Venice VR Expanded Diary 2021 (Updated 9/19/21)
Notes and capsule reviews from our team
No Proscenium’s staff is covering the 2021 Venice Film Festival’s Venice VR Expanded programming, which is distributed across VRChat, Viveport, Oculus, and more. The festival runs through September 19.
This diary will update through the event with notes, thoughts, and capsule reviews through the end of the fest.
September 19, 2021
Lavrynthos (Oculus): This project is the cleverly animated tale of an enormous labyrinth, a Minotaur, and a girl named Cora who is intended to be the Minotaur’s next victim. However, Cora is dead set on escaping the maze. And as such, we end up in a comedic tale: one of Cora attempting to find the ever-transforming maze’s exit and the Minotaur attempting to convince her that it’s impossible, with a couple of detours along the way. I felt a sense of sympathy for Cora and her stubbornness to achieve her goal. But I was mostly annoyed by the minotaur’s cranky grumblings, though I could tell he was more likely intended to be a humorous counterpoint to the human character.
While the story is mildly unsatisfying — what is intended as a tragic ending doesn’t actually feel all that inevitable — the tricks of scale and set used here are fascinating. Lavrynthos uses non-Euclidean geometry and impossible architecture to make its set feel infinitely enormous: you can duck under an arch and turn a corner in VR only to find yourself in a completely different space. Which is an amazing magic trick that they pull over and over, without it ever feeling stale. — Kathryn Yu
The Last Worker (Oculus): This interactive VR experience is actually the first chapter in an upcoming first person VR video game. Taken through that lens, the experience that was released at Venice VR Expanded is mostly about setting up the storyworld and character, with a lot of intriguing breadcrumbs about who we are in this world and what we might want.
The short excerpt presented at Venice consists of three parts: a fun mech-enabled battle through what is essentially a long trench leading up to the character is presumably the Big Bad in this universe who then fires us from our job; followed a dialogue-less cinematic “cut scene” about the protagonist, his partner, and the fulfillment centre he works in, all viewed from the inside of a huge cardboard box; and, lastly, a clever sequence where we meet our companion character — a broken robot — for the first time, which also acts an an onboarding/tutorial sequence.
The creators do a lot of clever game and VR design tricks here: dropping us into an action sequence right away; giving us a glimpse of our most feared enemy; showing tidbits of a backstory regarding a romantic partner who is now gone; and quickly introducing a mystery as to why someone who’s been at the company for 25 years needs to go through “first day on the job” training all of a sudden (which also acts as a nice way to drop some lore via the player character’s conversation with the broken robot). It’s an intriguing premise and I am eager to learn more and play through The Last Worker. — Kathryn Yu
Tearless (Oculus): This unsettling short film, Tearless, takes viewers to a now closed detainment center for sex workers servicing the US military bases in South Korea. Any women who were suspected to have STDs were taken here and forced treatment that resulted in severe side effects and occasional deaths, all due to pressure from the US government to lower STD rates among their soldiers. Tearless is mostly silent and sans any other visible humans, save for one at the very end; it’s more about a place than the specific narrative of any of its victims. The real life locations of the now abandoned center are eerie and foreboding, particularly when you observe the various items left behind by its former occupants, as contrasted by the way nature has taken over some of the building interiors. — Kathryn Yu
September 14, 2021
Container (Oculus): This 180-degree filmed experience takes the viewer through a series of vignettes all centered around the interior of a shipping container as it is used for a variety of purposes: the transportation of goods and services, a massage parlor, a home, a sitting room, and more. The scenes seemingly flip back and forth between multiple characters and points in time in a surreal, non-linear fashion.
I’ll go ahead and say that I found this film difficult to watch. Firstly, the creators have situated the camera such that it feels as if it is constantly drifting or moving, which could cause motion sickness in some people. Secondly, both objects and people often approach the viewer’s face such that they feel inches away. The resolution of my Oculus Quest didn’t really play nicely with these shots and more than once, my lizard brain assumed I’d be soon hit in the face with an object. The close ups are so extreme as to become painful to look at.
