The man behind the VR curtain

NEW YORK—Eugene Chung is the founder of Penrose Studios, which makes the best animated virtual reality films available now. Though the studio is less than a year old, it has produced the longest VR feature film to date, Allumette. [See “All in your head” in the May 14 issue of WORLD.] Craig Detweiler, a film professor at Pepperdine University, thinks Chung might be the first “auteur” of the VR world.

Chung’s background at Pixar and Oculus’ Story Studio laid the foundation for Allumette, which he wrote and directed, but he thinks the love of reading he learned from his parents was the best preparation. Chung’s father is an opera singer (which Chung slyly references in Allumette), and his mother is an accountant, which he said gave him a “duality of left brain, right brain”—he is both a filmmaker and a coder. Allumette is a moving story about a mother’s sacrifice for her daughter.

I sat down with Chung when he was in New York for Allumette’s world premiere. This interview has been edited for length.

Where do virtual reality films stand right now in the entertainment industry? If I were to ask you today to name a major movie company, it’d be pretty easy right? Paramount, Warner Brothers, Fox. Super easy question. But if I were to turn it back around and say, “Can you name a major opera or stage company of the 1800s?” … We’ve forgotten the names of these companies. People forget these were the big, major media companies of the 1890s and the early 1900s. The biggest blockbuster productions, the biggest stars, the biggest budgets. And yet, only a few decades later they were virtually nonexistent and these big movie companies took the fore. Some people retort, “Well, 100 years ago, it’s a long time to remember.” And I come back with, “Well, Paramount Pictures is over 100 years old.”

I loved films and cinema. I studied cinema, I also made films—the normal way. And I was always wondering, what will replace cinema in the way that cinema replaced the opera and the stage play? I look around and my dad sings opera all the time, and my friends, none of them are going to the opera every Friday and Saturday. It’s not part of the collective consciousness in the same way that it used to be.

But when I thought about the question, when will the art forms shift, I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime. Because if you look back at history, we had stage for thousands of years, we had opera for hundreds of years, and we had cinema for a scant 100 years, now 120 years. … I probably won’t see it, right? But then I saw VR happening a few years ago … and I thought, this could be that next step.

What principles translated from working at Pixar to doing VR movies? A lot of stage directors tried to become film directors in the last transition, over 100 years ago, and most of them were unable to succeed, because … they plopped the camera down and said this is a film. And it actually took completely new creators, like the Lumière brothers, [Georges] Méliès, D.W. Griffith—who invented the closeup, which I think is one of the great cinematic inventions … of the past 100-plus years. But it took them to create and define this new medium.

A lot of the tools that we’re creating are internal to Penrose and are proprietary to Penrose. … There’s these new things we had to develop: new computer programs, new algorithms, just to make what you see run, inside your headset, 90 frames per second [a much higher rate than film or TV].

Should VR filmmakers operate with a stricter code of ethics given how invasive VR is—how it puts you inside an experience? VR is a technology, but like any other human technology that we’ve created, it’s up to humans to use it in the right way. This goes all the way back to fire. Fire is one of the earliest human inventions. You can use it for good things like heating yourself when you’re cold, you can use it for cooking meat. … You can also use it to go burn down someone’s house.

I think there are, like any other technology, bad uses of it. But I think the good uses of it are pretty interesting, right? For example, what if you were a Palestinian and you could see yourself in the shoes of an Israeli? Or if you’re an Israeli and see yourself in the shoes of a Palestinian? There’s this quality of empathy that is interesting in VR.

Does Penrose have a particular ethos on how to use the immersion of VR? Our mission statement is to create better worlds. So Allumette is a world … What you’re seeing when you’re in Allumette is only a small part of that town, it goes on for quite a while. You don’t even know because you’re stuck in this one small corner, it’s actually a whole fleshed-out world. So that’s a big part of the narrative.

We actually think of ourselves as world creators first. In fact, even the way our engineers organize our project—a little behind the scenes Penrose lore—is by worlds first, and then by story or character or whatever project.

Our thinking is that if we can create these better worlds, then in some way form or fashion, we can go and elevate people to these transcendent worlds that they can’t participate in in real life. But that then they will come back to real life, and it will impact them in a positive way, here.

All of this has happened so fast. I’ve been doing this about three years, with various hats—VR stories. But in VR it’s kind of like dog years, your few number of years feel like a lot more because you learn so much every day. Every day we make a new discovery about VR. … That’s because it’s a new medium. And there’s a lot of room for discovery.