Guest Blog: VR production and the evolution from storytelling to story-living

VR is a new medium with many emerging genres and complex production methods, so when briefs come into REWIND, the first thing we do is get clarity on what exactly is required. Is it as simple as linear 360 degree video or as complex as a VR Experience (VRE)?  Both are fantastic in their own way, but could not be further from each other in their creation.

Storytelling to story-living

The difference in user experience between these two bookends of content production can be described as ‘story-telling’ to ‘story-living'.  Storytelling applies to current film and also to 360 degree video, it’s a linear experience, the user is a passive observer. But with 360 video you get some level of immersion although it’s limited as you cannot fully interact with your environment. Story-living on the other hand applies to VRE where ‘presence’ - the real magic of VR -  is at it’s most powerful. The perception of being physically present in a non physical world is an incredibly powerful sensation. Within VRE you can fully interact with the environment you find yourself in, you can even walk around, you are fully immersed, you truly ‘live’ the story you find yourself in. Traditional film is a window into a story. In VR, you are the story.

VR requires an entirely new type of storytelling

VR requires new storytelling rules and everyone is still trying to figure them out! Unlike traditional film-making where the director has complete control over what the audience gets to see, VR allows viewers to make their own decisions about what they focus on in the scene. This is a potential problem that no one quite has the answer to yet: how do you keep the level of freedom and interaction that VR allows the viewer, while making sure they don’t miss any of the key elements of your piece? There are several options open to the director to ensure the audience’s attention can be focused when necessary; lighting and sound cues, changing the focal point of an object or character on-screen, or even verbal/action cues can be a powerful tool. In ‘Back To Dinosaur Island’ Crytek used a dragonfly moving around the player’s “head” to direct their attention and ensure that they get a good look at every part of the environment.

Creating ‘presence’ and considering the user

‘Presence’ refers to audience participation within VR, something which can be greater or smaller depending on the type of experience they’re viewing. Directors will need to decide what level of engagement they want, and ensure that the right balance is struck; if a scene is too intimate without acknowledging the viewer, it's likely users will feel uncomfortable and intrusive. Conversely, if your viewer feels like an outsider they can quickly become disengaged and disinterested.

Pushing the level of immersion

‘Home’, the epic spacewalk experience REWIND created with the BBC is a prime example of story-living. The 15 minute VRX was created in Unreal 4 for HTC’s Vive, and the content was in part inspired by NASA's training programme and the astonishing experiences of its astronauts. ‘Home’s ambition as a piece of VR is to combine a strong narrative and sense of drama with the incredible impact possible in an immersive experience to encourage and enhance the public’s interest in space. The level of immersion is heightened at live events by the integration of heart rate monitors that feed back into the experience, recreating the sound of the user’s own heartbeat in their headset. This is combined with an integrated live mic that is acoustically treated and delivered back into the experience, relaying the sound of their own breathing. The ambient sound is spatial and creates the claustrophobia of the astronaut’s helmet and the unnerving sounds of your own body and your space suit's life support system. A gaming chair is also used to provide haptic feedback to make the experience as real as possible. 

Solomon Rogers is founder of VR and creative digital agency, REWIND. His talk 'VR Production: From Story-telling to Story-living" will take place at 3.30pm, room two.

Guest Blog: Kate Russell

I’ve been writing about gaming and technology since 1995, the year the dot-com boom started. Back then, less than 1% of the global population was connected to the web – today that figure is around 40%. There are 6.5 billion mobile connections globally – almost one for every person on the planet.
Today’s gamers live in a hyper-connected online world where community and the ability to play together, and against each other, are often at the heart of enduring success for a game. The human desire to connect, be social, be part of the creation process, to interact and not be restricted by narrative or geography, manifests today in the phenomenon of live streaming on platforms like Twitch. 

I am one of over 13k streamers who earn a living playing games for others to watch. Last year Twitch had half a million average concurrent viewers devouring 459,366 years’ worth of video, with viewers on average watching over 7 hours of content per month. Those kind of sticky numbers are metrics traditional broadcast and entertainment producers can only dream of. And they are liquid, trackable gold to the advertising industry.

More and more indie game studios are approaching influencers on these platforms to tap into their audience for up and coming games, getting their support for crowd funding campaigns by providing early release download codes to whip the audiences up into a storm that often raises hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re in the process of developing a game or looking for funding and support, you’d be a fool to overlook these avenues. But it’s not just shouting about your vision and hoping people will hear. ‘If you build it they will come,’ does not always work. Building a strong online community is a real art form that begins by understanding your audience and finding ways to relate to them.

You’re going to need to be friendly, interesting, honest and transparent. You’re going to have to involve your fans in conversations about the development process and as a result will likely be put under constant pressure to get it right. And you’re going to have to learn to take criticism on the chin. 

But get it right and you stand to gain a rock solid army of supporters, promoters and friends behind you, who are personally invested in seeing you succeed; emotionally as well as financially.

And that is a pretty good engine to build the success story of your future on.

I’m going to be talking more about this in my upcoming Develop keynote in Brighton on 14th July. During the session I’ll be revealing some of the tricks I’ve learned along the way - having successfully ran my own crowd funding campaign and being a partnered Twitch Streamer for almost a year. I’ll also be suggesting a few ways you can structure your own community activities to increase engagement and motivate your fans to campaign on your behalf. 

If you have a game to promote or get funding for, I hope to see you there.

Journalist, reporter and author, Kate has been writing about technology and the Internet since 1995. Appearing regularly on BBC technology programme Click she is also a partnered Twitch streamer and speaks at conferences and lectures in schools and universities inspiring the next generation of technologists. Her website, KateRussell.co.uk , won the 2015 UK Blog Awards for best individual digital and technology blog, and in June 2016 she was voted the Computer Weekly 13th most influential woman in UK IT. Her debut novel was published in 2014 under official licence to space trading game, Elite: Dangerous, the childhood passion that inspired her love of technology. As part of the licensing deal she got to name a planet in the latest release, Elite: Dangerous. She called it Slough.