 Welcome to Think Tech. I'm Crystal here. Long time no see. I'm back today for a special episode highlighting the International Film Festival here in Hawaii HIF with a particular emphasis on VR. What's VR? Virtual reality. Well, it's apparently a huge kind of up and coming thing and Taiwan has become the forefront of this and so I have a really special guest here today who flew in literally yesterday last night to present her work and to present this VR world here at the festival. So, with no further ado, let me welcome our guest, Estella, I'm going to do it right, Estella Valdiviso, I did it wrong, Valdiviso Chen, sorry, so Estella, you are part Bolivian, part Taiwanese. What an interesting combination. I'm sure you get it a lot, but not to dilute that idea of cross-cultural mixing and how that's influenced you. Can we start there? Like, what's your upbringing and yeah, what's your all about? My late father's Bolivian, my mom is Taiwanese and I'm born and raised in Taiwan, but with a Latino dad, you kind of have that really outgoing personality that kind of make me a little bit, just a little bit different for me, just a little bit different. I think a lot different, you come across as being, yes, very, very, yep. So tell me about your dad, like what did he end up in Taiwan for any particular reason? How did they meet? I used to work for Bolivian government at the time, like when he and my mom met, he came to Taiwan, he was like doing like a delegation for this country and there were like still diplomatic connection between the two countries at the time, so like that visit was quite often and that's how he met my mom in Taiwan. What was your mom doing? My mom was a college girl. Oh, cute. Okay. Yeah, she was studying, she was a major in English, so she was like, you know, very keen to be helpful to foreigners, you know, so, you know, it's just like one of those women's story that happened on a bus. Oh wow, sounds like a film itself. I know. Have you not done anything, a story on your kind of background? No, but I love talking about it, I love finding out little clues about it, there's the mom's version, the dad's version, and then my cousin's version from all the way in Bolivia, when I visit them, they tell me a whole different version of how the romance continues, so it's really interesting to have learned about your parent's story from a different place, from a different angle. You should do something with that. I mean, we're talking about cinema and the art form of framing and what you just said, it brings these kind of interesting concepts of like interpretations and storytelling and whose version do you listen to and how do you frame it, right? Exactly. Yeah, and you kind of embody this multicultural space, so do you use that in your work? Tell us about your work. So, I come from a feature film background, I study film and also my company also develops like a TV series and now virtual reality. The way that we select projects or the projects that we want to do are mostly projects that can speak to audiences from different places, but with that strong Asian identity, we want to kind of explore what Asian identity nowadays means because there is a lot of like a stereotypical way of thinking what Asians are, what Taiwanese are, and I think that with the stories nowadays, we can be much more and we can realize that even though certain stories come from, maybe come from Taiwan, maybe some ritual from Taiwan, but the essence of it is very similar and can connect you anywhere in the world. Like when you come into like your spiritual tempo sucks, the spiritual aspect, how does that reflect in different culture and how do they connect to it? That's kind of how we select projects that we are interested in producing, like finding that essence in it. Yeah. Essence is a good word. And it kind of links to your idea of exploring spirituality in VR because VR space is a very spiritual space. It's a very dystopian space, right? Like you have to put on these goggles and you go into this different world. Do you think there's a trend for this because people are searching for out of reality kind of experiences or to go outside of their own normal lives to live something a little bit more interesting? I think that how media has developed is very much that, you know, with cinema, with wanting to go to a movie on the weekends, like once a week or every other week with your boyfriend or your family. That's to get you out of your usual routines and then with now people are streaming all the time binge watching and all this is you trying to get out of that, like the reality that you have and creating another version of reality for yourself. And that's kind of how we proceed, like thinking that maybe virtual reality will have its place for the future narrative as well because that's how we have that habit and that kind of interest of exploring what's the alternative version of yourself. Alternative version of yourself. Wow. So for people who aren't really familiar with this VR world, how would you explain it to them? How are you supposed to approach it or experience this? My favorite way to explain it is always memory. So I like to say virtual reality is like creating a version of memory that you will have because you are putting on a headset, you are seeing a world, a creator, a storyteller create for you. It could be game or it could be narrative, it's a very wide spectrum, but you are in there with a headset, exploring it. Like you're in that realm with those characters. You feel like you are in a different space. And if it's game, you have more interactivity, you have more choice, but then the spectrum goes to even just a 360 video, then maybe you don't have that interactivity, but you still have the choice of being attracted by certain performance and you look into different