Aleem Hossain - Launchpad Weekly Updates - "I Never Told You"
WEEK 1
I'm a filmmaker who just finished my first feature film as a writer/director. It's a sci-fi drama and I'm just starting to send it out the festivals. For the past year or so, as I was completing my film, I've been getting more and more excited about VR.
My current goal is to create my first immersive experience (a fictional live-action one) by early fall.
What have I been thinking about creatively?
As a filmmaker, one of my big goals is to approach VR with an open mind. I don't want to bring a lot of filmmaking assumptions to the process by default. And I've been searching for project ideas that feel truly/essentially VR… and not just a film idea shoved into the 360 format for no real reason.
I'm nowhere near the first person to say this but I think the key is to figure out what's truly essential about VR, what's unique to it.
In cinema, I think editing and framing are such central tools b/c film is an amazing way to manipulate what the audience sees and doesn't see, and how fast or slow information reaches them, and what order they see or feel things in, and what information/emotions are combined or isolated. Many (though of course not all) of the best films really take advantage of these strengths or explicitly subvert them.
But what about VR? It's early days in this art form but for sure people have zeroed in on the idea of “presence” as being one of the essential parts of the VR experience. And of course there's the inescapable fact that the “audience” in VR is much more conscious of themselves in the art form… they are almost always made to feel like they are inside the art, a participant.
So I decided I wanted to try and do something that evokes presence and explicitly makes the viewer be conscious of themselves in the experience.
I know, I know… that's pretty vague. I felt that way too… until I thought about Sam.
Do you remember Sam?
Quantum Leap blew my mind as a kid. I just loved the idea, the characters, everything. If you've never seen the show, it's about a guy named Sam Beckett who is traveling through time in a very particular way: His consciousness is constantly being dropped into the body of someone in the past. He's a white guy in his 30's in the present day but he finds himself in the body of a mafia hitman in the 1960's, an older black man in the segregated south of the 1950's, a single mother, etc.
The show is a 1980's network drama, so it's not particularly subtle. But it's pretty profound if you ask me. We see Sam get sexually harrassed as a woman. We see him racially attacked as a black man. We all know the old adage about walking a mile in another person's shoes… Sam gets to literally do this.
And with VR, we all can do this.
Which brings me to the specifics of my project: I'm going to develop an immersive VR experience about being looked at.
One of the most personal and unique experiences we have is the way people look at us.
Until now, it's been very hard to truly let someone besides yourself viscerally experience this.
I don't want to be too simplistic but just to make my idea clear, I'll start with some pretty clunky examples.
- The moment when you arrive at a party and everyone looks over at you… I think it's really different for women vs men (Or even just walking down a city street).
- Getting pulled over by the cops and first moment the officer makes eye contact with you… I think it's really different depending on your race.
- Being in a room full of strangers vs your closest family – you get looked at differently.
I'd like to film some scenes where I direct the actors to treat the camera as a very specific person (in terms of gender, race, age, relationship to them, etc)… and cycle the user through these scenarios. Some may feel very familiar and others will hopefully feel very strange. You will hopefully get to feel in a truly visceral way what it is like for someone other than yourself to be looked at.
Basically, I'm going to do a meditation on being looked at. I'm imagining this is more of an experimental/emotional piece than an actual narrative one… but there will be an emotional journey for the user. A gut-level, pared down to its purest form, version of walking a mile in other people's shoes.
Those are my creative thoughts at the moment.
What have I been thinking about technically?
VR live-action camera technology is driving me crazy. It's so obvious to me that everything being used to shoot stuff right now will seem totally outdated in a year… and probably laughable in a few years. I'm coming from the film/video side of things where now that we're past the crazy early years of digital, we're at a point where the camera technology is no longer a significant obstacle in the process and can pretty much do whatever we want it to.
But it's also pretty exciting to be at the beginning of an art form, not just artistically but also creatively. I'm going to choose to focus on this. I was never going to be there with Edison and the Lumiere brothers figuring out 35mm film cameras… but the VR versions of those folks are working on the tech right now.
I've got a Ricoh Theta which I'm using to do tests. I want to shoot my actual project on a better rig but I love the Ricoh for testing/brainstorming. (Thank you Marcy for encouraging me to play around with it) When I'm making films, my iPhone (and before that my miniDV handicam) is an essential tool. I'm constantly testing shots and edits. For me, it's way more productive than storyboarding. The Ricoh feels like it will play a similar role in my VR experiments.
Eye contact will be extremely important for my project. I want the user to feel like they are being looked in the eyed– I want them to get that buzzy feeling I get when I've got the headset on and a character (live-action or CG) really looks at me.
So I've started doing tests for live-action eye contact.
At the moment, I'm experimenting with distance to camera (in terms of how readable a face is). I shot of series of tests standing at progressively farther distances from the camera. With the Ricoh at least, the fall off was pretty quick and pretty sharp. Once I was 4-5 feet away from the camera I felt like my gaze into the lens was already less powerful when I looked at it in the headset. But there's more than one variable at work. Partially, it's problem of resolution – both the camera and playback in the headset. It's also problem of optics – how good the lenses are and how they represent depth, space, etc. I'm going to do some side by side tests with my DSLR. The flatness/fuzziness of even multi-camera GoPro based rigs is a challenge. These cameras were just not created to capture the subtlety of human emotions flickering momentarily on a face… which is not to say that can't be used to do this but I'm using my DSLR as a comparison point b/c I know that it can capture clear and powerful human emotion directly into the lens at a pretty great distance from the subject.
A second issue I'm pondering is what an actor looks like when they're staring directly at camera but the user has not fully turned into this direct gaze… is it weird to see this? Does it undermine the feeling of being looked at once you turn fully into the gaze b/c you just previously saw the gazing not being at you?
Another issue I foresee is the ability for an actor to maintain eye contact with the user while moving. On a cheap camera like the Ricoh, this is pretty easy… an actor can traverse 180 degrees of a fixed 360 frame staring at the same lens. But on a multi-camera rig… what's the answer? This is something I won't be able to test until I get access to a more complex rig.
Those are my technical-ish thoughts for the week.
Thanks for reading!
