Every year for the past six editions of the Venice Film Festival, the cultural association fanheart3 joins this international event with a collateral award (to date still the only one of the immersive section) dedicated to audiences and fan communities: the fanheart3 awards.
During the festival, the jury – active members of popular fandoms with expertise in specific fields (cinema, immersive, celebrities, social issues, etc.) – analyzes a selection of films and immersive productions presented at Venice to identify which ones have what it takes to become cult productions loved by mainstream audiences and able to foster the active participation of the audience, encouraging, among other things, the production of fanfictions and fanarts, cosplay activities, the publication of meta, and more.
This year I had the pleasure of being on the jury and taking part in interesting discussions with my colleagues on the Venice Immersive lineup at Venezia81. It was an experience that once again confirmed how the expectations and “demands” of those who regularly participate in the immersive sphere are often different from those who are not usually part of this world, and yet are willing to discover it and maybe even get passionate about all it can offer.
Fan Experience Winner
While there is no doubt that XR in general has allowed the average viewer to take a step forward and find themselves within a story or situation that they can discover and connect with in new ways (as happens, looking at this edition of the festival, in the powerful ADDRESS UNKNOWN: FUKUSHIMA NOW, or in the Achievement Award winner IMPULSE: PLAYING WITH REALITY, on which you can read our interview with designer Allison Crank) a production for more mainstream (and possibly fan-related) audiences implies a series of additional steps.
To simplify a lot, it has to introduce us to an engaging and in some respects familiar world, offer an almost cinematic narrative and characters with whom we can emotionally connect and have a relationship with. And, on top of all this, it needs to give us the illusion (and it’s not always just an illusion) of being co-authors of the story as well as active players in it.
Going mainstream at Venezia81
In Venice this year, the immersive lineup included several works that looked at the audience with new perspectives, essentially trying to do something we have seen little of in previous editions of the festival: to bring together the audience more devoted to immersivity with the more standard one linked to cinema or television, in an attempt to generate a new and more accessible transmedia experience.
This is the case, among others, with FREE UR HEAD by Tung-yen Chou, a work we have already discussed here on XRMust and loved very much in Venice. The team behind the experience really managed to create an audience involvement that went far beyond the headset and was a source of entertainment even among unsuspecting passers-by.
Alongside it, worth mentioning is certainly NIGTHMARA EPISODE 3 by Gianpaolo Gonzalez, which, although in the traditional format of the 360 (though used in new ways), seems born to expand on various formats – television and comics above all. But also, the innovative IN THE REALM OF RIPLEY by Soo Eung Chuck Chae, which through a fascinating detective (who made several of us fall in love, I’ll admit it) tries to connect virtual reality, 2D cinema and artificial intelligence in real time, asking viewers to make sense of the story from different roles and points of view.
What If…? An Immersive Story: from the series to mixed reality
Certainly the most obvious example that comes to mind when talking about audiences is WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY, directed by Dave Bushore. We say “most obvious” because What If…? brings us into the fandom realm par excellence, that of Marvel, built by a production studio that understands a lot about audiences… and is also strongly influenced by them.
WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY gives us a familiar world and familiar characters, but does so in new ways, while fitting perfectly into the series it references.
“We had several meetings with Brian Andrews, the executive producer of What If…?”, told us in Venice Phil McCarty, co-writer of WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY with David Dong. “A lot of our initial brainstorming was about how to make sure we were not overlapping with the series or repeating something they had already been done in the show. The Watcher in the series has a bit of a journey of their own to make, so we had to make sure that our depiction of The Watcher was at the same point, reevaluating their philosophical stance on non-interventionism.
Beyond that, however, WHAT IF…? gives us ultimate creative freedom, since everything revolves around the central question: What if… things had gone differently? That really gave us the ability to do anything we imagined because we wouldn’t be breaking Marvel’s history nor the audience’s expectations with our story”.
The first element that demonstrates the attention of WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY to the potential audience and enhances the operation carried out by Dave Bushore and his team is therefore precisely in this reflection on how to bring the immersive storytelling closer to what the audience is familiar with. Something made possible by a narrative care that shines through even in the seemingly minor details of the plot, those that a true fan cannot fail to notice (we mention, among others, the hint to the deep friendship between Steve and Bucky, that is definitely not put aside in WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY, despite the different context of the XR experience).
