BEAUTIFUL NEW LANGUAGES: NEW REALITIES OF STORIES

The power of stories ratchets up as Virtual Reality heightens their abilities to transport us.

This year, the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier is largely devoted to the powerful new stories being told via VR.

While Virtual Reality (VR) tech has been around since the 1990s, it has made such exponential progress in the past couple of years. The viewing/experiential tools are still a bit clunky, but we get past them because the rest is so cool.

While it seems quite primitive to don a Google cardboard viewing scope, once you do, you are propelled into a futuristic 360-degree viewing experience in Chris Milk’s Evolution of Verse. We are immersed in a magical, poetic land, where a train explodes into birds, and birds transform into raining multicolored streamers.

The cardboard viewer also delivered in Ian Hunter’s Kaiju Fury!, as monsters smash your world.

We “stood” in a field amongst beautiful buffalo as they mosied and grazed around us in Oscar-nominated director Danfung Dennis’ experiential doc essay film Zero Point. Our hearts skipped a beat as they came near, moving their giant bodies, almost too close to our own vulnerable selves.

We felt the wind in our faces as we “flew,” flapping our arms, as if wings, affecting our 3D paths, in Birdly, as we lay, face down, in a T-frame and experienced the physical and visual sensation of flying above a city as if we were eagles.

We “ran,” sometimes chasing, sometimes being chased through the woods, as they changed from familiar to surreal in color and form in Vincent Morisset’s Way to Go.

Oscar Raby’s Assent, is an autobiographical interactive documentary about Chile’s Caravan of Death in the aftermath of the 1973 coup. 

Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria, will “take you” to a busy Aleppo street in Syria, just as a rocket hits. It is a brilliant advance since her debut of Hunger in Los Angeles at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012 with Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey.

Get ready to shout “Viva la revolution!” in Navid Khonsari’s 1979 Revolution Game, a video game/documentary installation in which the user partakes in the Iranian revolution.

Khonsari, the founder of iNK Stories, developed the cinematic look and feel for video games, such as Grand Theft Auto.

The collaborative duo, Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël return to the Sundance Film Festival with a series of VR delights:

Live with a nomadic family of yak herders in Herders.

Hang out with a celebrated Montreal musician in his studio on a cold winter’s day in Félix and Paul’s Strangers with Patrick Watson.

Check out WILD - The Experience, Félix and Paul’s VR experience, drawing from the film Wild in which you can enter a fully immersive media environment to join Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), and her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), in a vision from the afterlife.

In the Festival’s panel discussion, A New Language in Filmmaking: Virtual Reality, top directors, including Chris Milk (An Evolution of Verse), Rose Troche (Perspective), Saschka Unseld (story consultant to Oculus), and animator Glen Keane (The Little Mermaid) explored this new language and approach to storytelling.

It is obvious to see the entertainment value of stories told in VR -- films, games, shows -- but think about the power of VR stories in education, business, politics, and social impact.

This week we are celebrating Beautiful Stories, with most of our posts featuring films and performances making their debut right now at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. BeautifulNow will be bringing you stories on location, live from the Festival, so stay tuned here for posts and check our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr pages and BeautifulNow Sundance page for live updates.

Read more about Beautiful Stories, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including 10 Beautiful Stories Told Through New Films @ Sundance Now, Stunning Stories of Science and Tech @ Sundance and Beautiful Food Stories Happening Right Now.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Stories in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 02.1.15. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!

PHOTO CREDITS:

1. Image: Courtesy of Chris Milk. Still from Chris Milk’s Evolution of Verse.
2. Image: Courtesy of VRSE.works. Stone Milker.
3. Image: Courtesy of Chris Milk. Still from Evolution of Verse.
4. Image: Courtesy of Ian Hunter. Still from Kaiju Fury!
5. Image: Courtesy of Danfung Dennis. Still from Zero Point.
6. Image: Courtesy of ZHDK. Birdly Machine.
7. Image: Courtesy of ZHDK. Still from Birdly.
8. Image: Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada. Still from Way to Go.
9. Image: Courtesy of Oscar Raby. Still from Assent.
10. Image: Courtesy of Emblematic Group. Still from Project Syria.
11. Image: Courtesy of iNK Stories. Still from 1979 Revolution Game.
12. Image: Courtesy of Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. Still from Herders.
13. Image: Courtesy of Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. Still from Strangers with Patrick Watson.
14. Image: Courtesy of Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. Still from WILD - The Experience.
15. Image: Courtesy of Oculus Rift. Oculus Rift.
16. Image: Courtesy of Danfung Dennis. Using Zero Point.
17. Image: Courtesy of Sundance. Cardboard VR Viewer.
18. Image: Courtesy of Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. Still from WILD - The Experience.