Useful terms of virtual reality filmmaking for a successful project
For a good virtual reality content, the brands need to understand some terms that will prove important in terms of content. Here are some of the basic jargons that you should know for the successful delivery of your project.
Agency
Agency is the factor that makes the user do something while being a part of the experience. While films only let you perceive the events, the VR takes it a step further and lets you interact and take decisions while exploring the virtual world.
The success of the participation level decides how good a virtual reality film is.
Empathy
Empathy is something very important for both films as well as any good piece of journalism. In general terms, empathy is the feeling that one shares with another person. When it comes to virtual reality filmmaking, the level at which the user can go and feel the power of the content, feel the emotions of the characters and connect with it, is very important for virtual reality content. The films and TV shows have tried using empathy in several ways but with VR, the audience can connect with the characters in their own world and feel their emotions.
POV and perspective
When immersive journalism demands empathy, one needs to give special attention towards the POV or the character who is telling the story. Since the audience is seeing the entire film through the eyes of the character, they easily understand their POV and hence are able to empathize with the characters.
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What is immersive journalism experience and how it differs from the conventional ones?
The need to make the audience stay connected with the story has been one of the prime requirements of the media platforms. The television sets don’t provide this experience and often fail to capture the interest of their audience. The live TV experience is still connecting because there is something unique about being able to watch the events that are happening in the real time.
With innovation of media and the style of storytelling, the news channels have become really keen on the idea of bringing immersive journalism to their reporting methods.
Let’s see what is immersive style of storytelling is.
Immersive journalism is a part of VR storytelling where the content involves the user’s physical presence so much that they lose the idea about where they are. This experience doesn’t rely on getting a positive feedback from the users in the real time because the users don’t know where they are. Instead of telling how they are feeling, they instead become a part of the story.
Immersive journalism is more engaging and raises the empathy level from the audience who are experiencing it.
This is a ground breaking innovation in many ways. It is different from the conventional methods because of many reasons.
Virtual reality filmmaking gives a real time experience of the story even if it is not broadcasted live. Conventional methods fail to do that and only live feed is able to provide that experience.
Virtual reality experience is not dependent on any traditional means of storytelling. Unlike conventional methods, it doesn’t need a film screen or a television screen.
VR has a picture superiority effect. In case of conventional news reports, the experiences depends on the television quality.
With so many advantages, the experience of VR is sure to win more audience with the time.
Nonny de la Peña is one of the most influential pioneers in developing virtual reality as a modern means of expression. Her work in what she calls ‘immersive journalism’ has inspired many artists to explore and innovate with virtual reality. Since the 2012 Sundance Film Festival when she presented her piece ‘Hunger in Los Angeles,’ Sundance has continued to support the emergence of this exciting new medium through Festival programming and our artist development programs.
Fun fact: The VR console pictured above was an early prototype of Oculus Rift developed by Palmer Luckey, inventor of the Oculus and an intern for Nonny de la Peña at the time.
One of the highlights of this year’s Prix Italia will be a Virtual Reality Workshop to inspire and share best practices. Caterina Villa, who works for the Prix Italia news team, has curated this month’s Social Newsroom.
Caterina has interviewed the BBC, The Guardian, VRT, Yle and immersive journalism pioneer Nonny de la Peña for this special edition. The 68th annual Prix Italia media festival will be held in Lampedusa, from 30th September to 2nd October.
The island of Lampedusa has been one of the main gateways for refugees and other migrants entering Europe to escape tyranny, war and poverty. The theme of this year’s festival, “Historytelling, now,” focuses on the role of public service media not only to inform citizens, but also to increase understanding, as a crisis of historic proportions engulfs the Old Continent.
“The way we narrate reality is a core value of Public Service Media,” says Prix Italia Secretary-general Vittorio Argento. “The way we recount the refugee emergency has an immediate effect on public opinion in our country and beyond, which then has an impact on policies and integration.”
