Maturity in craft, thoughtful use of place and the power of deep fakes – just some of the takeaways of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s 2019 Alternate Realities exhibition (6-11 June), as observed by the i-Docs team – Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, Mandy Rose and Julia Scott-Stevenson. What follows is an abridged and adapted version of our conversation about some of the immersive …
Virtual Futures: A Manifesto for Immersive Experiences
In her research conducted during a fellowship on immersion with the South West Creative Technology Network, Julia Scott-Stevenson explores: How can immersive media create shared experiences that imagine pathways towards a preferred future? This piece was originally published in Immerse: creative discussion of emerging nonfiction storytelling on March 8, 2019. Climate armageddon, the rise of the far right, the arrival …
This is the story of the space between people…
Julia Scott-Stevenson writes about her experience of The Collider, the latest immersive work from creative duo Anagram — in its inaugural showing at IDFA DocLab in November 2018. A fellow participant and I are directed through two separate doors to begin the experience independently, accompanied by a narrator’s voice through headphones. I enter a tiny room, and the narrator describes the machine …
Alternate Realities at Sheffield Doc/Fest
i-Docs research fellow Julia Scott-Stevenson gives a rundown of her visit to the Alternate Realities showcase at Sheffield Doc/Fest, with additional comments from Mandy Rose and Juliet Lennox. I’m handed a VR headset which feels disconcertingly wet when I place it against my face. At first I think perhaps the attendant has been slightly overzealous with cleaning it between users, …
Light into VR darkness – an in-depth interview with Arnaud Colinart
When directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney were working on their documentary Notes on Blindness, their attention was on finding a filming style that could convey the deepest emotions sensed in John Hull’s voice – a professor of religious education at Birmingham University that went blind in 1983 and spent much of a decade recording his journal on tape as …
Karim Ben Khelifa on VR, empathy and how to deal with the enemy within us
VR and 360 video projects have dominated the festival landscape this year, and small and big players want to catch the train while they can. Similar to the effect of The arrival of a train at La Ciotat (1895), the illusion of “being there” is associated with a wave of enthusiasm. Immersion and empathy are the new keywords, and the hope …
It’s Not You, it’s Me – The Fly-on-the-Wall Documentary and Virtual Reality
By Katy Morrison – Producer at VRTOV . We talk a lot about Virtual Reality. What to make, how to make it, why we should be making this thing instead of that other thing. And yet while the promise of VR — be anywhere! Come face-to-face with anything or anyone! — is expansive, the conversation is not. Aside from the constant …
Deep into (the) Clouds: an interview with George and Minard
With Sundance hosting 13 Virtual Reality (VR) experiences under its New Frontier’s umbrella at the start of the year and Tribeca Film Festival showcasing projects like The Enemy in their Storyscapes line-up, we turn to a project that has been among the first to experiment with the use of Oculus Rift in a documentary context. CLOUDS, by media artist James George and …
IDFA DocLab: focus on digital reality
Last year, DocLab had “Interactive reality” in its title, this year it was “Immersive reality”. We shifted from interactive to immersive, what does this mean? Since our physical reality is already both immersive and interactive, I suppose the novelty here is to question how we want to understand the role of factual storytelling in the digital age tout court, especially …