Closing Out An Amazing 2021 Tribeca Immersive (Wrap-Up)
One last round of interviews to celebrate the Festival’s triumphant return
This Sunday, June 20th, will see the close of an incredible Tribeca Immersive that has been made all the more remarkable given the raw uncertainty of the year.
While every collection of immersive and experiential projects that has come through the Tribeca Film Festival over the past decade has been impressive, this particular collection would have turned heads even if we weren’t coming out of a pandemic. As it is, the hybrid approach to this year’s festival has meant that more people around the world have been able to access what the curators of the program put together.
At kickoff we highlighted some of the projects we were most interested in, including Kusunda, The Changing Same, and CURRENT — all of which would go on to win awards at the festival. (See our kickoff for an interview with the filmmakers of Kusunda, and our podcast for a talk with the team behind The Changing Same.)
Since then our Review Crew, led by Executive Editor Kathryn Yu, has written capsule reviews (some of them quite meaty) of over two dozen projects in the festival — from the installation works available only in NYC to the material readily available in the Museum of Other Realities. (PRO TIP: the core MOR app is free on Steam until 11PM on the 20th. The Tribeca collection is $15 as DLC. There’s still time.)
While a few more reviews may make it into our diary, we’re bookending our coverage with interviews from three more projects that captured our attention over the course of the Festival.
Brett Gaylor’s interactive documentary Discriminator, which acts as a kind of origin story for facial recognition technology; Inside Goliath, a VR exploration of “one man’s experience of living with schizophrenia and psychosis”; and The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite, which adapts a live immersive theatre piece about dissociative identity disorder into a work of VR immersive theatre.
DISCRIMINATOR
No Proscenium: When did you know you wanted to make this as an interactive film, and was there ever a point where you wish you had just made a conventional documentary piece?
Brett Gaylor (Creator): A web documentary was always the intended medium — I’ve been exploring this space for a while. About 10 years ago I worked on a project at
Mozilla called PopcornJS that was a framework for interactive video, and I made a series called Do Not Track about privacy and the web economy. So I like making things for the web — its accessible, and interactive, and uses the medium in question to tell the story.
I probably wished I had made a conventional documentary 2 weeks before
Tribeca when we were testing it on Safari (shakes fist).
NP: What was you initial reaction when you realized how all the material you put up had been co-opted to perfect the surveillance state?
BG: Curiosity, to be honest. I wasn’t surprised really, but I wanted to understand this supply chain and tell that side of the story. There’s a lot of great storytelling around facial recognition such as Coded Bias and the advocacy of Joy Buolamwini, but the story of how the sausage was getting made I thought needed more exploring.
NP: Not to put too fine a point on it, but are we screwed? Is surveillance capitalism here to stay? Are all attempts to have a creative commons sort of doomed to not only rent seeking by big corporations but subversion by the powers that be into tools that can be used against individuals?
BG: No! We’re not doomed. There’s such a lack of policy in this space that some smart policy will go a long way. In the case of facial recognition specifically, there are many calls for a moratorium until the human rights questions and privacy implications can be hammered out. There’s a bill in front of the Senate right now in the US to ban its use by any federal agency. There’s a lot of momentum in civil society to hold corporations to account and pressure lawmakers to act.
It’s important that the narrative around AI and facial recognition isn’t doom — its about recognizing our agency and the need for robust frameworks and accountability mechanisms.
INSIDE GOLIATH
NP: What does making this an immersive work afford you that another medium — say a traditional film — does not?
Barry Gene Murphy, Director & Writer: The subject matter centres around perception and understanding a shared reality so the medium of VR is particularly suited to this. It’s astounding how easily we get lost in the illusion of the virtual world, how we forget that we are donning a headset and holding controllers. We hover around this idea through telling the story of someone who at times struggled with different realities and at the same time ask ourselves to reflect on our current reality. It’s not dissimilar to the intentions that structuralist cinema set out, to show the mechanism of the medium at work. The newness of the medium also allows us to stray from cliches and play with metaphorical connections between subject matter and the participants. Some people trying it have never been in a headset and that’s a fantastic opportunity to engage their expectations. When doing VR you really do have to ask why this technology and software? It’s extremely time and energy intensive to produce so it does have to justify itself but I would say this story seemed perfect for the medium. There seemed to be so many reasons to justify it as a VR story.
NP: Can you talk a little about the inspiration behind this work?
BGM: Inspired by a close artist friend and his desire to make an artist about his brother. The idea brewed in me for about ten years slowly growing until I got into VR and felt it just had to be made. Upon researching we got more and more determined to tell a positive story about a serious condition in the hope to put work out there that reduces stigma in this area. Isolation is a big problem with people who present these symptoms so we felt the social nature of gaming to be such an important piece of the puzzle.
NP: Why was it important to bring Inside Goliath to life in a physical installation?
BGM: I’m speaking for (Inside Goliath Co-Director, Writer & Executive Producer) May Abdalla now as the physical element is very much Anagram’s modus operandi. Anagram uses technology as a sort of trial, forcing the tech to justify itself. Pushing the limits of the intended design in creative ways. Our story was about layers of reality we find ourselves in as humans. The physical installation was to be another layer of reality. Where we could control the participants’ perceptions briefly in a thoughtful perhaps mischievous way. When you leave the cinema or even VR you are for a moment, if the film is successful, a bit vulnerable and malleable. We wanted to leverage for a moment afterwards.
