Transcript
VR stands short for virtual reality and it is a new medium. It’s not to be mixed up with film because it has rules of its own in terms of how you’re creating that and also of how a hero is created in that. So with virtual reality, what happens is you put on the goggles and then you yourself, the experiencer, you are in a 360-degree environment. That means you make the decision where you look.
That means you become the hero because you have self-awareness of yourself within the story. And that’s completely new and it changes, you know, the way how you approach the creative process of building walls in the virtual reality. And on top of this, and there’s also by now, the technical means, for example, you’re wearing gloves or you’re holding controllers. It means you become interactively involved into what’s happening around you, into the story, into the characters that surround you. So for the virtual reality, the question now is what is at the core of the experience and how does the experience of feel while going through the experience and also when they take off their goggles? Before that with film, it was more of the main story.
Like what is your story about and how do you want to get that across? So now we as creators, we have to think very, very differently. And I’m going to take one step forward and say that virtual reality for me is a medium, especially for female creators because in some way I do believe that it very much comes close to how we perceive the world. And how we deal with the situation. It is less about my opinion on yours. It is a lot more about how do you feel with this and what do you make out of it? So I think it’s a super interesting medium and it’s very challenging in order to create heroes or characters because you yourself as the experiencer, you are so involved with it that you cannot detach that and you always as a creator now have to think about the person that puts on the goggles. And that changes the game.
In this matter of virtual reality and how to finding your character, you don’t really have to search for it anymore because it’s already the person in the goggles doing the experience. But what you can do now is you can really make that an experience of its own. You can add technical aspects like you can talk to the characters that you’re going to meet or if you have gloves or if you have controllers you can interactively get yourself involved. So you are the hero, you are the character. And that will also change your perception of the medium or maybe even of the story that you’re involved in.
And I want to give you an example, Alejandro Inarritu. He’s a director, the last big film that he did was The Revenant and he did a VR piece called Flesh and Sand in which you are a participant, a hero, so to speak. And you are in a group of Mexicans trying to get over the border to the U.S. and then border control comes, threatens them with guns and you are part of this group and you will feel exactly what this group would feel if this would be a real situation. And that gives the aspect of being a hero, being a character in a story also in your tray because you will go through the same emotions not only because you watch the screen and you watch somebody going through it, but because you are going to be 100% immersed and involved with it. So it’s just the beginning of where we are right now, but very curious on how it’s gonna develop and how are we going to have new definitions maybe for heroes or heroines and characters itself.
I also want to tell you about another example for how you’re going to be approached in the future with the medium of virtual reality as being a heroine. Like the Sinnema Animation Studio right now is working on a piece called the Matriarchs. Where you are gonna put on the goggles and you will be immersed in surroundings and structures that go with matriarchal ways of dealing, you know, with society or with the economy.
And what we’re working on, we want to shape the heroines or the heroes perception of how our environment actually changes us and how we perceive ourselves when there are different kinds of ways that social structures work or that we do see that we interact with each other. So that’s also on top of this big question of how is it going to change to be a hero in the future of storytelling or in the future also of virtual reality.
