Thread by @kentbye

The @Sundance Film Festival 2019 is officially kicking off. I'll be in Park City covering the VR/AR pieces in the #NewFrontier program & catching as many documentaries as I can.

Sundance serves as a public square for independent media (over 14k submissions) that's an antidote to shallow clickbait news. Art, culture, community are vital for making sense of what's happening in our world.

The Sundance theme is "Risk Independence." Some of the worst conditions for doing journalism today.
2 Syrian & Iranian filmmakers couldn't get visas because of the Muslim ban.
Sundance also expanded beyond white male critics with 63% of credentials to underrepresented minorities.

.@Sundance programmers. Big focus on the diversity of international programming.

There's been an incredible renaissance happening with documentary films. (Agreed!)

It's a perfect storm & a zeitgeist of resistance.

Themes:
Importance of Journalism
Rise of Nationalism
Profiles

Shari Frilot talks about how #NewFrontier is at the intersection of film, art, & technology.
She says we're at an inflection point where the human body is being brought back into storytelling, which is actually what we talked about in our 2018 discussion
voicesofvr.com/629-embodied-s…

#NewFrontier Central is a new salon space in a reclaimed Blockbuster store that features live performances.
@NonnyDLP also got a shout-out for kickstarting VR storytelling revolution at Sundance New Frontier 2012.
You can hear that oral history story here:
voicesofvr.com/6-nonny-de-la-…

Sundance has expanded it's representation of women and underrepresented minorities. Sundance serves as a pipeline for the larger film industry, and they're striving for gender parity at all dimensions of their organization (programmers, board, slate of filmmakers)

I'm off into my #Sundance adventure.
Checking out all of the #NewFrontier experiences in Friday & Saturday, and then doing Voices of VR interviews until Wednesday.
Come say "Hi!"

.@alexgibneyfilm deftly unpacks countless layers of Theranos' fraud. It's an exposé of ethical transgressions, but contextualizes the deeper culture & behavioral economics of Silicon Valley's religion of disruption.
Watch to calibrate your moral intuition
sundance.org/projects/the-i…

APOLLO 11 was entirely reconstructed from archival footage & news soundbites from that era seamlessly woven together into a lucid narrative of one of the most epic events of mankind.
sundance.org/projects/apoll…

I saw 22 out of the 24 VR/AR experiences and the first of 6 immersive stage performances at the #Sundance #NewFrontier today.
I'm about to head to the New Frontier party, and I hope to tweet out some first impressions here soon.

I've now seen all 24 #NewFrontier VR & AR pieces. Each one has either something intriguing, striking, or does something new with the medium.
Whenever someone asks for my recommendations, then I usually ask what they're looking for.
This thread attempts make those connections.

In terms of technical achievement, THE DIAL combines projection mapping w/ dynamic ambient lighting w phone-based AR (a HARD combo). It also combines bone conductance + quandraphonic audio. Also 2 roles, navigator controlling pacing of story + 2 "passenger" observers. Impressive!

TRAVELING WHILE BLACK is amazing exploration of the dynamics of racism in America. It invites you to the table of a famed DC restaurant that's transformed into a truth & reconciliation circle of people bearing witness to testimony of experiences of racism. It's SUPER powerful!

SWEET DREAMS explores taste in VR with @marshmallowlf's surealist multisensory "taster." Excellent worldbuilding & onboarding ritual that's an overloaded haptic, taste, & visual experience -- a viscerally memorable experience, in fact. Huge smiles & many moments of awe & wonder.

In terms of narrative, GLOOMY EYES pushes forward the genre of table-top, near field animation, and uses characters moving their bodies through space to take you on an adventure in this dark city plagued by zombies. Super cute & endearing story.
#NewFrontier

Kiira Benzing created one of the most fun immersive dance parties I've ever seen featuring the popping beats by @reggiewatts & @johntejada. If you like dancing, then it's pure unadulterated fun with dancers, costumes, & gravity-defying moves you've surely never seen before.

Melissa Painter fuses embodied practices of yoga, dance, & akido with VR in EMBODY. It's a great warm-up/palatte-cleanser that cultivates a sense of embodied presence. It has a fascinating backstory as a collaboration with athletic clothing store @lululemon's innovation lab.

EMERGENCE explores group dynamics. Part of the power of the VR medium will be in demonstrating non-linear dynamics of ecosystems you can play with in order to understand complex system dynamics. This experience does that in a fascinating way that patient users will have a payoff.

.@AsadJMalik's A JESTER'S TALE explores the blurring of realities with a @magicleap, and explores many different ridges of the ethical terrain of technology. It's surely meant to lead to some deeply philosophical debriefings.

.@NonnyDLP built a #WebXR platform and is using @scatterco's DepthKit to do volumetric capture of #NewFrontier attendees sharing some deep thoughts on our immersive future in 30-second clips. It's such vital work to be building out technologies on open platforms. 👍

Caleb Slain & @felixandpaul drove around Detroit w/ @Eminem & @RealSway as they engaged in an intimate conversation on place & memory. It's a really beautiful piece that feels like you're eavesdropping on a trip down memory lane while exploring all that Detroit has been through.

