How To...Travel the Road to Sundance Through VR Filmmaking

Directors Nico Casavecchia [pictured above right] and Martin Allais [left] of 1stAveMachine have just returned from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where their VR film BattleScar - a coming-of-age tale starring Rosario Dawson and set in the blistering, buoyant 1970s New York City punk scene - earned a spot in the New Frontier category. 

Heralding the future of storytelling, New Frontier showcases those making strides and championing innovation behind the lens in fields such as VR.

Below, the directors explain how VR filmmaking is finally coming of age and how exposure at festivals such as Sundance are helping to grow the medium. 

The growing importance of VR 

VR has become our one and only passion project thanks to the work on BattleScar. Balancing two careers by doing commercials and film at the same time is somewhat difficult as we can only tackle one film project at a time. We have been working on BattleScar, on and off,  for more than a year now, and now finally premiering in Sundance, the days have become hectic and busier than usual, so I would say VR is right now very important and in the last couple of months it has taken over our whole life.

The challenges of BattleScar and VR integration 

Everything with integrating VR is a challenge. Working with a video game engine as opposed as a post-production pipeline, we were learning on the job and creating our unique way to navigate a process where you don’t have a North Star. The fact that narrative VR is a relatively new genre under the medium makes it more challenging in terms of workflow. 

We approached BattleScar in a very intuitive way and the process is constantly pushing the way we are used to working on linear Animation/Live action. This is our first VR experience and while we were doing it, we were developing our own way to make it come to fruition. We can see the lack of tools for make interactive storytelling as it’s usually linear storytelling tools or video game tools and we are right in the middle of it. It’s exciting to envision the kind of tools we will see in the near future to make these kind of experiences happen. Another important shift for us is getting into the real-time render world against the render farm process that we are most used to do.  As of now, we can already see real-time engines becoming more and more relevant and eventually debunking rendering as the way to finish a project.

Today’s VR micro-trends 

There are two separate worlds in VR now that are about to merge in the near future: live-action and real-time. Live-action is pretty much a 360 sphere around the user stitched together using multiple camera views. Real-time, meanwhile, is a lot more sophisticated, bringing the user into a fully immersive world that can be experienced with the higher-end headsets.

Live-action technologies in VR are evolving and soon the two worlds of real-time and live action will become one, allowing for a much more sophisticated use of live-action. This is something we have been seeing since we started working on BattleScar in 2016. The reason we decided to go with animation over live-action was that the level of immersion is way bigger right now if you use CGI, but we hope to be shooting live-action for VR very soon.

The advantages of VR integration 

We believe in a not-so-distant future when audiences will be literally inside the story and be part of the film. This changes the syntax of storytelling and cinema completely because strategies to manipulate audience attention and create meaning like edit and framing are no longer relevant. In a 360 world, you need to redefine the sense of direction and rhythm. The technology is still very raw, so the adoption is slow compared to other mediums that can show linear narratives, but it will come for sure and is going to be amazing.

Modern-day VR pioneers 

Through the journey of making BattleScar, we had the chance to meet the small community of VR filmmakers pushing the boundaries of the medium. These pioneers are working in the foundations of what will become the mainstream in the next decade. Tyler Hurd is doing some amazing work with animation and comedy. He essentially introduced us to this world and he is one of the trailblazers for sure. Eliza McNitt is pushing the boundaries of narrative VR and science with her narratives about space and cosmology in profound amazing ways. Some of the producers involved in BattleScar, like Arnaud Colinart from Atlas V, René Pinell from Kaleidoscope VR, and the people, of course, in 1stAveMachine are some of those at the cutting-edge of the community, pushing the boundaries and investing in the future. The Voltron of VR is slowly but surely coming together!

Landing on a New Frontier 

Earning a spot on Sundance’s New Frontier slate was the best thing that happened to our careers in the last year. New Frontier means that you are truly pushing the envelope of the medium and joining the forefront of the conversation.