Jake Oleson’s CURRENTS is an immersive VR180 film made for the Apple Vision Pro in partnership with Vimeo, telling the story of a Vietnamese woman overwhelmed by the shift from rural life to the city. Blending stylized visuals, spatial audio, and real stories, Oleson explores themes of identity, transformation, and the unseen forces shaping us. In this interview, he discusses the film’s origins, creative risks, and how new technology opens doors to deeper storytelling.
Cover: CURRENTS set photo
CURRENTS is an immersive film born from the story of a Vietnamese woman who dreamed of moving from the countryside to Hanoi, only to find the city overwhelming. It explores our complex relationship with urban environments, the sacrifices made for progress, and the internal and external currents that shape our lives. Developed in partnership with Vimeo for the Apple Vision Pro, the film utilizes VR180, spatial audio, and stylized visuals like point clouds to delve into themes of personal cost, identity, and societal pressure. Interview with director Jake Oleson.
CURRENTS Synopsis
Project Origins and Inspiration
Jake Oleson – My name is Jake Oleson. I’m a filmmaker and electronic musician and multidisciplinary artist. I tell stories using tools that excite me in ways that feel different and kind of uncomfortable for me. A friend of mine started a production company in Vietnam a few years ago called Bun Cha. She told me the story of a woman who lived in the countryside of Vietnam and had a dream of moving to Hanoi. She made the move to Hanoi and she ended up hating it. It was too much, just sensory overload.
J. O. – This was a story that I was looking to explore through a music video, and then Vimeo reached out to me about a partnership they had with Apple to create a Vimeo app for the Apple Vision Pro. They wanted to commission me to make a project that would get filmmakers excited about immersive as a medium.
J. O. – I hadn’t made a VR project before, but I’d been experimenting with 3D scanning tech and AI tools, and I guess they saw me as an artist that was not afraid to just experiment, but also follow stories that had an emotional core to it. So I pitched them this story of a woman in Vietnam with the dream of moving to the city, exploring our relationship to cities and the cost – or what we sacrifice in order to move forward – and what it’s like to try to really push through the tides of whatever societal energy is pushing against us.
J. O. – I had a rough script and went to Vietnam a few weeks before the shoot and spoke to a lot of young people who had made the move themselves from rural Vietnam to the city. Just breathing more life into the script and making me feel more comfortable that it was a true representation of the film or the experience that people were having.
Technical Approach and Creative Choices
J. O. – There was the option to try to shoot on some of Apple’s cameras, but the pipeline looked very slow, and we also heard some stories of just the complexity that comes with working with experimental gear that isn’t available to the public. It can be not ideal for high altitude, high humidity, intense environments. Another reason was I want to shoot on something that everybody has access to. So we used the Canon immersive creator’s kit. You can get it for under $5,000 USD. Just to show other filmmakers you actually can achieve cinema quality stuff with a pretty low-budget kit.
J. O. – The last part was the footprint. I wanted to have the smallest footprint possible in Vietnam. We have about 15 cast apart from our two leads. The rest are basically people that were living their lives in Saigon and Ninh Binh. Having a massive camera onset is just not conducive for an invisible presence. You still have people that stare, but it actually kind of works with the story in a way that I liked.
J. O. – Stereoscopic 180-degree immersive filmmaking is the closest that I felt to being present with a subject and being inside of the story, while also not limiting the filmmaker to moving the camera and having crew and lights and gear on the other side. When you start to do full 360, there’s a lot of limitations both in what you’re able to pull off onset and then the viewer’s attention. 180 has this nice middle ground where you can kind of live in between traditional two-dimensional filmmaking practices, storytelling-wise, while also living in the immersive, placing someone in an environment. 360 I feel is a totally different experience that is beautiful and immersive and amazing, but I’m not as interested in like free-form projects like that, at least at this point.
J. O. – Leaning into what the Vision Pro can do – that 2D cinema cannot –was a really integral part of designing this story. We have a character experiencing a place for the first time, a viewer experiencing a place for the first time. It’s a simple enough story that you can kind of tune out. You could look at the periphery details and not be as locked in with Lynn’s story and still have a rough understanding of what’s going on. I tried to leave it meditative and open-ended enough to not pressure people to follow a succession of events, and also feel like they can tune in whenever they wanted to. But that did mean stripping down a lot of the complexity of like auxiliary characters and dialogue.