New tools are available to journalists to engage citizens, create empathy and deepen understanding. VR in particular has made huge progress in the past months and is developing into an increasingly relevant platform for storytelling of all kinds.
The workshop will provide a showcase for some of the best 360° videos and immersive journalism in Europe to show participants what is already possible now and what is likely in the future.
It's not the best way to tell every kind of story; but for a particular sort of narrative, where putting you on scene generates a more powerful emotional response to what's going in, it can't be beaten.
Nonny de la Peña runs the Los Angeles-based Emblematic Group, a virtual reality company that creates content for the Oculus Rift and other customized goggle and tracking systems. Her pioneering work on immersive journalism has earned her the nickname, ‘The Godmother of VR’.
It's definitely a new frontier, and it's definitely more immersive than other media. It fully holds your attention in a way that no other screen can - you can't look away to check your texts, and you don't want to anyway.
Your mind tricks your body into believing that you're present in some other location, and that's kind of transfixing. It's not the best way to tell every kind of story; but for a particular sort of narrative, where putting you on scene generates a more powerful emotional response to what's going in, it can't be beat.
How feasible is it technically, cost-wise and ethically?
There are definitely ways to make a cost-effective piece as the technology keeps developing and changing. I made my first project, "Hunger in L.A.,” which was the first VR piece to get into the Sundance Film Festival, for $700.
But that involved calling in a lot of favours. People, for example, “donated” animated characters for me to place into the CG environment that I built.
At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve made pieces that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, where the money gets spent on things including very high-quality body and facial scanning and animation for characters, as well as film crews shooting on location, with all the costs and trappings of a traditional shoot.
You can make really effective work at either end of the budget spectrum, but it depends on the specifics of the scene you’re creating. It’s cheaper to recreate a dark, rainy night than it is a crowd of people in a hyper-detailed environment that you can walk around in.
What are the pros and cons of immersive experiences when it comes to news?
The pros are that the viewer has a much more immersive experience than just watching something on a 2D screen. In VR, the user can explore the scenario, move around inside it, see different details from different angles.
But most importantly, she or he feels a powerful emotional response thanks to the sense of being “present” in the story.
As for pitfalls, aspiring VR filmmakers are faced with a bewildering array of competing camera equipment, content platforms and viewing hardware, with new products launched daily.
So it’s complicated, and it’s also expensive. But that will change very rapidly in the near future.
When does it get too much?
Like every other form of media, VR could of course be used in the wrong way. Someone could, for example, deliberately recreate a false version of events; because the experience is so immersive, this could be quite convincing.
How do we prevent this? By being as scrupulous as possible in our own standards and techniques.
In some of our pieces, for example, we have used actual recordings of 911 calls to the police as the audio track, as well as architectural plans of buildings where the events took place.
We’re trying to explore the best practices for how to use VR in journalism, to get standards established that make it harder for misinformation to get through.
What do you think immersive journalism could mean when it comes to telling very charged human stories, like the refugees and the so-called migration crisis?
I’m trying to craft a new type of journalism: there are some stories that are better told in this medium than in any other, and I want to tell as many of them as I can. Project Syria, in particular, addresses the Syrian refugee crisis.
It generates an incredible sense of empathy with characters and situations, because of that sense of presence, of really being there on the scene. Project Syria was commissioned by the World Economic Forum to be shown at Davos in 2014, and as an offshoot of that we were invited to set it up at the V&A Museum in London for three days.
Without any marketing or promotion - it was literally just people who happened to be at the museum and saw this weird contraption in the Tapestry Room and wandered over to investigate - it generated 54 pages worth of comments in the guest book.
They were all overwhelmingly positive, and many of them made the same specific point over and over again: this is so much more powerful than just seeing something on the TV news.
Some say that VR has not yet become the breakthrough of the year and that no one has created a “killer app” and there’s the cost of positional-tracking headsets. What will be the next developments in your opinion?
