All in your head

NEW YORK—The only way to see Allumette, at 20 minutes the longest virtual reality feature film ever made, was to travel down to a penthouse in Manhattan’s financial district. Penrose Studios—a San Francisco–based virtual reality (VR) film studio made up of alumni from Pixar, DreamWorks, and Oculus—had rented space there before the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. One rug in the middle of an open room with low-lying couches and wooden floors was where you stood to watch Penrose’s superb film, Allumette, a creative interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl.”

Don’t leave the rug and you’ll be fine, one of the film’s creators advised as he tightened a VR headset on me and then took up his menial job of making sure I didn’t tangle myself in cords during the movie— or whatever this experience was. The exquisitely animated film had the feel of a Pixar short, but the experience was different than any movie or game or even the 360-degree films you can watch on a smartphone through a Google Cardboard viewer. In a VR film, you are immersed in the narrative with the help of a personal headset that provides sight and sound and senses your movements: In some movies the viewer is a character himself, in others an invisible bystander.

Eugene Chung, who wrote and directed Allumette, used to work at Pixar. Then in 2013 he tried out an early version of Oculus Rift, the long-anticipated, $599 VR headset that began shipping to consumers this April.

“I remember taking the headset off and I couldn’t even contain it,” Chung said. He thought, “This is going to change the world.”

Oculus hired Chung to head up its Story Studio, which has released short animated VR films. Not too long after Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion, Chung left to found Penrose. Chung believes that with the proper technology and artistry, VR films like his are the future of visual narrative and will leave traditional movies in the dust as movies left operas in the dust more than a century ago. Skeptics of VR aren’t so sure: Whether the medium becomes widely popular may depend on the quality of VR films, in terms of both storytelling and technical chops.

Chung’s team at Penrose put Allumette together in less than a year, assembling the tech infrastructure needed for VR animation at the same time as they were making the film.

As Allumette opens, you are standing in a quaint town with clouds surrounding you above and below. Large wooden ships hum past through the air. You see in front of you Allumette, a girl, alone at night and examining her glowing box of matchsticks. She strikes a match, flashing back to a scene with her mother on one of the flying ships. At different points in the story, you can physically lean forward and climb into the belly of the ship to see what is happening inside.

Sound mostly directs your vision, so you aren’t wandering aimlessly as you might in a video game. A puttering ship engine behind you makes you turn to see what’s coming, or a character coughing grabs your attention. Time seems to alter inside the VR headset: The 20-minute movie didn’t feel like more than five or 10 minutes.

Unlike early virtual reality, this film doesn’t make you motion sick, nor does the immersive experience overwhelm you. It makes you feel as if you are watching a story unfold in a new way. Allumette makes the hype around virtual reality films seem not so outlandish.

Since the general public has little access to virtual reality films, or to high-quality VR headsets, the demand at the special interactive day of the Tribeca Film Festival for these VR productions was high. A line formed for Allumette, and Deep VR, a five-minute animated VR experience in which you swim underwater, had an eight-hour waitlist. Penrose will release the first few minutes of Allumette for free on some of the new VR headsets coming out this year, but the studio isn’t sure about distributing the entire film yet.

“We’re basically pioneering every aspect of this whole thing,” said Chung.

Virtual reality as the next cinematic medium has many barriers—the distribution via expensive, clunky headsets; the technical developments required to create quality VR films; and funding, to name a few. But believers in the technology think those are the same kinds of barriers other new media faced and overcame.

Penrose recently raised $8.5 million in seed funding. Another new VR studio, Baobab, announced it raised $6 million in investment in December. Yet another studio, Jaunt, already has significant backing from companies like Disney.

Only this year are high-quality VR headsets becoming available to consumers. In addition to April’s release of the Oculus Rift, another major headset, HTC Vive ($799), also just started shipping to consumers. The Sony PlayStation VR ($499) is forthcoming. Tractica, a firm that researches the technology market, estimated to Vice that 15.9 million VR headsets will sell this year. The VR doubters think only video gamers will want to invest in expensive headsets, and that the medium lends itself more to participatory games than to film.

Christians might be concerned too about how this new technology will influence their brains and souls. The pornography industry, which was first to VHS and streaming video, could end up exploiting virtual reality for its own purposes.

