for an indie VR company to work with a big broadcaster, kind of finding their feet themselves in VR. This project kind of comes back to the sort of the structure that we set out in a sent in a way. It's based on an audio recording of a man who was involved in the uprising in 1916. He recorded his memories when he was about 70 years old and put them on a cassette tape, put them away in a drawer and forgot about them. And his descendants found that tape a little bit later on and it came to us in the end. And that kind of formed the backbone of the interactive, of the experience. So our job was then to try and tease out what are the operations that we can kind of put into this experience that really kind of convey the story of this guy. So we took that recording and used it to kind of craft this experience where you inhabit his memories of that time. And here's another slide from that one, talking about the things he did and things that he perhaps didn't do. Just quickly, a little note on how we work. So this is, we work with a lot of 3D scanning for our documentaries. The fairytale project was crafted entirely from scratch in 3D, but our documentary projects, we use a lot of 3D scanning. This is a still from a production process of Ascent, which back in 2013 we were using just Microsoft Connects to scan with. So that's where that started. This is a production still from the Irish project where you can see Oskie using, we use consumer technology. We use an iPad with an attached 3D sensor. So that turned into, that's one of the finished pieces. So we take those 3D scans and bring them into a game engine. Something like that. It's quite portable technology. This is one that was made in South Sudan. So I was gonna show you a bit about the workshops that we also run, I will leave it there and we can kind of come back to that if we have time in the conversation. Hello, Ish. So first of all, it's an honor to be here next to the person who introduced me to Ziga Vertov. Sarah Walzen up there, who introduced me to my favorite robot artist who was actually from MRT. My name's Kasper, as said, and I work at ITFA. How many of you know ITFA? So it is an international documentary film festival, after all. It was founded 29 years ago by Ali Derks. And in 2007, I started a program there called ITFA DOCLAB sort of to explore documentary storytelling in the age of the interface. And when we started, this was, I guess, some of the buzzwords that were around at that time. Web documentary, a lot of transmedia words that some of us really would like to forget at this point. And we'll probably have the same with some of the words that we're talking about today around VR, maybe in the future. In the end, what we decided back then to focus on, because we couldn't find a word that actually made sense. So we decided to focus on four main ingredients. First of all, story, interface, digital data and technology. And as we are a documentary festival, captured reality in whatever form possible. The only thing we didn't focus on was linear filmmaking, basically. To give you a little hands-on of what type of projects that we look for at the festival, I think she's here somewhere, Cat Sizzak, one of the, I would say, Godmothers of Interactive Documentary. The High Rise Project, so Interactive Documentaries, Web Series, but also Data Art, Like We Feel Fine, made by Seb Camber from MIT, together with Jonathan Harris. Multimedia Journalism, Digital Performance Art, which I think is not a term used a lot, but I think if we look at early works of people like Zay Frank and Miranda July, that's basically what it is. And I think in 2011 or 10, we had our first VR project. I'll talk a little bit about this one tomorrow at the conference. But I just wanna show you one clip of a project by Alexander Reuben, project that we commissioned in, I think, 2012 or 13. As an example of, I would say, sort of some of the other less web-based projects, but projects that involve robots, AI, biometric technology, et cetera. I'm going to ask you some questions. Who do you love the most in the world? My mom. I love my mom. My wife. What will people remember you for? I live with crazy, freaky, generous, small. Tell me something that you've never told a stranger before. We'll go on to what do we do with these projects? So we look for them, we curate them, we select them and occasionally commission them. But then we're basically still a festival. So every 10 days, for 10 days every November, we have a competition program in the main festival, where we actually now have two awards, a digital storytelling one, and an immersive non-fiction award, hey, VR. We organize a 10 day exhibition with installations. This is a machine to be another, from Be Another Lab. We organize live cinema events, which back in 2008 started as sort of director's navigations, where a director would navigate through an interactive program, creating sort of a live, linear version. Nowadays, wow, that's bad resolution, sorry. Now we're exploring much more sort of theatrical and new types of live cinema events, ranging from collective VR screenings to, this was our opening night event, and actually some of the people that you see here huddled together are somewhere here in the room. Bonus points if you spot them. 10 points. Other than that, we have an annual conference day, we have markets where new projects get funding, we have a talent program running throughout the festival, and online we have our website, where I think there's around 200 projects that you can look back to today, and projects, for instance, one of the things I'm most proud of that we ever did was a collaboration with MIT called Moments of Innovation. It's slightly dated up until 2012, I think, but it's totally worth it to go through it. And I just want to end it with a few final words as we're about to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. I think when we started the program, there was a lot of skepticism around whether the internet was actually a medium that could be suitable for art or not. And I think 10 years later, we got to the point where I love Zaynep's view on the internet. Yes, it's good and bad, and I think basically this goes for VR as well, right? So where we are now, interactive documentary is growing up. Some people know that I always use cats in life. But I would say starting from 10 years ago where there was a few people here and there around the world doing interactive documentary and stuff that was so hard to define, I think amongst other things to MIT OpenDoc Lab and some of the other organizations that were bringing people together, we now have a small ecosystem. Yet at the same time, I think as the web has grown up, we're also starting to realize that the world that we inhabit has become digitized to an extent that maybe isn't always great. And we're sort of having this sort of next wave of technological breakthroughs with VR sort of being, I think, the gateway drug to a lot of other things. And I want to close with a quote by Jonathan Harris, one of my favorite artists in this space. Who said a couple of years ago, we speak a new and powerful language capable of saying things no other language can say but few have realized this and even fewer have found what to say. I think that's the case for interactive documentary, but for VR, we're not even towards a full language yet. And that's why we're launching something new this year which is called the Immersive Nonfiction Network, which is a program where we want to develop pilot projects, want to do audience research and organize events and bring different people together. So if you have a great idea for a weird VR project to let me know, these are the deadlines and my contact link. Thank you very much. So my name is William Iaricchio. I'm a professor here in Comparative Media Studies and principal investigator of the OpenDoc Lab that's sponsoring this event. And to sort of segue into our first question, I'll pick up from Jonathan Harris, the Jonathan Harris quote you gave about the potentials for a new language. And I want to start with a sort of confusing moment in an old language. Those of you who have seen 360 video, especially attempts to tell stories with 360 video may recognize Buster Keaton's dilemma here. You're immersed in a world. It's convincing, at least as convincing as the VR can make it. And all of a sudden, you're somewhere else, like it or not. You're busy exploring something in this corner of this side of the VR experience and the director has decided