GHOST SHIP VR was the harddest-hitting dose of reality in the #NewFrontier program. Intense story of Tun Lin who was kidnapped & sold into slavery for 14 years on a ship catching fish. This VR doc has really stuck with me in a way that it wouldn't if it was just on a 2D screen.

ROCKETMAN360 was a surprisingly endearing romantic story of separation as the boyfriend watches an immersive love letter & memory capsule as he's about to take off to Mars. It felt like a complete journey through the entire arc of a relationship & all of it's associated places.

I had an emotionally powerful reaction to LAST WHISPERS. It geolocates endangered languages around the world with actual recordings of people speaking words that are extinct. It made me think of impacts of monoculture, & the counter decolonialization movements & hyperlocalization

THE TIDE: Ep #1 & #2 was a surrealist graphic novel story featuring giant mutant, man-eating fish. The credits said that they used @UnrealEngine, which given it's very unique and mated aesthetic was a bit of a surprise. Kind of a weird story overall, but even weirder in VR.

I saw the updated version of the @magicleap MICA demo, and the eye-tracking and social virtual presence is still some of the best I've seen in a virtual avatar. They fleshed out the worldbuilding & deeper intention for what they hope their MICA character can achieve.

THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN is a volumetric capture of a @TheRSC theater actor performance of Shakespeare seen on a @magicleap that premiered at #LeapCon. Great use of miniaturized hologram performance mixed with a spatial metaphor of the piece.

MECHANICAL SOULS did some interesting theater onboarding and debriefing with group discussions using a VR piece that explores ethical issues of AI robots. Hope to see it again & unpack it more with the creators to see what narrative innovations they've attempted.

KAIJU CONFIDENTIAL is a rare VR comedy where the turf wars & banter between these animated monsters takes some surprising turns. I'd be interested in watching this as a shared experience to see if the crowd reaction is contagious within VR.

ASHE '68 recreates the context of a powerful moment in American history as Arthur Ashe won the US Open in 1968. Uses a hand-drawn animated style that's unlike anything I've seen in VR + uses lots of 2D photos, which creates a bit of a memory palace of Ashe's historic achievement.

4 FEET: BLIND DATE explores the tension & awkwardness of a first date where the protagonist hadn't disclosed her disability. Lots of ambitious timeline jumping here that I haven't seen much of before.

Artist Teek Van Thi Mach created one of the most epic @tiltbrush scenes I've seen in quite a while, that's evolving throughout #NewFrontier. She also created what I can only describe as a virtually-manufactured moment of déjà vu, which was SUPER trippy.

INTERLOOPED uses real-time volumetric voxel capture from @imverseIO to do real-time looping of yourself. It blurs the virtual & the real & has some trippy, real-time, out-of-body, rotated perspectives of a pixelated volumetric version of myself.
#NewFrontier

LIVE STREAM FROM YUKI <3 had some interesting speculative design exploring mass ubiquitous, spatial computing holograms roaming your home. Like telepresence entities that blur the lines of reality & create on-demand, social gatherings within the near to far future.

WHERE'S MY ROY COHEN doc traces the sociopathic career of this infamous layer, McCarty aide, & mentor to Donald Trump. He never admitted any culpability, eventually got disbarred, mingled with mobsters, & architected the tactics that led to our intractable political polarization.

UNTOUCHABLE deconstructs the institutional failures of power & money that enabled Harvey Weinstein's decades of abuse through the embodied testimony of countless brave women who shared their experiences. Simultaneously cathartic to hear the truth, but gaslighting is infuriating.

Note: Journalists are being exalted as the heros in so many #Sundance documentaries. @NewYorker's @kenauletta was featured in THE INVENTOR, WHERE'S MY ROY COHEN, & UNTOUCHABLE talking about investigative stories he did on Theranos, Roy Cohen, & Harvey Weinstein.

COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD is one of the most amazing documentaries I've ever seen. Mads Brügger surrenders to serendipitous collisions through embodied investigate journalism, & goes on an amazing journey of truth & reconciliation on the dark corners of colonialism & white supremacy

.@oculus was showing an immersive theater piece in VR by @TenderClaws where you can have real-time interactions with live actors from Pie Hole. Theater and VR continues to be on a collision course, & this piece starts to build out the best practices & required moderation tools.

.@DisneyAnimation produced their first VR piece #DisneyCycles, which traces a lifetime of memories of a home for a grandmother who is moving into assisted living. Super powerful time dilation montage of emotional peak experiences.
Ping Nick for an invite:

https://twitter.com/NickaRuss/status/1088297095612657670?s=19

I was watching a projection mapped experience at the #Sundance #NewFrontier immersive stage when a baby started exploring the space. I started to see through the baby's eyes wondering what type of new neural pathways were being blazed. This next generation will blow our minds.

Thanks to @KathyBisbee for capturing this moment!