But so far the biggest porn companies haven’t invested much in this medium, perhaps waiting to see whether consumers invest in headsets, according to a report from the website Mashable, which tracks the digital world.

“Like any medium, [virtual reality] can be abused, and offer false promises of satisfaction or escape from this world,” said Pepperdine University film professor Craig Detweiler. “But it also has the potential to make us laugh and cry and feel closer to our neighbors.”

Detweiler thinks the broader issue in media, including VR, is the tension between valuing real human interactions and the mediated interactions via machines. As machines become a bigger part of the world, “a kind of post-human future,” he said, “people of faith can’t afford to ignore emerging formats and need to be actively engaged in both creating new stories and also being willing to push the pause button in their own lives.”

‘Like any medium, [virtual reality] can be abused, and offer false promises of satisfaction or escape from this world, but it also has the potential to make us laugh and cry and feel closer to our neighbors.’ —Craig Detweiler

STANDING IN THE TRIBECA interactive studio jammed with people waiting to watch a VR film, Pearl, was the movie’s producer, David Eisenmann. The room was at capacity, and more people were waiting outside. Eisenmann was a computer graphics supervisor at Pixar beginning in 1997 before moving to Google Spotlight Stories to work on VR films.

“To me, it feels like it did in the early days of Pixar,” Eisenmann said of virtual reality films. He recalled the mix of engineers and artists at Pixar’s inception creating new technology as they made movies. “We didn’t know where it would go when we were making it.”

Patrick Osborne, an experienced animator at Disney, directed Pearl, and Google has enlisted Aardman Animations (the creator of Wallace and Gromit) and Pixar director/writer/animator Jan Pinkava—behind the Oscar-winning Pixar short Geri’s Game—for other VR projects.

Pearl has more basic animation and much less movement than Allumette, but it’s a well-told story. The five-minute film follows a girl as she grows up, but the scenes take place entirely inside a car as her father travels the country with his guitar in tow. Wearing a VR headset, you the viewer can spin around in the car and even stand up to poke your head out of the sunroof to watch the daughter catch passing fireflies in a jar.

The Pearl filmmakers said they struggled with how to do cuts. Feedback on the earlier versions of the film said it was too jumpy and made people sick. The animators figured out a solution: For the first six shots of the film, they placed six stable objects in the car, like a guitar, that stayed in the same place as shots changed. After six shots they could remove the objects because the audience was used to the framework by then. Putting the audience inside the car for the entire film also stabilized the viewers.

The team finished the film in December, but then spent the following months ironing out technical issues so that it would play smoothly—an indication of how new the technology is. Even at the Tribeca interactive day, where several VR projects were playing in one big studio, the team was struggling with interference from another system across the room that was making their video stutter and glitch.

Pearl was well-done, and Allumette exceptional. But most VR projects right now aren’t great, and filmmakers are concerned that bad content could doom the medium. Opeyemi Olukemi, the director of interactive programs at Tribeca Film Institute, who also curated the VR films at the festival, said her role is to keep out the bad stuff.

“Ultimately it may fail, not because it didn’t have potential but because people have hopped on the bandwagon and just created fluff,” Olukemi said. But she’s optimistic about the broader future of interactive storytelling.

“People are really thrilled that this could be something as powerful as film.”

360-degree activism

Activist groups are turning to virtual reality as a way for audiences to experience an issue in the first person, and perhaps feel empathy as a result. Such projects at Tribeca depicted a confrontation with police, solitary confinement, and a woman going to get an abortion.

Planned Parenthood funded the abortion project, titled Across the Line, which the group showed on smartphone viewers outside the U.S. Supreme Court the day of the Texas abortion case arguments this year.

The filmmakers used documentary footage of a pregnant woman going to an abortion center with her friend: The two drive past a large group of pro-life protesters with signs outside and roll down the window to ask a man where to park. The man turns out to be a sidewalk counselor and tries to encourage the woman to seek help at a pregnancy center down the road—he says she would be making a “dignified choice.” The friend retorts that the woman is making a dignified choice by having an abortion. Inside the abortion center, the woman is upset, and the abortionist comforts her and offers support. This particular VR experience didn’t feel markedly immersive or different from a documentary. —E.B.