it's time for you to go to the next scene. And this strikes me as such an apt expression of that dilemma. What language, what language should we be using? I think our default mode has often been to look back on the traditions we know from, you know, well developed over the last hundred years with cinema and television in terms of how we do visual storytelling. But I think certainly in 360 VR, but also to some extent beyond that, we're kind of fumbling our way through that old vocabulary into a new one. So I guess with that, it would be maybe a good question to start with is what kind of new vocabularies? What kind of new techniques? Are we at an impasse with what we're using or should we be looking for new kinds of ways of telling nonfiction stories? I mean, Nona, you've done it quite well with what you're doing. Your soundtracks tend to really hold things together. And the visuals make sense accordingly, but what's your sense of this? What do we need to be thinking about in terms of structure for story in this space? Any of you? Well, there's a technological issue of nausea, right? That's a, no, that's a serious issue in this space, right? It's unique to this medium. And we have to address that as part of the construction of our pieces. So I know that Ben Solomon, who made that really nice piece that's displaced, was saying that there's one shot where people are on a boat moving or they're on a back of a truck moving. He said, you know, 70% of the people tell me it's their favorite shot and another 30% say made them so nauseous they had ripped the goggles off. So that issue of knowing that where your eyes feel like you're moving, but your body is not moving, that disconnect can be really problematic for a part of the audience. And I don't know how we're gonna solve that. I mean, I tend to lock the camera off. I tend to be very conservative. I tend to be not one, I let people move with their bodies. That's one of the reasons why I like the body and body stuff, because then the body and the camera are, which is your eyes, are connected. I do that in a maybe conservative way, because some people will say moving the camera is fine. That is something which I think we're gonna find out. I mean, I've heard some very weird possibilities that actually there's like an inner ear, I don't know what exactly they're doing, but they're like putting, pressing like pushing like air into the inner ear so that it creates a pressure system to make you feel like you're moving when the camera's moving. But like that's a technological solution. And I think that we as artists should be coming up with some storytelling solutions first. Is how do you do, especially investigative journalism in this space, how do you actually transmit real information we would call journalism in this space that actually you can actually absorb without reverting to a ton of voiceover, which we will use some of, but ultimately I feel like we're in the beta phase for what we're gonna do for journalistic VR in our case. And I think 8i and some of the experiences that I've had since actually could transport us in a way that is frameless, that will help us rethink then how we can tell stories. So I feel like the work that we're doing is almost, I'm speaking just on front lines behalf because we've now done four or five big projects. I think we're getting closer and closer to understanding how you can get information in. And I think the other thing, and I've seen it in some of the work that you guys have done is, how do you take then 2D images? So a lot of the world that we live in is telling stories that have existed already. So if you're telling a story about Storm Sandy, for example, because we're doing a VR experience about living through a storm, then how do you take these archival images that are still in 2D, that are so captured in 2D that are real, that you wanna give a real sense of the actual incident itself? How do you combine 2D in a 3D environment or do we have to, right? So when you're telling a story that actually happened and it's not captured in 360 or in VR, what do you do as a storyteller? These are the biggest challenges we have as documentarians in a space where we wanna tell real stories or we wanna transmit deep information and frankly, at frontline, we're used to it. So we just had a conversation today about the meaning of this work being more than just a really cool environment, at least for frontline, right? So how do you, it's not to be experimental visually for us as much as it is, how do we take you inside a story in a deeper way so you feel like you're there more and then you're impacted more challenging. Yeah, let's pick up on that as well, actually. In terms of the challenges, I think one of the things that we've been learning as we've been working with, especially with big broadcasters is that a lot of the conversation is quite understandably coming from a very familiar language of television and film and I think the way that we work is sort of, I mean, we also come from that tradition but we all are trying to kind of bridge the gap to understand more about game design and kind of starting from a perspective of, okay, my story exists in the body of the user and what are they doing in this story that actually tells the narrative and I'm conveying that to a TV commissioner is like, it's been, it's an interesting conversation. They automatically, the question is always, what does it look like and we go, but no, we want people to do this and they're like, yeah, but when they do that, what does it look like? So I think those kinds of conversations are really, they are a real challenge and it's everyone kind of figuring it all out together, I suppose, yeah. Can I just push the inter-institutional thing a bit? I mean, especially for organizations that are large legacy organizations have not done much VR or interested in it because it's cool or because it's hot or because they need to do it because everyone else is doing it. That's sort of maybe a top-down incentive. Bottom up, you've got makers who have a project that can really benefit from this that needs VR in a way that a flat, a 2D or maybe a linear is not gonna do the trick. Those two pressure points sometimes don't align. In fact, I'm willing to bet they often don't align in some organizations. Any better ways to make those reconcile or? Frontline, we always ask, should this story be in VR actually? So we're not just doing VR for VR's sake. Like we're actually doing it because we think it could tell a better story. We're working with Nani because we can see that she'll take us to the next level when it comes to storytelling. So because we have Frontline already, we're doing linear film, they do really well even digitally. These films do great. So it's being disciplined actually about making sure when we're making a decision that it's a righteous, creative and journalistic decision. So it takes discipline and I am a commissioner, right? So it does take discipline for somebody like me to say, no, no, no, we're not gonna just do the cool thing that I know is gonna get a million people to see it. It's just like, what does it mean? Should it be VR even? I don't think every story is meant to be told in this space, frankly. I think it's really encouraging though to see organizations like that. I mean, like you guys and like the BBC that we work with are willing to take a kind of a gamble in a way, especially at this stage when no one really knows how it's gonna go. No one really knows how to distribute it. The work that we make for Oculus Rift, I mean, how many people have their hands on a CV1 right now? But the thing that's pretty ticking whatever time bomb or whatever that I think is gonna be super, super interesting is when the Morpheus hits in October. Because if you've got 40 million plus users who've got a PlayStation and they can plug in their Oculus Rift for 300 bucks, now we're, sorry, Oculus Rift, sorry, I'm sorry. Morpheus, the Sony Morpheus for $300. So you've got an audience worldwide of 40 million in which a 300 million, sorry, $300, God, I'm tired. I'm sorry, I keep my story on. A $300 headset can get plugged into the PlayStation VR. Well, that's a major, major distribution pipeline. So what then for story? And Sony's a little, you know, and Valve has Steam and Steam is pretty good about letting you upload and Oculus has the share, Oculus share which lets you upload stuff and Sony is making a sign or rather, they even said, let's have your lawyer on the first phone call because the