Additionally, nearly all of the scenes in Container depicted some form of pain and suffering: a South Asian family with four children sewing soccer balls and sports jerseys and falling asleep where they worked; an East Asian female massage therapist being told “lower, lower” by her white male client; a Black person seemingly drowning in rapidly rising waters; a Black woman in servant’s clothing pushing dirt around the fallen body of a Black man; and a white family with kids who look terrified of two Black people dragging up something from the beach into the container.
All of these vignettes are presented as is, without additional identifying context so it’s hard to know what to make of them; the thing they all have in common is the shipping container itself. So unfortunately, without any sort of captions or narration, the true intended message and intended audience of this piece remain mostly oblique to me.
— Kathryn Yu
Clap (Oculus): This interactive, animated story takes the participant into the world of “Thread Man,” a character who appears to be isolated and disconnected from the others around him. You as the player are able to help Thread Man (who looks a bit like Gumby but with giant pink eyes) get his confidence back. This happens primarily through a clever clapping mechanic implemented through the use of the Oculus Quest’s hand tracking feature. There’s no dialogue so we have mostly the character’s actions and expressions as well as some visual prompts in the background to guide us along.
But for any one who is sensitive to rhythm (shout out to all the musicians out there), there’s a noticeable delay between when you see your hands clap in VR and when the experience plays the feedback of a clapping sound back to you, which can be jarring and immersion breaking. Additionally, because the experience does not use any words (written or spoken) so oftentimes I felt like I wasn’t exactly sure how my clapping was actually going to help my tiny green protagonist. Even if everything did turn out fine.
— Kathryn Yu
Genesis (Oculus): If we were to map all of Earth’s very existence to a single 24-hour day, then the Anthropocene — that is, the period of time in which human activity is the dominant influence on the planet — takes up only a single minute from midnight. That’s part of the thinking behind Genesis. The entire framing of the piece hinges on the metaphor of that single 24-hour day, which is very similar to Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, although does not seem to be as effective or understandable.
The experience takes us on an epic journey in VR from 4.5 billion years ago when Earth collided with a proto-planet to the beginnings of life undersea to the age of the dinosaurs to early man, all under the thought experiment that our very existence stems from chance events. The visualizations of life on Earth billions of years ago are very cool but I found myself feeling distanced from the events happening around me as we sped from space and time within the space of 13 minutes, give or take.
— Kathryn Yu
September 13, 2021
End of Night (Viveport): End of Night places participants as a passenger to the story of a man named Josef, as he flashes back through his memories to 1943, as he attempts to flee the Nazis with his sister-in-law and niece. Their only hope is to make it across the ocean from Denmark to neighboring Sweden.
End of Night is also fascinating from a technology perspective as the environments were all captured using photogrammetry, but the actors in the story were volumetrically captured. The jagged, incomplete appearance of the buildings and walls fit the overall mood of the tragic tale and emphasize the fragmented nature of memory, while the sometimes distorted or stretched out faces and bodies of people hint at the possibility of an unreliable narrator.
The plot also takes its time unfolding into the inevitable slow motion trainwreck; truly, the only possible ending for this story is a bad one. But by situating the viewer in literally the same row boat as the narrator as well as having the main character facing us and (making eye contact in VR), I found myself compelled to hold on tight and not look away.
— Kathryn Yu
Bliss in the Ear of a Storm (VRChat, PC VR): Intended as an “an ongoing exploration into the interrelation between music, sound and control,” this VRChat world entices participants to roam in a surreal desert-like environment populated by enormous record players and cassette tapes. At the center of the literal storm, is a band playing music. But not just any band. This particular metal band plays non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with music generated by AI. Therefore, no two visits to Bliss in the Ear of the Storm are alike; I laughed out loud when I realized what was happening.
Fans of the genre will find much to enjoy in the eye (or ear, that is) of the storm.
— Kathryn Yu
Spirit of Place (VRChat, PC VR): This large, non-linear explorable world is perhaps one of the most game-like of the projects included in this year’s competition. Participants are guided towards beacons of light scattered throughout an enormous mysterious forest. Upon approach, orbs glowing in the dark deliver monologues to the player; I thought perhaps I saw the source of the low, deep voice behind me, but it was hard to tell in the night. Perhaps I’m too impatient to explore but I found the mystical concepts in the voiceover to be fairly abstract and a bit overshadowed by the sandbox nature of the environment.