Gartner group is estimating 25 million headsets in the market by 2018, so VR will undoubtedly become a core component of mainstream news and entertainment. In news, for example, you will see the scenes of major stories being scanned, and audiences will be able to go "inside" them rather than watching them on a screen.
Movement will be an even bigger part of the experience than it is already, as newer headsets allow you to walk around, as opposed to sitting or standing in one spot. This will present a challenge for 360° video; although it's a hot topic now, for the degree of realism it brings, it doesn't let you walk around inside an immersive experience.
By 2018 we'll have a hybrid solution, combining the realism of 360° video with the immersive, volumetric capabilities of CG and gaming platforms like Unity and Unreal.
THE GUARDIAN’S 6X9: EXPERIENCING LIFE IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
MAY 2016
The Guardian took a big step towards bringing VR into the mainstream when it launched an app in April to convey the shocking realities of life in solitary confinement. Called “6x9″ it’s available free of charge to smartphone users.
The VR experience is enhanced by the harrowing stories of six people who spent time in solitary. Francesca Panetta is Special Projects Editor for Guardian News & Media.
How did the decision to build 6x9 come about?
My job at the Guardian is Special Projects Editor, a remit to experiment in storytelling. I was interested in virtual reality as a form and had been thinking about what we could do.
Simultaneously in the office we were talking about solitary confinement. It’s actually a topic we’ve covered a lot in the past.
Our chief reporter Ed Pilkington has been covering the story of Albert Woodfox, just recently out of solitary confinement after 43 years.
In the office we were talking about doing a project on solitary with many components. In the end it was just 6x9 that materialized.
What were the biggest challenges?
It was a very complicated project in many respects - we had never made a piece in CGI or a gaming engine. We asked The Mill if they wanted to work with us on the project and they ended up investing in the project too, making it a real collaboration.
They were also very understanding of the integrity that needed to be in the piece. This was a piece of journalism not a game and throughout we discussed what that meant for the piece.
I sent the 2D pictures of the room to the people I interviewed who had been in solitary confinement to check it looked similar to their room. We asked a psychologist to watch the piece to check if the symptoms we represent were accurately portrayed.
What are the pros and cons of immersive experiences when it comes to news?
As for the pros, it is incredibly visceral and experiential. If the story benefits from having you there on location, it can be powerful.
On the other hand, it is currently not a cheap option and is time consuming. But that will change quickly.
Also distribution - at the moment not everyone has VR headsets but, again, that will change as the technology develops.
What is the added value of this kind of storytelling?
It’s a very different kind of storytelling - spatial. It places you there. This isn’t relevant for all stories, but when it is there is huge added value.
Do you think VR might be the next frontier of journalism? You have mentioned that it’s not cheap. How feasible is it technically and ethically?
At the moment it’s not straightforward to make pieces like 6x9 technically, but simpler pieces are possible. Most news organizations are making 360 videos, which are less complicated to make.
And, with time, I think the overall process will become cheaper.
I believe the ethics are the same as all journalism. You need to decide if you are portraying the story and the characters fairly.
All journalism is edited and to a certain extent constructed. A written article is carefully crafted with characters and quotes woven in.
I don’t see virtual reality as having any different issues with ethics, it’s just a new form so the ground rules and established codes of practices aren’t set in stone yet.
As one of the main topics of this year’s Prix will be the so called migration crisis, do you think that VR and immersive experiences could enhance reporting from key hot spots along the migrant route?
Yes. You can imagine many VR pieces which approach migration. It will certainly be a big story all this year and I’m sure we’ll see many VR pieces on the topic.
What are the Guardian’s plans for the future when it comes to VR and immersive journalism?
6x9 was an experiment - a proof of concept. It worked in terms of journalism and was an effective way to tell a story we care about.
We have a history of being at the forefront of digital innovation and regularly experiment with the different forms our journalism can take - including virtual reality - and look forward to investigating the potential for using this technology more in the future.