becoming a developer for Sony is such a hugely layered, onerous thing. So they need the content. I don't really know what's gonna happen but I can tell you for somebody like me who's saying, wow, I'm gonna have access to that kind of distribution for the, you know, maybe even bigger than some of the broadcasters I've worked with, right? That's pretty massive. But this is really, I mean, this is history repeating itself for the umpteenth time, the beginning of every medium has all these format dilemmas, every company is trying to hold on to its proprietary format and therefore its distribution, you know, they construct their own distribution bottlenecks and I wonder, I mean, on the one hand, so we're dazzle the festivals with all this great stuff and then you go out and you buy something and it doesn't actually work with the things you thought were really cool or you're really limited. Is there gonna be wisdom this time round on the parts of the corporations or is this gonna be driven by a user revolt? No, I think young people are gonna drive this, frankly. Like I was thinking, you know, during the year I was an open doc lab fellow, my child, my boy was seven and a half or eight and you remember the kind of profound conversations I was having with my children about their expectation for media. So certainly their expectation is that it's an immersive environment, first and foremost they can touch it and feel it and they can really be in their environment. So I do think that this is gonna happen to us, frankly, that people who are experienced PlayStation who are gamers are ready, they're gonna be driving the expectation for the work that we do to some degree and I think the fact, and you should weigh in on this too, that Facebook and YouTube and Google are making such a play for the space even in a 360 sense right now with native players that we're publishing in and I think Carla Borras is here today, she runs VR for us with me and we're really looking at these new environments to publish natively and because that's where we reach them, the most number of people. So I don't know if it's gonna repeat itself, I just think that there's a huge opportunity here. I think it's repeating itself. I mean, it's which part of history is it repeating but I think the difference if I look 10 years ago when sort of this happened around web and digital art, I think there was the same thing, broadcasters need to like deal with this thing called the internet and get to the young people and I think the great thing was that the internet was an open platform even though there was proprietary stuff like Flash but there was the internet and it was a place where everybody basically could cheaply play around and distribute to everybody. The great thing now is that there's actually companies needing to sell devices. So there's money, there's a hype, there's like big, big money going into this. That's why that's the good news. The bad news is there is no web VR or some people are working on it but it's not there yet. Sorry, Brian. I think we really need it, Brian. No, I think it's, right now it's really sort of, I mean, it's the good and the bad of it, right? We, some in the world keep trying to bottle the genie, stuff it back in and yeah, it's a very good point. Race is another, I mean it's a potentially really good point but it's about ethics in this that there are a whole lot of ethical issues. The one that gets talked about a lot is the affect. I mean, this is an affective medium or at least is alleged to be. One could argue that literature and film are also quite affective but there are, and we'll talk about this tomorrow with some neuroscientists that this is processed in a slightly different way and may have different implications on that score. We know that eye tracking is the next big thing and those eye tracks are gonna be doing more than helping us navigate and mitigating nausea. What happens to that data? I mean, Facebook's interest in this is not just about trying to capture new market for entertainment. Thoughts on the ethical stance of things? Is this a place where we need, how can we foster more attention to this or more debate or a sharper sense of what's happening? I think that's a key part of the grant that the Knight Foundation gave jointly to Emblematica Frontline was to try to come up with some ethical best practices through this exploration of making content to try to at least raise the questions and make sure that they're front and center that we're trying to wrangle with these and dig deeper into what these issues are. I faced a lot of these particularly when I started out because I was recreating scenes, right? So I mean, I literally had colleagues pointing their fingers at me going, you can't do this, this will never work, this isn't journalism, that's a game platform games aren't journalism, I mean it was really, I took a lot of criticism when I began the process and I still get a question a lot about whether I'm ethically trying to address the issues but I think the best we can do is make sure that we raise the questions and indicate that when we're making this work at this point that we aren't ignoring the kind of principles that we have utilized previously in print and broadcast and documentary that have informed our approach to work and our sensitivities to the individuals whose stories we're trying to portray. Which I think is cool because it's also a maker grant so we're making three big projects and we're just actually for the first time started really making the first project this week and I think out of that we're gonna be asking these really tough questions of each other and of course we come much more from the traditional but so does Nani so I think it's gonna raise a lot of these questions. Then we have to publish some stuff that you'll hopefully help us edit. Speaking of questions, I mean this, we're talking about a fairly interactive medium. The floor is open for questions so if you have any come forward. And meanwhile another question on my part is simply, and this certainly happens a lot in the exhibition space, the festival space of Europe and how do we, you know it's a very individual medium closer off from the world in our little box. I guess you could argue that reading was the same way. And yet the cinematic or the visual part of it and maybe even the affective part kind of encourages us to want to be with other people. They're usually around us. The noise is coming through the headsets in most festival settings. And I know that the latest iteration of the enemy that will be shown here actually has, I think you can see other, I haven't seen it but I think other figures are in it. Oh, okay, you have to be serious. If you have a teenage kid and particularly a boy, I mean, if you don't think you're aren't hearing their friends coming out of their bedroom from their TF2 play that they're not screaming at each other and you can't hear the other kids coming through into your house. I mean, the story I always tell is that my son was in the living room with his laptop open on his lap and my daughter was in my garage, my garage office, my daughter walked into the living room, my son looked up from the laptop and went, why'd you leave? But she just walked in the room and what he meant was why'd you leave the Minecraft silver we were playing on together, right? I mean, shared experiences may not be necessarily sitting next to each other with the stuff on, shared experiences, the places that we go together and virtual spaces. Will classrooms come together to, I mean, when I did virtual, the virtual gone time away prison in Second Life, that was a very interesting for me moment where I would show up at our virtual build and there'd be classrooms from Canada coming to expect the virtual Gitmo because they couldn't actually look at the real one, right? So, and there'd be people I didn't know and it would be coming in all the time. So that kind of experience, I think it's gonna end up being more common. But as we start to be able to scan our world like you guys are in the field is amazing. As we're able to bring people in and do this very interesting volumetric capture, the embodied, you know, right now when you jump with the movies it's gonna be a different kind of jumping and you'll be jumping with your friends that just maybe not sitting next to each other. I would agree. I think that's definitely where we're going but I would actually question whether you know, you say that when you're in a festival environment you