Using Point Clouds as Metaphor
J. O. – There is a scene in the film that uses point clouds. This scene came from conversations I had with a DJ in Saigon. We were talking about raving and kind of spiritual and transformative experiences on the dance floor.
J. O. – I kept seeing this image of this person fighting against this current. It evolved into this visceral dance floor experience where the main character Lynn is suddenly thrust into this nostalgic state where she’s thinking of home, her mom, how far she’s come. And then pretty soon everything is obliterated – place, space, time – until she’s just this very minimal, almost nervous system frozen in time in the streets of Saigon. And this current of particle energy, of the flow of millions of people moving from the countryside to the city, starts coming at her. She’s fighting against it, and as she’s fighting, pieces of it are hitting her, and she’s becoming more and more fully formed and realized as a human being.
J. O. – Absorbing those stories of listening to these young people speak about how they found themselves moving to a new city, I learned that a lot of them would lose their accent. They would live in the country, speak a certain way, come to the city, and then speak another way because they didn’t want to give off this idea they were from the countryside. They would transform. And that transformation of choosing your identity, leaning into who we are, leaning into what you can be, but then also being shaped by the forces around us – of society, the time we’re born in, the place we’re born in – is a really evocative and complicated sensory process that feels very emotional and visceral and symbolic. I don’t think I could have found a way to express that through live action alone.
J. O. – So we scanned the Bui Vien, the very colorful street where our main character in the film has this panic attack. We took thousands of photos, used Nerfstudio to turn into a neural radiance field scan, which then we turned into a point cloud and animated it. We worked with Charlie Kemp, a super talented animator in London, to animate the point cloud. We then worked with an amazing choreographer, Amy Gardner, and movement artist Mio and shot at Onassis in New York. We really just began to lean into what this character was experiencing internally through movement rather than dialogue or story or conventional means.
The Role of Music
J. O. – I was in Amsterdam when Vimeo reached out. I didn’t have access to an Apple Vision Pro, but I knew the story I wanted to tell. So I started writing music in Amsterdam at Dekmantel. I just threw a bunch of stuff at a wall, working with organic percussive elements and warm synths that seem to be this breathing pulse. This song had this forward momentum to it that was interesting to me, that felt like a story of this person moving through a new space for the first time.
J. O. – When I was in Vietnam, I started to refine the score, work on it more, record sounds of the city, and then listen to it as I was in the different locations to see what the camera movements would feel like or what actions would feel relevant, and how it connected to the tonality of the stories these young people were telling me about their own subjective experiences.
J. O. – I really love interfacing with a place or a person or a story through sound. It’s much more intuitive, and it’s like a deeper level of intelligence that feels way more impactful than anything that I could intentionally sit down and try to design.
Working with The Apple Vision Pro
J. O. – The first time I tried the Vision Pro on, I was kind of taken aback by the fidelity. I was just shocked. I feel like people were going to live in this thing. The irony of capturing this story on the Vision Pro is not lost on me. I realized that it is a pretty particular medium to explore this on. It sounds pretentious, but I wanted to try to set a precedent and make a film that could inspire people to put the story first and not be so obsessed with spectacle and escapism.
J. O. – VR is like a magical medium that has the power to shift minds and change hearts. It could also be used against us. I want to be a part of the movement of artists and storytellers that is using these tools to connect with ourselves more deeply and connect with each other, both in the headset and outside of the headset.
J. O. – The editing process was different in terms of not being able to really feel the spatial, immersive quality because you’re looking at this weird flat equirectangular thing. I edited the film before I shot it. I shot a lot of spatial photos onset with stand-ins. And then I cut that together in Premiere and then watched it in the headset to give myself an idea of pace. I do that a lot with my commercials because when you’re working with 30 seconds, I want to be extra sure the whole thing is going to unfold in a way that makes sense. With this project, and working in VR for the first time, this was the only way I was going to feel confident that it was not going to confuse people and be too abrasive.
J. O. – I think post-COVID, in an oversaturated internet TikTok world, we’re hungry for meaning and presence and connection. Let’s lean into the things that only we can do, whether that’s an interest of ours or a story we’re obsessed with, even if it doesn’t fit within the algorithm. Working with the Vision Pro is such a fresh, fertile void to experiment in. This is where we get to show people what this technology can be used for.
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