direction. That all creates a level of memory. So your version of watching, for example, your spiritual temple size in my version will be different because we'll probably be seeing different information that the story world has. But doesn't that story guide you to look for certain things? Well, I think that a lot of storytellers in virtual reality create a space that you don't have to see every single thing. Okay. You put in a lot of Easter eggs, you put in basically building a story world, so for the audience to have the space to explore it and maybe even revisit sometimes. This time watching it, you see this and you feel this way. Maybe the next time you watch it, you will find different things. There will be a level of guidance, but that guidance is not strict. It's not like in films that you've got the storyboard, you've got the frame to frame that we are very systematic of how we want you to receive the information. Interesting. Why that title? Why that title? Well, I think it matches the attitude because we actually had a very serious title at the beginning and then after the very first draft, we were like, oh, we should have something that's a little bit more challenging in the audience because the narrative itself, we're aiming for comedy, we want people to laugh with it, we want people to kind of imagine that they go to this virtual reality, spiritual world and thinking that they can fix something at a beginning, but then everything starts falling apart while you fix it. So that's why we get, you know, that's why it's called, you know, it's very funky and you can see the pace of it and the music and everything just escalates into this very kind of fun, crazy world, unrealistic, but perhaps there are things that people can pull out that can apply to them. Is that what you can say about that? Yeah, that's what we're aiming for. So like, I'm not sure if you know of this ritual. It's like a Taoist ritual. It's called a blind folding ritual. So it's a very famous ritual in Taiwan that people get blind folded with this red clothes and then there will be a Taoist monk guiding you to go to the spiritual world to either visit your lost family, people that you want to see, or you want to say goodbye to, or go to your spiritual temple so you can remodel it and you can change it and make your real life a better place. So if you have a problem like in career, in marriage or anything, you can go to your spiritual temple. You take it to your bedroom and fix it and... So if you tidy up your room a little bit, hopefully your love life will be a little bit more better? Yeah, yeah, exactly. You say, oh, maybe it's because your window is by... Oh, it's like a feng shui thing. Yeah, like a feng shui thing, but it's in your spiritual temple. Okay, okay. So that's what we learned about it and we found it very fascinating because it has that same feeling like it's like virtual reality, right? Exactly. You're putting on something and taking you somewhere else. That's exact same ritual of virtual reality. That's very cool. Your spiritual temple sucks was our very first VR work and we wanted to find something that we have fun with and something that we can connect to and that's where we approach with it. But then at the same time, even though that ritual only exists probably, I think only in Taiwan. I asked a lot of people, different places in Asia, they don't know about the ritual. So I think it's a very Taiwanese ritual. It doesn't matter because it's very much something that people from everywhere in the world have that imagination. I say, I wish I can go somewhere and fix my trouble. And everything can be managed just by remodeling. It's interesting you say that because just glancing through the different selections of the VR films that are presented at HIF this year, there are a lot of things that do deal with memory. One of them called After Image for Tomorrow also explores choosing three memories that you can preserve, but then you have to question whether you can trust them. So that's kind of like going into a very more abstract and deeper tangent. There's one by the US called Asteroids, which is a comedy of deep space. It's a different kind of virtuality. Body List is also by Taiwan. I don't know if you're familiar with that one, Lending Digital Storytelling by following an elderly political prisoner who's past and where he goes from there and it turns digital. So the abstractness of that reality, of that after world being kind of synonymous with this digital kind of virtual space. Really fascinating stuff. So I think you know, as we dwell or as people can slowly absorb the concept of this, do we have things that can kind of hook them into wanting to try this experience? Is it for young people? Is it for like, is there like a target audience? I think it's very broad, because the fact that virtual reality, the way the storytellers in virtual reality have different backgrounds. You know, we have like your spiritual temple is from a film director. But at the same time, you've got digital artists, you've got people from theater, space, performance. Oh yeah, there's a dance one from Australia. So there is it's a it's a media that so many artists from different space are coming into it. So people as you know, if you have different interests, you will gather all of them into this space and then age wise as well. Every idea for your spiritual temple sucks is obviously comedy is very funny. But then I've shown it to my grandmother. But also I have an audience of like 30 high school kids watching and laughing. So this includes all of you out there. So if you're interested, we're going to take a short break, but we come back and we're going to talk more about this virtual reality world and how hip is offering all this opportunity to go and watch it. So stay