actually do want to kind of be in the headset and share your experience. I mean, personally, I don't, you know? Like I actually think we shouldn't be scared of the fact that it is an individual thing and sometimes that's, it's a blessed relief, you know? You get in there and you're like, oh, you know? Like I don't have to, I think it says something to the way that we are kind of trained to communicate these days that everything is collective, right? And we kind of expect that to be the way that things should be. But I mean, just speaking personally, I think that there is some element of me that goes, oh, I actually don't have to do that while I'm here. So I think we should embrace that. It's interesting how we talk about the definition of what VR is even though it's not defined yet. And I think let's embrace the fact that it's still undefined in that sense because what you're describing is some of my favorite VR experiences. What you're describing is some of the little VR multi-user things that I've seen so far that really excite me. They're both, I don't know if it's VR, I don't care. It's both immersive art or immersive experiences. Solitary and non-solitary. You can have interactive theater and non-interactive theater. You can eat it too. Testing, okay. Hi, thank you all. This is a great panel. My name is Dan Roy. I'm a CMS alum. Hi, William. I love actually your last comment about the VR is undefined because I agree. In five years we won't have a conference on VR. We'll have a conference on all of the subsets and the experience of Google Cardboard versus the Vive is so completely different opposite ends of the spectrum. One is seated and you have to hold your hands to your face. The other, you're moving around the room. Some of you talked about inclusivity. There's a tension between the reach of the Google Cardboard or PlayStation 4 versus some of these experiences that may be more immersive or may track more aspects of your body in the space, but may be enable us to do more with that medium. How do you balance the tension between exploring the potential of the medium that you're interested in with the mandate of the organization you come from to reach whatever your target audience is? Thank you. I think it's, if we ask that question to a medium like Print, we would say there's really expensive pop-up books being made or there's really expensive coffee table books that you really devote your entire attention to and there's newspapers and there's comics and there's short stories and there's poetry. Like, I think VR can be all those things. If you're making something for the Vive, it's like making experience for, first of all, the Vive asks of people to devote a room to a thing. It's like buying an entire physical pool table and putting it in your house. The experience must be really, really special to live up to that. For the Cardboard, I think we're totally looking more at social experiences. We're totally looking at quick experiences or it's a much more versatile medium just like a newspaper is much more versatile. But it does yield two radically different VR experiences. One is good for 360 video and one has incredible different set of affordances. So, if one thinks that 360... The Vive is like having a TV in your home. It doesn't really require too much more space. You can just have a, your TV room right now is very easily convertible to a vibe space. You don't not need a huge amount of room to walk around. So, just to say. Maybe my house is too small. Your house is big enough. You just have to kick the baby's crib. You know, I'll have to be out into the hallway for a little bit. Sorry. I was just going to say, I mean, for frontline and public television, I think that one of the most important things is that we do survive. So, one of the parts of surviving is being brave and looking at new story form. I really do believe and that's not just VR. That's also a cross-interactive storytelling and also just natively publishing on other platforms. And I think that's part of our mandate is to continue to try to do really high quality work. As it pertains to VR, I was really excited by the fact that we can look at how this can be more widely available even if the experience isn't as amazing as Vive and some of the really incredible VR experiences I've had. But just to give people a cinematic 360 experience is an entering way into understanding this space that I think is important. And then people have more access to it. So at Frontline, because we are public television and we're public media, we have to make this available so people can access it. So it's available to the public. And I know the barrier is going to become much, much, much less expensive even still for the more immersive experience. So we're doing both and all, frankly. Yeah, I think from an indie producer's point of view, again, we're in the same position. We kind of pitch in at the highest quality we want. And then we're often having to do things like version of the work for a broader distribution platform. Thanks for a great panel. Phil Guerra, I recently graduated from MIT Sloan. At this weird moment at the Tribeca Film Festival's VR exhibit, where it basically was handed a menu of VR items to look from. And they were all stories of human suffering in some way. And I kind of felt weird, just like being like, OK, I'm going to pick this one out of famine. So I'm wondering what you guys make of this kind of trend that seems to have captured early VR, of this focus on human suffering and despair. And yeah, I wonder what you make of it. And I wonder why that's become so popular, and if that same kind of power for suffering can be used in other ways. I think a lot of people gravitated to the concept that virtual reality does offer a connection that creates empathy in the audience. And I think there's been certainly a perception that the audience has become disconnected, has become their sense of adult to important stories around the world that for some reason they've been overloaded with images, and therefore they stopped caring about their world. So I think that people who do care and do care really gravitated to the fact that maybe they could create an empathy in their audience that could help bring focus. And as I always say, with younger audiences, particularly to make sure they are informed global citizens about their world. So it's not as if the news organizations don't always approach these issues. And perhaps they seem to focus because there's only, you can't find the comic section in VR very yet. And right now it's mostly focused on the stories that would be more of the front page stories in a way. Yet I think that the approaches, it does seem like are we going to see another refugee story, right? We're getting that overload, which we're talking about before. And yet when you go in and you have to put the goggles on and you experience those stories, it's really not just another story. It is as important as the last one. So I think that's the balance. How do you make sure that we have a comic section, but make sure we continue to be able to make the really important stories that touch people? Maybe to add to that, I think at this point we don't really distinguish between journalism and documentary and art. And I think if I look at film, that very same comment can be made of the documentary film world. And I've always found that slightly awkward working for a film festival where everybody would like to line up to see that amazing film about other people suffering and then have beers afterwards and go dancing. I think there is a deeply strange thing happening there. And it deals with physical or like it's strange that we need media to have stories from other people suffering. And we're completely disconnected from that. And there's this sort of catch 22 where it gives us access to that and makes us feel something. And at the same time, we're just observers. And I think in VR, the same thing, we're just observers and sometimes even worse. Because when the medium becomes interactive, it's actually asking me to do something and to partake in that story somehow. And I think when it's done right, it can be incredibly visceral. The enemy for me made me feel what it is to be a tall white dude standing in front of a tiny little Palestinian guy who's going through immeasurable suffering that I can never even understand. And I actually felt how distant I was from him in a way that a film would never do, a film I would blame the filmmaker for not making the right