— Kathryn Yu
September 9, 2021
Angels of Amsterdam (Viveport): Angels of Amsterdam presents the stories of four real life women in Amsterdam circa the 17th century and the ways that society back them judged them to be less than or other. Four volumetrically captured actors play Maritgen Jans, Juliana, Elsje Christiaens and Pussy Sweet and tell their tragic stories through a variety of methods including monologues, operatic singing, or dance. While the environment is that of a real life 17th century café in Amsterdam, the viewer is essentially stuck in one spot (the experience tells you to step back should you move out of place) and the only agency the user has is whose tale to view first and in which order, achieved by gazing at the dot above their heads. It’s an interesting use of the medium that might be quite effective in a museum or educational setting, as I felt I was missing a lot of context for the content and what it was trying to say.
— Kathryn Yu
Glimpse (Viveport): This charming, well-acted and well-written animated VR story focuses on the breakup of Herbie and his girlfriend Rice and its aftermath by taking the viewer on a journey through Herbie’s memories: the end of their relationship, the start of their relationship, and the moment it began to all fall apart. (It should be noted that Herbie is a giant panda who is an illustrator and Rice is a deer and aspiring musician.) You actually are Herbie in VR, by the way, and this is demonstrated to the user by way of a mirror in Herbie’s art studio, where all of the action takes place.
Vignettes of Herbie and Rice are re-enacted before your eyes, sometimes at human scale and other times at dollhouse scale. The overall experience is well designed, the environments are gorgeously rendered, and the use of music as a thematic element is strong, although I do wish the action moved slightly faster in the middle of the story. There’s some amount of interactivity in Glimpse by way of flipping through a sketch book, using an answering machine, or rifling through a pile of crumpled up drawings but for the most part, but my favorite was the candles: Rice would bring a single candle up to my headset and ask me to blow it out. Which I did.
Glimpse is a quiet, more contemplative, story-driven VR experience, which I daresay we need more of.
— Kathryn Yu
Myriad. Where We Connect | VR Experience (Viveport): This nature-inspired piece takes viewers on an imagined migrational journey of three different animals. The viewer can choose from the tales of the Bald Ibis, the Arctic Fox, and the Green Sea Turtle; your presence appears in the project at the selection menu as a series of charcoal drawing-esque trails as you move your controllers about the world around you, though once you actually select a chapter, your presence is diminished and de-emphasized in the content. The art style here is fascinating with the use of a minimalist color palette that reads as a close cousin to black and white, let’s say dark brown and white or dark crimson and white. I was struck by the desaturated nature of the environments and the sheer emptiness of the sky or the ocean as we followed alongside our ibis or turtle. Due to the use of contrast, what objects and animals we do see in VR take on a more significant feeling, especially against the long, harrowing migration paths they take.
— Kathryn Yu
Le Bal de Paris de Blanca Li (Viveport): In its original conception as a location-based VR experience, Le Bal de Paris takes up to ten participants and places them in VR in the same physical space as three dancers, who are also in VR. The dancers take the roles of the main characters in the narrative, which centers around Adele, who has just returned home to Paris after traveling around the world, and the beau she left behind. You, as a participant, are cast as one of the guests of the party. But don’t worry if you don’t have anything suitable for a black tie event, because Chanel (one of the sponsors of the project) has multiple gala-ready outfits in a gallery at the start of the experience. In the standalone version created for Venice VR Expanded, the dancers have all been motion captured and placed into a solo player version of the experience which combines elements of musicals, dark rides at amusement parks, and immersive theatre to epic effect.
Le Bal de Paris takes each participant on a 40-odd minute journey through various sets as the characters dance and sing their way through the plot, as if you were literally present in a full-length musical. I found myself stunned by a grand, elegant ballroom with dozens upon dozens of non-player characters waltzing, as well as the callback to Old Hollywood-style synchronized swimming dance numbers, and also a whimsical garden party that had more than a little Alice in Wonderland embedded in it. Naturally, we end up at some point in a Parisian nightclub with scantily clad dancers doing a choreographer number all around us. The piece also leverages a few classic immersive theatre tropes: characters prompting the audience into moving into the next set piece as well as a performer who asks us to follow them through.