NP: What do you hope people take away from experiencing it?
BGM: Our core pillar for making the piece was about reducing stigma, we wanted to bring a creative interpretation of someone’s story, to give insight into the minds and understanding of others. If we achieve that even slightly we will have succeeded.
THE SEVERANCE THEORY: WELCOME TO RESPITE
NP: What’s been the biggest challenge in adapting Welcome to Respite from a live immersive theatre piece to a VR experience?
Lyndsie Scoggin (Producer, Creative Director, Performer): One of the biggest strengths in the original version of Welcome to Respite was that the relationships, both between the characters themselves as well as with the participant, were very intimate and complex. Most of this was communicated through nuanced performances using facial expression, body language, and physical connection. It’s impossible to leverage these same tactics using an avatar. All of the performers in the virtual production have needed to focus on enhancing their voice acting skills, puppeteering avatars in effective ways, and learning to emote within a virtual space to create meaningful connections with audience members.
Deirdre V. Lyons (Producer and Performer): Shaking the box in my head about what was previously done. I already had a preconceived notion about what it looked like and trying to think bigger than that and allow for the fantastical nature that VR affords us.
The Avatars were also a big challenge; we went around and around about what they should look like. We wanted to be able to allow the audience to project onto the parents, to get lost in the story and reflect on certain parts of their own life that are represented by these characters. And it’s an impossible task, to make an avatar that is that universal. We had talked about doing something more stylistic, which was a way that I was leaning, but others wanted them to be more grounded. Some wanted more cartoon like qualities. We were very lucky in the last month to find Sonnet Cooper, who was able to create a unique family that are expressive, including an Alex avatar that is very androgenous, as kids can be at that age. We also give the audience a chance to choose the skin tone that most aligns with them and keep the story vague enough that it feels like Alex could be born to the parents or adopted.
Braden Roy (Co-Founder, Ferryman Collective): The biggest challenge has also been the driving force behind why we took on the project to begin with: translating those very personal, intimate moments to a format that does not readily allow for more nuanced body language, facial expressions or eye contact. We had felt that the very real sense of embodiment and presence which VR affords is something which has largely been neglected within the immersive theatre space in VR, or at the very least not used in a way which intentionally emphasizes personal connection between cast and audience members. Learning to move your body and articulate your voice in such a way to close the gap left by the missing tools of the trade — the aforementioned eye-contact, facial expressions, etc. — is no small task, but we wanted to push ourselves further than we had previously been. It was a risk and an experiment, but one which I truly believed has paid off. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface here.
NP: A good part of the team has been working on VR theatre pieces over the course of the pandemic, what do you know now that you didn’t at the start of 2020 that’s paying off in your process?
Whitton Frank (Performer and Marketing): Performing as a part of The Under Presents team taught me a lot about how to be an effective performer in VR. Using stage acting techniques and adapting them for the virtual space. You must be incredibly adaptable as a performer because the audience is no longer sitting in chairs watching, they are in the story with you and will often go off in an unexpected direction. You have to be able to react quickly and yet make it seem as though this could all be a part of the show.
Sonnet Cooper (Character Designer): At the beginning of 2020 I didn’t know much about 3d modeling in general lol. It wasn’t until I was bored in quarantine that I started teaching myself how to use Blender with the help of friends and youtube tutorials, and it’s a good thing I did because now I want to make a career out of it!
Stephen Butchko (Producer/Performer): I didn’t know at the start of the pandemic (though, it didn’t take long to figure out), that there were so few people attempting to forge ahead and begin creating this new genre of storytelling in VR, as well as the challenges of performing in a virtual story, have helped me become a more grounded and focused performer IRL.
NP: What does it mean to the team to be debuting this work at Tribeca?
Braden Roy: It’s extremely validating. And not only for our team, but the medium and format themselves. To see the likes of Tribeca and many of other prestigious festivals opening up the gates and nurturing their immersive and XR programming … it’s heartening. The work being done in our niche is broad, ambitious and captivating, but is also at times transient or mystifying. That our work and work like it is being acknowledged and even championed is one step closer to mainstream mindshare and understanding. I’m supremely proud. It’s an honor.
Deirdre V. Lyons: Back in December, I approached Lyndsie Scoggin with this proposal, and I told her ‘I think we could get into Tribeca’ which seemed kinda impossible at the same time. We’d done two projects prior and had only been producing in VR since September of 2020. I had really wanted to explore a quieter project, where the actor really looks at the audience and allows for moments where they can feel truly seen. I remembered the feelings I had while seeing Welcome to Respite in person and felt that could be replicated in VR and taken beyond, to its own place. It has been successful beyond what I could hope for and here we are, at Tribeca! It still feels impossible, somewhat prophetic, and incredible. I am immensely grateful for this team of talented creatives who put their heart into the project and to Tribeca for taking a chance on us, when Loren saw it in its beginning stages. It’s come so far and I’m incredibly proud we are a part of this prestigious festival.
Lyndsie Scoggin: Having been one of the original creators of Welcome to Respite, I could never have imagined that this production would mean so much to so many people. So much heart and soul has gone into developing this experience. Tribeca has offered us an opportunity to share our passion and artistry with people from all over the world, and we are extremely honored to be recognized for this achievement.
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