film. Here, I was like, actually, I'm standing there and I'm actually not caring so much. Why am I walking around this space instead of listening to it? I think the other thing is what I really hope and what I've always been doing with DOKLAB is look for interactive stories where the thing that the user brings makes the story. And I think looking at suffering is not a great thing to bring. But diving deep into yourself or exploring how mundanely and intensely boring your life is can be an incredibly dramatic experience if, in an interactive case, you do that right. That question that the robot asks you, all sorts of questions, that's really everyday life stuff, but really intense. And I would love to see more of that in the audience. And yet, Rene, I would suggest to you, I mean investigative storytelling is crucial. It's crucial. Totally, totally. But that's why I'm saying there's a part journalism and there's a part like documentary and art and just like we have poetic documentaries that show us the beauty of a landscape. But the part of the work. Right. I was going to say, actually, because this question, the very same question came up at another conference a couple of days ago where somebody said, are we at risk for stereotyping even in this environment? They took it to another level. And I said, well, for Frontline, we have this saying we're the trouble with. So it's sort of what we do, right? We actually unpack investigative stories. So our hope is we're not just bringing you human suffering, but we're actually investigating it. So at the end, you don't feel as hopeless. That's the whole point to Frontline, right? And that I just, we haven't cracked it yet in VR, right? It's more immersive than our films are. But I just have to believe that we're going to be able to crack this code so you don't feel as hopeless and sort of depressed after. Or like you said, maybe you even feel distant from it and like you don't care and you don't know why you don't care. So I think it's a great question. I mean, I think there's an underlying, one of the great things with VR done well is that there's a tension between that feeling of being there, where you, as you just said, you're there, you're empathetic in ways that you probably could distance yourself from with other media that you're more familiar with. And at the same time, you're watching, you're a voyeur, there's nothing you can do. And to find a way to sort of exploit that tension, to direct that tension into action would be really remarkable. That's what the enemy does in a way. And yeah, the enemy I have to say of, yeah. Don't miss it. If you haven't signed up, don't miss it. It really is. I haven't seen this version, but yeah. And I think that question as a storyteller, always is an issue because you get to walk away at the end of the day. And that is something which if you're sensitive to that issue, it carries through your work from beginning to end. Hi there. So I'm Amy Sterling. I'm the director of IYR. It's a brain mapping game, crowdsource neuroscience. I'm a huge fan of VR. And to kind of springboard off that last question, I think virtual reality has this huge tremendous potential for wonder and awe, right? Like you can see things that you could never otherwise experience. And as someone who works in science and technology, I'm always looking for more VR experiences that say tell the history of invention or the evolution of neuroscientific discoveries. You could be in Isaac Newton's lab. And so I would just love to hear you guys' thoughts on kind of the future of telling stories of discovery and maybe even data visualization or that realm of VR. Just got asked by a friend who's a quantum physicist to help visualize a 12-dimension project that they're working on. I'm like, please, let me get a crack at that. How amazing fun will that be? So I agree. I think it's really, really interesting because they kind of talk about their lab and know this sort of non-normal way. And I can barely wrap my head. I don't think I can wrap my head around it. I don't think that would be a lie if I can say barely. But the idea of getting to think about VR as a place that we can start to visualize things that are otherwise unimaginable, literally, to most of the world is really exciting. I think you're absolutely right. Microscopically, we're working with a scientist who turned artist in Switzerland who does microscopic, microelectron imagery of mites. And he makes these incredibly beautiful images of the world of the mites. And I keep laughing. My poor team keeps saying, what do you mean you want to make a love story about mites? But that's it, right? We can do things like that, that understand, live in their world in a way that is so beautiful and different and, again, unimaginable. And I think that's one of the really exciting parts of VR. One of the people on our team, Carla, is always saying, like, if she was a kid today learning, it would be if people could put their minds to how we could teach with this form, which I know you have someone speaking about tomorrow, which I think is one of the most amazing tools. And the other work that's really impressive is work that's being done at POV. And they do a lot of interactive storytelling, but some of their most dramatic work has been in data visualization, which they've been starting to think about VR. And I just think some of the data visualizations they've done have so much potential in that free space as well, which is cool. There's a project in the exhibition tomorrow called LOVR by Aaron Bradbury, which isn't technically scientific. It's inspired on neuro-scientific data on what happens when you fall in love. So it's basically you go, it's a data-vis project where you go through, fly through a timeline of a slow down the moment when somebody falls in love at first sight. And you should check it out. Thank you. So thank you very much. My name's Andre. I study synesthesia as an inclusive practice. And in the context of what we were just talking about in the context of learned helplessness and this acquired apathy, that if we're not very careful whether it can be generated through VR, and I think it's this gap that we have where VR is more immersive than it is interactive. And in the context of this, I'm wondering how, except from the technology of interaction, how do we profile the processes of imagination in the VR space? That's really deep. I can tell you what I think. Have many of you done toprush? Have any painted here with toprush? Do you not feel like that's the process of imagination right there? That's the virtual reality painting program, right? One of the first ones where you painted 3D in colors and you can throw snowflakes up and they fall on you. So I've had a lot of people demo that piece. And it kind of has astonished me the way that people engage with that piece. I have to take the headset off. And I've had accountants come in and go, well, I'm really not creative. And then they can't believe what they can make. And it seems to me it gets to this basic thing. I don't know. I've decided this is in my very anecdotal observation that humans need to make. And it's no more more evident than in this virtual reality program that is so wildly different. And I see people just don't want to stop making. So there is something there. I wouldn't want to go much further than that. It's purely an anecdotal observation. But it's an anecdotal observation of hundreds and hundreds of people now. So if you can, go ahead and do toprush. And you can start doing your own investigation. I think it's a great tool for that. Agreed? I'll just add to that. I think that your point about virtual reality being more immersive than interactive is probably true at the moment. But it doesn't have to be like that. And I think that is our job as artists and storytellers to try, if we want to push it in that direction, we need to start from a place of interactivity from starting from that. OK, how do I tell my story through operation, rather than how do I put it in front of your eyes so you can look around in it? And I think once we start to think in that way, we will be starting to get to that place where we're producing more engaging stories that have doing as part of their very kind of bones, their DNA. Thank you very much. My name is Bester Graham. I'm a filmmaker. And I'm taken by how often we're referring to this as an immersive medium. And yet the examples that we're giving are essentially visual examples in terms of the immersion, knowing that actually