I’ll admit, I even went through the Le Bal de Paris de Blanci Li experience twice to try to catch all of the dazzling details; frankly, I haven’t seen anything else like it in VR.
— Kathryn Yu
Yi Yuan (The Final Wish) (Viveport): Chinese company iQIYI returns to Venice with the same formula that they used with last year’s award-winning interactive film Killing a Superstar. Participants can watch high definition 360 video of multiple characters in a layout where the viewer can choose which characters to follow as they move from room to room. You can also rewind and fast forward through time to review the material for clues about a mystery central to the experience. Chapters are punctuated with quizzes where you must answer questions about the plot correctly in order to progress.
This time around, in Yi Yuan (The Final Wish), a set of six strangers congregate in a home at the request of a lawyer who is reading the will of the recently deceased Fu, an art dealer who is believed to have committed suicide. However, unlike the more successful Killing a Superstar — where the titiular crime happened at the end of the experience and you as the player needed to figure out who did the deed — Yi Yuan starts with a mysterious set of circumstances regarding Fu’s suicide and whether or not he meant to do it.
The six strangers who all knew Fu are also supposed to be representative of the six sources of human suffering according to Buddhism: greed, hatred, stupidity, pride, hesitation, and prejudice. This means they’re all pretty flat and shallow characters. Meanwhile the narrative plods its way clumsily through a series of subjects like infidelity, childhood trauma, implied sexual abuse, and more. And (spoiler alert), there is a twist at the end of Yi Yuan as the user interface hints at a crime that happens at the end of the film, but I found said twist to be surprising and unsatisfying.
The technology behind the experience is impressive but the story itself could use a rewrite.
— Kathryn Yu
September 7, 2021
Anandala (Viveport): Whatever drug artist Kevin Mack is on, I’d like to try it some day. Best known for his work on What Dreams May Come, Mack has created a compellingly strange, super trippy virtual reality world with Anandala. The textures of the giant sculpture in the sky (that you can fly inside of!) are reminiscent of circles of dripping paint or perhaps the Great Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter. The shapes are irregular and organic, perhaps best compared to human tissue. Plus: comfort and approachability are at the forefront of the project’s interface. Simply hold your controller in whatever direction you’d like to fly in and you’ll move in that direction. Hold it down more to speed up, press down less to slow down.
Just make sure you mind the “blorts,” who live in the world and take on the role of seemingly sentient non-player characters who react to your presence. Imagine my delight as I reached out to touch one, and it scampered away.
— Kathryn Yu
Caves (Oculus, Viveport): A kind of blast from the past nature film from director Carlos Isabel García that follows three experienced cave explorers — Lea Odermatt, Nora Sanz, Diego Sanz — as they go spelunking through an intricate network of caverns. Its impossible not to think a bit about how all the shots were constructed as you watch the 360 film, but its still a great use of the technology to take us to places most people don’t get to go.
One little line of text near the end turns much of what we see on its head, however. So brace yourself a bit when the credits are set to roll.
— Noah Nelson
Exploring Home (VRChat, PC VR): Think of this piece as less of a live “show” per se and more of a guided tour through a surreal world with enormous sculptures, complete with an entrancing soundtrack and a live performer. The world the creators have built is vivid and impressive. But the visual art goes by far too quickly in pursuit of the solo performer who is guiding us through this experience. As in: you literally have to chase them as they’re constantly moving during Exploring Home. I felt as if I barely had any time to look around in this short, approximately 15 minute piece. The world is fantastic but we don’t get the chance to truly slow down and appreciate its vast scale, even if this is intentional. Protip: expect to use smooth locomotion nearly the entire time, prepare yourself for clipping through walls (on purpose), and learn how to “jump” in VRC (poor me, I had forgotten).