tuned. Thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours, the Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of Think Tech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, collateral analytics, the Cook Foundation, Dwayne Kurisu, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Abarbon Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, VOLO Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Back to QoqTalk here on Think Tech. I'm Crystal and we're talking to Estella about the virtual reality world, the beauty, the abstractness, the concepts of memory that you can play within VR. So we just saw a clip of your film and that's just one of many projects that you do. And let's talk a little bit about kind of the production because people don't know like how you distinguish VR with regular cinema. Is the budget kind of much smaller? Are concepts of lighting and storytelling, you know, how is it differentiated? I think that VR, there's so many different genre or let's say a way of approaching it. Like, for example, for you, Spirit of Temple sucks is life action. So you have your actor in a space and then you add graphics to it so that you created a virtual space. But in that sense, the production mainly is focusing on shooting, right? So it's very much kind of like traditional filmmaking. How do you organize your production in that sense? But then the difficult part is probably to avoid too many things that you have to stitch together because you're having 360 cameras. How do you shoot it and still be able to set up the lighting? Like basically all the tools that you use to know not necessarily exist or will be there. So how do you solve that problem in post-production or even in production? That's the part one is difficult for live action. But with live action, there is still a limitation because it's still a free degree of freedom experience. You can only see like 360 and up and down. There are also the spectrum of creating more freedom for your audiences that you can provide them a 60 degree of freedom so you can walk in and really get closer to the character. So a lot of animation works are done that way. Another animation virtual reality. And actually we are working on that right now and realize that there are even more technical things that you need to figure out along the way. It's not completely just using the animation production pipeline. You actually also have to think about the interactivity before the animation. How do you create and draw a map of interactivity to make sure that your audience really can get what you are guiding them to do. And you're working with different dimensions, right? You're talking live action, animation, graphics and yeah. It's a lot in every project. The projects that we do, we try different things in every project. We just want to see how the media can do in different fields with different kind of artists. But they are more and more mixed genre as well like some documentary work that mixes live action and animation to tell the narrative that they want to tell. So that is a field with different possibilities. Yeah, it sounds really endless the way you're saying it. But in terms of production, is it more expensive, less expensive? I would say it's relatively, but you definitely have to consider the part of because it's a new technology. So there is a lot of R&D that you got to do. You got to research. You got to develop and you got to, you know, and that's very costly. They tend to be shorter, shorter films, right? Yeah. Is it because of our attention with something that's just so highly stimulating or is it just because of the budgets often? I think it's all this. You got the budget, you can't do something that's really high production value but super long, but at the same time. We also notice that a lot of audience, most of them around 20 to 30 minutes a lot of times they want to breathe also the hardware is still not as light as we hope yet and that we're getting there. It's a physical issue. Having your headset here and heavy, but then at the same time. You know, sometimes you lose track of time for me. I'm like losing track of time because I'm in love with the medium now. So I get to be in there longer. But for, you know, new audience, young audience, they're still trying to figure out how they use the device and how long time they can be there. Is there a danger in over immersing yourself in VR world? No, I don't think so, unless you are putting on a headset in public space and walking through the traffic. You know, it's like kids who do gaming and then they lose touch with what their real world should be. You know, in that way, do you think that some people might just go so deep into this other world that they don't really have a grasp on their own that they can't pull back and have the simplicity of what's natural? Well, that's why we do storytelling, because when you are using storytelling to using this media to do storytelling, you're also reflecting on it. And a lot of the work that you've you probably see even in his is that they are work that's also trying to understand what virtual reality means and what's your relationship with virtual reality. And I think that storytelling helps people understand how to cope with it. And you have to be participating and actually be part of it in order to know how much you use is healthy. It's the same thing like Internet or gaming when it came out of online gaming that a lot of kids are spending a lot of time with. But we only learn by actually participating. That's why. And is there an engaging aspect of this presentation? I think there is. So there's a hip has a VR lounge, right? And it starts when the ninth insult. It starts on the eighth, actually, from the eighth to the 12th. And then there's an entrepreneur sandbox, which is a very new space also installed in Kakaako from the ninth to