audio is so much a part of immersion. So I'm curious about how you're thinking about audio, sound, the whole challenges that we're faced with, that VR will be actually changing in terms of the space that we go into with it. And a very early piece that we did at the lab of Mel Slater in Barcelona was one of the earliest virtuality researchers, who I did my first big wide five of those $50,000 goggles is where I worked. And we did a piece where I put you in a body of a detainee in a stress position. Where first you saw this character in a stress position, and then you had a virtual mirror, and it mirrored every one of your movements. I was trying to look at what does it really mean, all these freedom of information active force that a detainee had put in a stress position for hours on end. What was that really like? What did that really mean beyond the words on a paper? But anyway, we did an interrogate. We used the interrogation log of Alcatani, who the Bush administration said was torture. So there's no doubt what had happened to the guy. And we used an actor to read the interrogation logs. And it was meant to come through another room. And they played it. I was not yet, I was still in LA, and I was flying to Barcelona, and they were testing it on people. And they played it right next to people. And I had done the audio recording with the idea was going to come through another room. So the audio was muffled and weird and wrong. And people were not having a very good connection to this case, right? Once we moved it back to the wall, then everybody we had this experience, they were sitting upright in a chair with their arms behind their back like this. And we'd asked them, what was your body like afterwards? Well, when the audio was right, they all reported being hunched over in a stress position. They took on the body of this guy in the mirror. But without the audio working, they had none of that connection. So that was like immediately when the first things I learned was that audio was the most crucial part of the exam. You were just today at Frontline talking about our project. How do we solve the audio problem for something that we're filming? And the interesting thing from where I said is a lot of our filmmakers have been stripping back their sound. People as production budgets have been shrinking. So we're yet again saying sound matters so much. And you know this, Vesta, the production dollars have gone down for filmmaking. So then introducing again the fact of meeting surround sound, really, right? Well, we know too that even if the picture's bad, we'll watch it if the sound is good. It's really huge. This is a lesson from interactive documentary as well, that some of the best interactive documentaries actually started with the sound. And then all the interactive, visual, everything else came after. I think you're showing notes on blindness here, aren't you? One of my favorite pieces that's been made recently. It's called notes on blindness. So if you can see that here, it's basically a journey into, it's literally somebody's recording his own journey becoming blind. And then they've done visuals on top. But in this way that the sound is so his voice and his experience, it's just extraordinary. It's funny, too. I mean, a year ago they showed me that that project wasn't started as a VR piece, which I still love. Just goes to show how early days they said. Like a year ago, they had the demo of the iPad version. And then they were like, should we do this for VR? And now it's like one of the classics already, like an instant classic. Just brilliant, wonderful, making peace. Hi, my name is Jacob Lohenstein. I'm a grad student at the Sloan School. And I run our student VR community here, NMIT. Media historically, you hear of times when the vanguard of a new medium will talk about how in the previous medium, or the one before that, there was some experience, some story where he or she wanted to feel it more, or perhaps that the narrative ran up against the boundaries of expression of that medium. I could read Richard III, but I couldn't hear Richard III. And I'm curious, as artists yourselves, if there are experiences from older media that you look to that sort of have inspired you in VR because they run up against the limitations of the medium through which they were expressed, or even relatedly, if there are ones you look to learn from, for example, do you look to gaming to learn from how previous artists have handled interactivity in elements such as that? Yeah, I mean, to answer that, half of my staff are from the games world. We work with game developers, game artists, and we're learning as much from them as anything else. I think that, you know, from our company's perspective, we do take a lot of inspiration from lots and lots of different places. I know, I mean, Oscar's an artist of our training, so we talk a lot about painting, about sculpture, when we're doing our concept designs for our pieces, or we've got our entire staff who are from the games world. And, you know, we've kind of named our company after Ziga Vertov, so we kind of thought, we're not adverse to experimentation in thought and form, I suppose. I think for the first time, Frontline's looking at interactive storytelling, mostly in the gaming space. I mean, and even with our first couple of projects, we were actually so just nascent stages that we would have to go around the room and understand the makers from secret location in this situation. What do you do? Who are you? What do you make? And then they would show us their native computer language, and then we would learn from that. So we've had to really look at other story forms to understand how to start to tell stories in this way. And then of course, good stories are good stories, right? And that's not anything new. Desperately, you know, always need to be absorbing good stories to think about how to construct good stories. So, and certainly all the visual stuff, I mean, there's of course lighting in games, there's lighting in films, how to do lighting in VR. That's in itself a real challenge when people are moving around in real time way. So trying to think about how did big, say what I like to look a lot at, I actually have these really beautiful, old stage design books. And from like all the way 50s through the 80s, and there's some beautiful stuff, because now, yes, the stage used to be there, and yes, now you're in the middle of the stage, but the way that some of the approach was for that kind of space that you're in, I find it really inspiring. I think there's some, I think one of the things like how new media affect old media, like how look at a photography affected painting, like painting became a more exclusive, much more like abstract art came as a result of painting maybe, or abstract painting. I think it's really interesting to look at like what was really niche back when old media were mainstream, like what was really happening on the fringe of opera at the time when opera was the main thing, like what was happening in like experimental cinema at the time when cinema was the main thing. I mean, it still is, I don't know, but I think that's really interesting. Like I look a lot at performance art, at like audio tour art, like really sort of art forms that use very basic tools that we all have today, but that never reached the sort of mainstream level and now through VR and the hype of VR. It's actually really interesting to see how, I don't know, some of those earlier masterpieces happen. Hi, I'm Margot Farris. I'm a graduate student with MIT and I'm also a science correspondent with Storybench, which is an under the hood look at digital storytelling and sort of the innovative things that are coming out of that right now. And some things we like to ask are advice for incoming journalism students. So my question for you is, do you have any advice for students wanting to get into VR or the sort of immersive storytelling, whether they're in journalism or they're in game design or they're in programming? I guess I had this great experience with NYU's journalism and film school where we ended up working with this team who did this great work out of Chernobyl. And actually, I think the best advice I could give is learn the technology, learn how to use the cameras, learn how to actually edit and understand it enough because for someone like me to work with students, is it completely exciting if you're bringing to us skills that are not natively cooked into front lines producing core at this