I've always had an interest in animation in an interactive context, so when I heard there was a Masterclass with Blue Zoo Productions, the UK based computer animation studio behind the experimental VR short film 'Hoodoo', at Manchester Animation festival, I had a few questions regarding design and pre-production for VR. During the masterclass I asked Catherine Salkeld and Tom Box, producers at Blue Zoo, about the limitations of designing for VR and what solutions they could see for moving beyond Room Scale VR in the future. In the 'Hoodoo' demo, which I tried out on an HTC Vive earlier in the festival, it was clear the developers were working within the limitations of the tech they were developing for. The virtual environment in which the short film takes place is limited to a small room-scale area made to look more expansive with the inclusion of a skybox; this was done for a number of reasons, some due to the limitations of the tech in it's current state but also due to the limitations of VR in it's current incarnation on a broader level.
Without the aid of a treadmill or larger scale VR playroom environment, simulating movement through a larger virtual environment would be difficult due to the dissonance between reality and the Virtual Environment experienced by the player. Instead, the developers of Hoodoo decided to embrace these technical limitations in their storytelling, setting the short film on a small, room scale area of mountaintop with events unfolding around the periphery of the player/viewer's vision. This is a technique I have seen embraced by lots of VR media in the past, as setting the virtual environment in a smaller room scale environment doesn't necessitate having to come up with a solution to simulate walking.
Lots of VR/360 degree music videos use this technique, including Bjork's 'Stonemilker' and Run the Jewels' 'Crown' music videos which place the viewer in the centre of the scene with the performer/performers acting out the music video around the viewer, directing their attention to parts of the scene through careful and precise direction.
Bjork's video takes advantage of the space granted by 360 degree video by directing the viewer's gaze throughout the video, making the appearance of additional Bjork's more and more effective as the video goes on and more and more Bjorks start to appear. RTJ's video also takes advantage of the format, depicting Mike and El-P rapping at the viewer while simultaneously acting out scenes non verbally to tell a story. Both videos take advantage of their formats by embracing the limitations of Youtube's 360 degree viewing mode.
Going back to the Blue Zoo talk, the developers also outlined how they went about designing assets for VR. Due to the varying power of consumer friendly VR devices at the current time, developers are trying to keep the polygon count on objects rendered in CG to a minimum, both to ensure parity between deviced but also to ensure a smooth immersive experience on low end tech, as frame rate is prioritised in VR over resolution. This is partially what lead to the developers on Hoodoo embracing a cartoony, child-like, low poly aesthetic for their short film. They also talked about how they went about storyboarding for VR, creating 360 boards for every scene/action that takes place, directing the viewers attention using audio/visual cues and event triggers. In a way, VR films owe more to the language of theatre and video games than to the language of film and television, as viewer's agency in the story is integral to the storytelling experience; the viewer is an active participant in the narrative rather than a passive one, and as such requires direction as to their orientation in a scene when certain event triggers play out.
Many of the directorial devices used by film and television, from dissolves to zooms to split-screens, aren't feasible in a VR narrative, as they can seem jarring to the viewer, pulling them out of the experience. So that leaves the next generation of artists to invent their own form of visual language for telling stories in a virtual environment.
There is an interesting article in The New Yorker written by Andrew Marantaz about directing films in a 360 degree space here...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/25/making-movies-with-virtual-reality