— Kathryn Yu
Il Dubbio Episodio II (Viveport): In this piece (the second in a series about artists), Kenyan painter Beatrice Wanjiku reflects on the loss of her mother and how the spectre of doubt has shaped her career. Wanjiku’s story of her childhood and what motivated her artistic career is compelling; the painterly art style of the project suits the subject matter well. I loved being able to step inside enormous VR brushstrokes as Wanjiku narrated her story. However, the participant is pretty much passive here and not really able to move around within the space, though on occasion your hands turn into swarms of particles and you’re asked to reach out and touch objects. (Personally, if I’m being offered a family photo, I’d like to grasp it and hold it in VR for closer examination.) But in this experience this act actually causes the photos to disintegrate and fall away, which seems at odds with the narrative.
— Kathryn Yu
Goliath: Playing With Reality (Oculus): The essay film is an overlooked form in general. Its one that sinks or swims thanks to how charismatic or compelling the subject is. This piece, a biographical story of a man we come know only by the online handle Goliath, benefits from having both a compelling central character and a deft understanding of the interactive elements of VR to bring audiences a little closer to their subject.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized after a destructive episode, Goliath’s story is rendered compassionately by directors Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla in a way that illustrates both the personal and systematic issues with this complex disease. What could be turned into treacle by making the subject of the piece an object or by compulsively gamifing the interactive elements instead manages to ring true from the inside out. It also doesn’t hurt that, as a gamer, some of Goliath’s story makes sense to render in the language of gaming.
Narrated by the incomparable Tilda Swinton, this one is well worth the 25 minute runtime. — Noah Nelson
Montegelato (Oculus): As simple as this piece is, it is amazing.
Director Davide Rapp and his team have combed through scores of films to create a video collage of Rome’s Monte Gelato waterfalls. Just about every genre of cinema imaginable is represented, with the moments from each film layered on top of each other to reveal more and more of the physical scene until a full picture emerges.
When I spied the runtime I balked. Surely this couldn’t keep my interest for a half hour. But it didn’t just keep my interest. It delighted. Simply an amazing exploration of the intersection of cinema and virtual reality, with a cheeky sense of humor woven into the editing.
The overall effect implies the idea of VR cinema as a medium for the remembrance of places. I’m all for that.
— Noah Nelson
Bing Mei Guei (The Sick Rose) (Viveport): In Bing Mei Guei, a little girl gets into a fight with her mother who has to go to work; sadly for us, there appears to be some sort of plague going on and Mom works in a hospital. And then our little girl — aptly named Rose — gets sick herself. Sick little Rose soon sets out on an epic adventure to gift her mother a magical rose. Along the way, she has some frightening encounters with various folks. And while I can understand the urge to process our feelings about the COVID-19 pandemic through the creation of art, I cringed a little at the overt references to masking, quarantine, and the fear of strangers coughing in the streets. Unfortunately, the overall narrative isn’t terribly satisfying. I’m not sure if Rose is now fundamentally changed or has learned anything from her journey. But the use of stop motion in VR is pretty compelling, as is the art style, which leans more Nightmare Before Christmas than Pixar and comes to life during a short but memorable musical number.
— Kathryn Yu
La plage de sable étoilé (The Starry Sand Beach) (Viveport): This gorgeously told folktale turned educational piece has stunning visuals and a compelling message about the environment. La plage de sable étoilé gets its name from a real life species of Foraminifera, known as Baculogypsina sphaerulata or more colloquially, “star sand,” named for its distinctive five-pointed shape. However,we’re also told that this type of Foraminifera originates from the pairing of the Southern Cross and the North Star, who had thousands of children in the ocean, but these offspring were eaten by a jealous mythical sea serpent, who spit out their star-shaped bodies to form the sand on a beach. The tale is told exquisitely using papercut art of the stars, serpent, and waves projected onto virtual curtains surrounding the viewer.
Creators Nina Barbier and Hsin-Chien Huang then cleverly shrink the viewer down to the size of a small ocean creature — much like the Foraminifera in question — and take us on a journey back in time millions of years under the sea alongside the sea serpent to better understand where Foraminifera came from and their role in the ocean ecosystem. Barbier describes the project as their attempt to marry poetry with science and I’d have to say that these two do pair together beautifully.
— Kathryn Yu
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