point, right? So if you come through the door really with some skills that we don't have, you will be welcome, trust me. I would give some very specific answers to that question which is, I've got audio, which is that they should learn a stitching software. They want to do 360 video cinematic VR. They want to learn some crucial, they want to do stitching, some editing and premiere. There's things like auto panel that can help. The Foundry is about to release a tool that auto stitches. So these are some very specific, oh my gosh, and my brain is falling on the audio tool, I can't believe it, oh well. So it's pretty easy to find 360 video. So those are the four key things you really need to know for 360 video, it's gonna be your stitching, your premiere editing, your audio tool and then how do you bring that into a game engine? And you have some compositing which also Foundry makes another tool called Nuke. And what the compositing does is when you've got two cameras shooting and there's some sort of overlap maybe or an underlap and you've got to do something about fixing that, you use a tool called Nuke to kind of manipulate the digital information to kind of basically put a band-aid on the, in a very pretty way on the problem where the shooting is. When you go into kinematic VR, the tool sets a little bit different and can be more complex. Then you get into tools like Maya, motion builder, certainly all these game engine helps, Unity, Unreal, sorry, I like to give this list for people so it's not so mysterious. Unity and Unreal are the two game engines that you use. And I mean, honestly, if you can get a little Maya and a little Unreal under your belt, you can go really far with kinematic VR. And then some of the scanning stuff, what do you guys use? What do you, you tell your tools? iPad and a structure sensor and there you can buy those for $600. Yeah, they're very affordable. So my advice would be just do it. It's kind of a free-for-all at the moment. Lots of people can make the barriers to entry a low and if you get out there and make something, you're an expert. Yeah, it's interesting because, can you hear me okay? Oh, there we go. No, it's interesting because it's a very collaborative field and you mentioned you've worked with people in other disciplines. But so it's interesting with students coming into this for the first time where they can learn like the software you're mentioning. But then also how some of these headsets cost hundreds of dollars like getting access to that as well. So do you have any thoughts on that? Can I add one more thing about doing that with the tools? Yeah, sure. I always tell people the first and the place to start is just to close your eyes and feel your body in the space before you make the story. And that's more like what VR's like, your body's in the space, so what does it feel like? And I think that's a really, before you begin writing your story or thinking about your story, what does it mean to be in the middle of it? Sorry, please finish your question. How do you get access to the tools? I know that's, a lot of the software is great. I mean, Unity totally helped create this whole VR way because I used a free game engine software for a long time and I am so grateful to my YouTube C-sharp teachers. So I learned my coding mostly on YouTube from YouTube. So that part's a pretty easy thing. It's true, getting the headsets is a little bit harder, but here's the interesting thing that you'd be surprised, like a lot of the headset manufacturers made some first versions and they made a lot of those first versions and they're not as good as the latest versions and there's gonna be a lot of people getting rid of the older headsets, I guarantee you. And that's gonna be a lot cheaper for people to have access to them. So I bet they can start looking at a marketplace at that. I was actually surprised at the NYU students and how low their budget was. We can share with you like a short list of the equipment that they had because they were able to construct something pretty affordably and they talk the faculty into buying it. So get some people on your side in positions of power to buy stuff. And it's usually, I mean, they really gave us a lower budget for what they bought as the entry point and that's just to start experimenting. Thanks. Hi, my name is Gabriella Arp and I'm actually kind of like on the next stage of her question. I'm graduating from UNC Chapel Hill and for my thesis project, I did a cinematic virtual reality film that I'm finishing in post-production now. And yeah, and so I had access to the camera through the school and I had access to grants that let me travel to the location of the filming. And so now I'm kind of entering post-graduation life which is obviously scary. And I guess my question is, beforehand I was a freelance filmmaker. If you see this industry as becoming something like, for Katie, you started your own production company but how freelancers fit into that scene? I think there's a big place for freelancers at the moment. Again, coming back to the space that everyone's kind of interested in this, few people are experimenting, I mean, more and more but you're gonna be in a very good position if you've already made something to go out there and get hired as a freelance 360 videographer, I would say. We use, in my workflow, we're not in 360 video but we use a lot of freelancers from the game industry. So I would say that our structure is very similar to any other small media company. We kind of expand and contract as projects kind of come about. Yeah. Yeah, I think in our world, the world of mostly linear documentary as we're trying to expand in VR, you would be, well, you probably wouldn't be surprised if we get thousands of pitches for linear films for our series but we get very few really solid people coming through the door. Like, she was just saying, you know, that really know what they're doing and construct a story. You'd be surprised how valuable your skills are right now. I mean, don't. Don't undersell your skills as you're graduating. It's kind of awesome that you decided to do this considering this is the part of our world that's expanding at the moment. And when the UN says that, it's telling the world that I think they got like a, I mean, I really misquote the number, but at least 30%, they went around with a VR film and they were trying to get people to donate to a cause and they'd shown the film and they had like a crazy 50% or something increase of donations after the VR film. So like, all the NGOs are interested in making VR films and they're just not enough makers at this point out there. That's just one market already going. And then, Natni, on that note, when you were talking about kind of the different platforms that you're using, do you guys have any recommendations for gear because it's changing so rapidly if I don't want to invest in gear? Like, where to rent gear from or? There is the million dollar question. Yeah, that's. Yeah, I know, we've compiled lists and then we changed that list and we put another list and we've got another list. And so, you know, if you want me to share with you our list and our research, I'll tell you what we have together for pros and cons. And really we should put this Google up the document, right? And then people can decide for themselves. But at least you'll have a kind of list of the, take the research we've done and maybe make it usable and valuable for other people to make some decisions on their own. Anybody here have a recommendation on a camera, by the way? Okay, yeah, it's open. It's a really open field. It's hilarious, because in the night grant, we're supposed to be buying gear together and we can't decide, so we're still trying to figure it out. There's something coming in two weeks. In two weeks, one month and NAP and everybody says something and it's all easier, but is it as good anyway, right? So we'll probably just buy a couple things that we think might be good enough and then see which one works best. But everybody's shooting with GoPro rigs right now and they are good and terrible. But as we compile this list that we've been putting together and we should share with you. So I've got one last, I don't see anyone else waiting, so we'll, but it's, you know, we've been talking a lot about VR and we've been looking and all of you make sort of projects that stand on their own two feet, maybe Rainie, you're the exception, because another way to look at this as is part of a media ensemble. There's more and