the 12th. And I think the setup, as I understand, is that there are a lot of different not booths, but just spaces for people to put on the glasses and you can watch whatever you want to watch. Is that right? And then are there panel discussions and people being able to talk to Microsoft yourself? Yeah. So I think one of the cool part about virtual reality is because everybody has their own individual experience. And the first thing that people want to do when it comes to you have a good memory, you want to share that good memory, you want to share what you experience. So that's why the launch is there when people after they watch it. And, you know, if you have that space, people can get to meet each other. You can you can talk and some of the work is interactive, maybe even with more than one person at a time. You actually get to meet interesting people or good friends in those kind of environment as well. It's very sociable, more sociable than a lot of people imagine when they say, oh, you just put it on a headset for yourself. I think creating a virtual space definitely create a social possibility. And also the panel is great. They're bringing a lot of people with different experience. I'm very much interested myself to listen to other people's experience to see how we can bring this media, this new media storytelling to another another stage, right? And another way of bringing this to another stage is you mentioned before off camera is co-productions, the concept of bringing different countries and different places and cultures together. So let's talk a little bit about that. How are you doing that? And why is that important? So for the second project idea is called Mechanical Souls. It's a Taiwan and French co-production project. And the reason that we aim for a co-production for our second VR is we want to bring the conversation of sharing resources. I'm all the way in Taiwan and they are the French French ecosystem for VR has been developed for five years. How do we work together to fill the gap of experience, right? So and also resources also approaching that different territory and reaching out to those audience that you usually don't get to reach. So you when you have co-producers that's creatively participating, then they will be able to provide you that information from that different territory audience to know that when we're talking about earlier saying like we want to do work, maybe it has cultural identity in it. But how do we still do work that not only have that cultural identity but also connect to people from different place? So we need to know how people understand the story as well. When you have co-producer, there is that. And of course last and not the least is financing. So it's always difficult to only finance winning your own territory. And there's limitation of public grants even in Taiwan. And there is public grants in France or different places in Canada as well. How do we bring this financial resources together to create something also with the fact that we are already we have our own access to our own audience. Then that means it's a project that can be distributed to different territory. That's kind of why that we kind of shifted from your spiritual temple sucks that's all made in Taiwan slowly shiven into more international co-production aspects. Yeah. And like you said, you're bringing in not just the support from both sides is the cultural context that you can bring on to the table. And that's important because I think like in our world, even though social media has kind of broken down all the so-called boundaries of how we connect, there's still lots of pockets of misunderstandings and ignorance. And by doing co-productions, you open up that space and learn to have context to everything we look at. And you talked about being actively participating in something like that. VR is an active thing. You don't just sit back and watch it with some popcorn. I guess you can't really eat popcorn when you're watching VR, can you? It's not like that kind of thing. I have seen people with a bottle of beer and watching it. I'm not recommended because I actually, like when I got my first headset, I had a cup of tea by my table. I splash it on my computer. So not recommended because you're in a different world. You can't like, you know, yeah. So it's crazy because it really just opens up a whole different dimension. And a few days in a few years ago, it was like, what VR? And now it's here. It's very exciting every year, twice a year, actually. HIF has these amazing films that we can see here. You know, I miss seeing Asian films and being in Hawaii, I see more Asian films than I had when I lived previously in Hong Kong. It's just such a fabulous opportunity. I hope you all go on the HIF website, hiff.org, because it has all it's very clearly mapped out the different films, the different categories. There's a highlight on Japanese films, Chinese films, VR. And it's just like it's very workable. And so please support it and go and see films and fulfill yourself and enrich yourself. Is there anything else like your kind of takeaways for audience to kind of leave lingering about this virtual world or? No, explore, have fun. Yeah, what are you going to explore? I mean, you're here for this, too. Yeah, I'm going to be binge-watching as a VR, right? Binge VR. What about just a plug for women? Like how do we increase the space for women in the film industry? Well, actually, in virtual world, there is a lot of female storytellers and creators. And it's such a new space. So it's very welcoming. And so I've been having a great fun working with a lot of talents. Well, you are that embodying talent and international and virtual space. So thank you so much for sharing all your work. Good luck with the festival screenings. And go watch their films. Thank you.