Storytelling for Virtual Reality by Bucher John;

Author:Bucher, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2017-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

John Bucher: You’re someone who’s had quite an accomplished history in storytelling, before we even get to VR. Can we talk about that first moment when you experienced VR? What were your thoughts?

Chris Edwards: Well, for me, VR reminded me instantly of two other big experiences I had in my life, long before VR even existed. That is the theater and theatrical events and, secondly, going to the theme park. I feel like the theater is a lot like VR because, of course, you as the director of the theatrical experience have the ability to place all of these people and objects and set pieces, and rearrange them, and do these transitions, and yet, you know that even sometimes, the actors can break the fourth wall, they can go down the aisle, they can go past the proscenium. If you go to a Cirque du Soleil show, there are people dangling from bungee cords sometimes. If you go to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, you see tons of things that involve the audience, involving multiple forms of media and physical objects all around you.

When I first saw VR, I wasn’t too impressed with what was actually happening, because I knew that it had been done before, in reality. Along the lines of the theme park, it was very similar. The whole point of it is to go beyond the movie or the franchise or the character and actually step into that character’s world. Even in the original Disneyland, you could go in and be part of Sleeping Beauty’s story, or one of the Disney classics, yet it’s all a bunch of mechanical gags and different pieces of artwork that pop up at the right time. That’s still very effective.

Fast-forward to all these panels that are talking about the film language of VR. Scientists are getting up on those panels and saying, “Well, this is so new, we will not know the full language of this for many generations, and it’s a long process, and we really don’t have many conclusions yet.” I say, “Well, no, we actually do have a lot of conclusions. There are certain things about VR that are custom to this new medium, for sure. Still, the large majority of it is based on traditional directing in film, before film even existed. Film was just the medium that had to put it in a rectangle. Now we’re going beyond the rectangle.

One of my soapboxes is that a lot of people still think that VR is a binary decision, it’s an on or off switch. You have to use full 360, or nothing. You’re back to the traditional medium. I think you can play with how much of the environment you show. Sometimes, 180 degrees works just fine. You can put floating windows out there, of different media. The impact of that switch from the choices of individual little shots collaged to one big image is undeniable.

I think that the language of VR is actually quite sophisticated and will increasingly create new subgenres of media within VR.

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