more cross-platform work where each medium can kind of pull its weight, do what it does best, and VR obviously has a clear place in that constellation. Is that, certainly with organizations like the New York Times, that's the foreseeable future. VR can bring things to stories, it can bring attention to stories that might otherwise get it. How do you see that evolving? Staying that way, more emphatically across media, more division of labor. I think that this type of storytelling will just grow as it pertains to current affairs or journalism. I think more and more people are passionate about it and doing it. As Ashley with the New York Times, this guy named Sam Dolnick this week and we were on a panel together, and he's great, he said they're gonna start a whole strand, they're calling meditation VR. So to the point of just, you know, desperate, depressing situations, they're trying to find a more meditative storytelling form. I think for places that are documentary series or broadcasters, we absolutely are gonna keep expanding, but it'll be part of a whole swath of things that we do. It doesn't have to mean that linear film goes away or that writing goes away, and I just think it's another way of telling a story, and it can be very persuasive and very important, but it doesn't have to be the answer, the only answer. We have a book on our shelf at home that was posted in 2005, and it's on the history of the book, and the desktop jacket cover says, boy, this book is more important than ever, now that books are going away. Well, exactly, it's laughable, exactly later, that's the laughable claim, right? Books are not going away, but VR is a fantastically interesting space. Okay, last question. So we've talked a little bit about the labor that's involved in this, and in traditional linear entertainment, as crew sizes have gotten smaller, you've gotten down to predators who now do two, three, four jobs, where there used to be five or six people, right? What I'm hearing, though, in the creation of this, though, is that you actually are expanding staffs back out. Now, traditional entertainment is contracting as a business. You guys have yet to really establish a business model for VR, if it doesn't really exist yet. How do we get past this? What are, you know, this is a million dollar question, or a billion dollar question, really. How do the economics work? How do the economics work, that would be the last question. I'm not sure if the business models for other forms of documentary work as flawlessly as... Wonderful, thank you. But that's, I mean, it's funny, like, I mean, this question, I think, is always like the question that we get at the festival, like, what's the business model? For 10 years of doing, like, interactive documentaries, like, but what is the business model? No, no, okay. Produce television right now, because it doesn't cost too much money. And here we are, and we wanna do passion projects and really great storytelling and art. Yet it's going to be much more expensive to do it in this format than it is to do it in traditional. I can tell you how my studio's surviving, which is we're doing the Vertov model, actually, and we're making some stuff for brands. Vertov made a few commercials in his day, didn't he? And that's what we're doing. We're making some stuff for some major, major, major brands. Most of it's kind of fun because they sort of are like, you know, they haven't done this before, so you can kind of do whatever you want and they're happy. So it's a pretty fun time to be working for brands. I don't know how long that will last, but it's certainly helping us, we have major, major brands working with it. And I don't know even know how that happened, but it's happening, because we're an expert, right? I've been doing this here. That's just a joke, right? It's a joke, but I've done many things for brands before, but now I can make things for brands. Anyway, the deal is that it seems to me, I feel like what we're establishing in our company is very similar to the traditional models in the way that news media organizations have worked previously. We are making hard news, which we love. We are making some funny stuff. We're making some science stuff. We are making some branded, sponsored content to help fund. So that to me is the way that in the long term, in the big picture, and I know that isn't really answering your question, how I, as an individual, go out and make my project and raise the money to do it, I get that that's the pain point right now, and I've been there, as you know, 700 bucks for hunger. I had, wow, I had a big $35,000 to make projects serious in six weeks and then take it to the World Economic Forum and show it to billionaires, holy shit. So I feel your pain, but we just made the pieces. And I think that, you know, that's always the pain of an artist. We answered, it's hustling, I think is the answer. Well, maybe to add one more, I'm not sure if this is helpful, but we did a very sort of small research attempt last year at looking at how we're interactive documentary projects funded. This is sort of pre-VR, but, and like projects from the last, was it, eight years or so, and out of that came that the average budget of a project was 200,000. But if we looked at the distribution of the budgets per project, there was actually not a single project made for that budget. Like they were all made for like zero to 100, or they were made for like 300 and up. So that's basically shows that either you work for nothing or you work with, like you do it yourself or you work with a brand and you have a big budget. And I would encourage, just because we're public media, we actually have to keep our budgets conservative and we care about keeping things affordable. So we're not gonna be able to do this very often if we can't get the controls down on the cost, right? I think it's really important to collaborate. So I would look at who you can collaborate with, because that's a lot of what we're doing right now is we're going to other news organizations and other individuals who are making things and we're putting teams together across multiple organizations. And we do it all the time and it has taken our costs down dramatically. So universities or other journalism entities or whatever you're really interested in, editorially, look to see how you can partner because then it can get your entry in but then also take your costs down. But we absolutely have to do this or this is not, this is almost a folly for public media. It's very specifically like, this is a place where there's a lot of innovation and the innovative tools are gonna need the content to showcase them. For example, we're in the middle of, we're getting towards the end of really beautiful discussions with ADI which just raised millions of dollars are about to do their B raise, is series B, so they're getting a lot of money. We don't have that kind of money, we're still a content maker. But they're gonna offer us a stage and support and we're gonna work on a journalism platform together which is super exciting. So here's a company that they need somebody to showcase their tool set. And you know, but I have to tell you, there are other companies like them, a couple other companies out there for sure but these guys are a few blocks away from me. So. You really care about journalism which is really unusual. One of these big tech companies that actually say journalism is their priority or one of their priorities for us was completely an extraordinary experience and let me tell you, we've had a lot of phone calls where it's clear that that's not the company's real priority so finding those partners. And I feel like you're here at a place where there's such cool incubation happening. I would think that this would be one place where you'd find people making the kind of tools to help you that need you to showcase their tools. Yeah, actually the project that we just did at Tribeca was a research collaboration with the BBC and with a bunch of universities. So they actually developed the audio tools that we ended up using and that brought the cost of the whole project right down because we had the whole soundscape already made for us. So yeah, I think collaboration is the way to go. It's affordable and it's an audience builder. It's a great way to bring people to a story that might not otherwise have found it so it's just a win, win, win. Hey, with that I'd like to thank our panel and you guys as well. And hope to see a lot of you over the next two days. Thanks.