How the Oculus Rift Brings the Tribeca Film Festival to Life
The festival's Storyscapes exhibit brings film buffs into the action with gadgets like the Oculus Rift headset.
By Chandra Steele
Chandra Steele
Senior Features Writer
My title is Senior Features Writer, which is a license to write about absolutely anything if I can connect it to technology (I can). I've been at PCMag since 2011 and have covered the surveillance state, vaccination cards, ghost guns, voting, ISIS, art, fashion, film, design, gender bias, and more. You might have seen me on TV talking about these topics or heard me on your commute home on the radio or a podcast. Or maybe you've just seen my Bernie meme.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-the-oculus-rift-brings-the-tribeca-film-festival-to-life
Film can be an impersonal medium. Unless you're at a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, watching movies is usually a rather passive event. Tribeca Film Festival organizers understand this, and that's where the Storyscapes(Opens in a new window) experience comes in.
Two floors of a building on Varick St. in Manhattan were transformed into the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination(Opens in a new window) for the transmedia event that is in its second year and runs through Sunday, April 27.
"It's about what a story is like when it truly surrounds you," said Ingrid Kopp, director of digital initiatives at the Tribeca Film Institute.
Check out PCMag's tour of Storyscapes in the video, as well as the stories behind some of the films below.
On a Human Scale(Opens in a new window) is the most simple of the projects, but in some ways the most emotional. Artist and musician Matthew Matthew approached New Yorkers on the street and had them do something that not many would attempt in public, let alone at the behest of a stranger: sing. He substituted a piano's notes with their voices to create a portable, playable human orchestra linked with images of each of the singers.
Around the corner from Matthew are two Oculus Rift-based projects. Visitors, including TFF co-founder Robert De Niro (above), can slip on the virtual-reality goggles and enter the world of Clouds(Opens in a new window) or use their bodies to power a Kinect version. The interactive documentary is a self-navigated exploration of artists who use computer code in their work. "It's made much more like a video game than a film," director James George said of the piece, for which he and co-director Jonathan Minard were given the Bombay Sapphire Award for Transmedia.
"We'd been working with this material, these 3D-scanned interviews at the same time that the Oculus Rift came out, and when we tried putting the two together we found it was the perfect synergy as a way to view this new emerging media of cinema," George said. "We had no other choice beside, you know, let's make it work for the Rift."
Also Rift-based is Rise, which is not in the competition at Storyscapes but takes a frame from a film and puts viewers inside a tense moment between a protagonist, a villain, and a bomb. Director David Karlak worked on the project with Scott Metzger, co-founder of Nurulize. "It's a frozen moment in time that the audience is allowed to explore," Karlak said.
When Kopp saw the Oculus Rift, she knew it was a must for Storyscapes. "Obviously if we're talking about immersiveness and we're talking about stories surrounding you, it would be crazy not to have the Oculus, which is going to change, I think, the way that we think about virtual reality and the way we think about the kinds of films that we consume," she said.
Journalist Nonny de la Peña is looking to get people involved in real stories and issues. Her Use of Force(Opens in a new window) recreates witness accounts and cell phone video footage of the brutal death of Anastacio Hernandez Rojas at the hands of border patrol guards. By using a virtual-reality device originally developed pre-Oculus Rift by the company's founder, Palmer Luckey, visitors feel as helpless and incensed as the witnesses that they live through. "I've put thousands of people through and seen how powerful these experiences can be for telling news stories," de la Peña said.
While Use of Force transports participants to an emotional place they might not have visited, Circa 1948(Opens in a new window) brings them to a place they can no longer visit; a town in Vancouver post-World War II that was razed for its profligate population and activities. Participants can walk through projections that surround an entire room, a Kinect tracking their steps. For those who can't make it to the House of Imagination, there's an accompanying app that recreates the experience(Opens in a new window) on phones and tablets.
Finally, writer and performer Nathan Penlington takes people through a walk of a different kind in his live show Choose Your Own Documentary(Opens in a new window). His quest to find the owner of 106 books from the cherished 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series is done, of course, choose-your-own adventure style (1,566 versions of the show and five possible endings), with Penlington narrating the events that led him to acquire the books of Terence Prendergast and the heartbreaking 20-year-old diary tucked inside. As life does, a meander through the House of Imagination has the same number of endings as Penlignton's show.
If you want to check it out, you can register for a time slot(Opens in a new window) this weekend, but hurry - those slots are filling up.
For more, check out Digital Artists Reimagine the Music Video.
About Chandra Steele
I strive to explain topics that you might come across in the news but not fully understand, such as NFTs and meme stocks. I've had the pleasure of talking tech with Jeff Goldblum, Ang Lee, and other celebrities who have brought a different perspective to it. I put great care into writing gift guides and am always touched by the notes I get from people who've used them to choose presents that have been well-received. Though I love that I get to write about the tech industry every day, it's touched by gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequality and I try to bring these topics to light.
Outside of PCMag, I write fiction, poetry, humor, and essays on culture.
Read Chandra's full bio
Read the latest from Chandra Steele
Must-Watch: The Most-Streamed TV Shows and Movies This Week
These Are the K-Dramas Fans Are Most Excited to Stream in 2023
Is Dall-E the Next Dior? How AI Is Trying to 'Make It Work' in Fashion
AI Is Exactly as Biased as the Information We Feed It
Which US States Are Most Vulnerable to Identity Theft?
More from Chandra Steele