Apple Vision Pro at the service of the story
Alongside this first element, an aspect to highlight (as always, after all, in the immersive sphere), is the role of the user. On this, too, Phil McCarty opens up an interesting reflection:
We knew that in What If…? An Immersive Story the user would be our protagonist. Our producer, Dave Bushore, was very clear that we did not want them to play someone else or witness someone else’s adventure. He wanted our audience to be there as themselves. So, right from the start, we had to understand how to make them fulfill (and be fulfilled by) this role.
My writing partner David Dong honed in on our initial challenge, right away: in traditional screenplays, the nature of the hero emerges from what the character says and does. In this case, our hero cannot talk, cannot physically connect with others. Sothe greatest difficulty was precisely this: how do you tell a traditional story with a traditional hero, in which, however, the person playing the hero cannot say or do anything to define themselves.
The use of the Apple Vision Pro was an essential part of the answer to this challenge, making it possible to bring the events of WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY into the spaces actually inhabited by the user/hero. In this way, what you perceive is that The Watcher comes to call you, precisely you, and in the place where you are more yourself and not playing at being someone else.
The Apple Vision Pro is fantastic for achieving all this. Their pass-through was much sharper and cleaner than the Quest’s at the time, which allows more things to happen in your reality.
The Apple Vision Pro allows us to tell a story that is about you. You wear it and suddenly the characters appear next to you, in your own space, and are ready to engage you in their next adventure. This is definitely one of the greatest strengths of the Vision Pro. With a different technology, the user would probably see a fake living room around them, and it would be someone else’s room. It would no longer be your space, and you would have to pretend to be that imagined person… whereas here The Watcher is literally next to you, on your couch. The superior technology makes it easier to bridge the gap between the generated objects and the user, and that, narratively, makes all the difference.
One of the merits of WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY is thus precisely in its technological choices: the innovative technology used is at the service of the story, and makes possible an identification that would not have been as effective with different headsets and media.
In this respect, the choice of exhibition space in Venice – a simple depersonalized white space in which to wear the headset – was perhaps a missed opportunity. The location, in my opinion, detracted not a little from the narrative effectiveness of WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY, where the space the user occupies is not just a place, but an integral part of the narrative and a stylistic ploy to convey the embodiment necessary for the success of the operation.
This choice led some users I talked to to perceive the experience more like a game than an episode of the series in an immersive format. A sensation that I – as many other colleagues – did not feel at all, having experienced WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY on another occasion and in a more personal setting.
Physical onboarding, emotional onboarding
The concept that experiencing the same work in different spaces can so strongly impact the audience’s perception of the deeper nature of the work itself calls to mind, once again, the numerous reflections currently taking place throughout the immersive sector on the most effective distribution modes for XR, and the role of venues.
Onboarding and offboarding, from this point of view, remain crucial in dealing with exhibition limitations of any kind. A topic that was also discussed with the team of UNCANNY ALLEY: A NEW DAY, the immersive piece that won the fanheart3 awards for the attention it shows towards the audience and the creation of a world and characters that the user can connect with and get close to.
While waiting for that article (coming soon to these screens!), WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY has, however, given us the opportunity to reflect on a different and even more personal onboarding, which is the “emotional” one, as Phil McCarty defines it: “At the beginning of every story, there’s this wonderful window of time where you don’t know what’s going on,” he says, “you’re absorbing every detail you can to find your place in the world and find out who the person you see on the screen is. This also happens in VR and XR: there is always that brief moment when people try to figure out what is going on and look around, almost frantically, almost overwhelmed. But once that settles down, authors have all the resources at their disposal to make a person really feel for a character and for their story”.
He mentions the example of UP, a Pixar Animation Studios film that in its wonderful and unforgettable 5 minutes incipit leads you to become immensely attached to Carl, the protagonist of the rest of the story (and yes, you end up crying every tear you have in those magical 5 minutes): “The on paper premise of Up is not an emotional home run … a guy ties balloons to his house and floats off with a boy scout and a dog. However in those first five minutes, they absolutely gut you and get you invested in Carl and his story. They showed a very relatable human experience- falling in love, wanting things, setbacks, the good and bad things in life that we all know and share. There is not much difference, really, in the human condition. We all have the same trials and tribulations. We have similar problems, similar goals, the similar dreams, the similar failures and weaknesses, the similar wins and losses, and it is just a matter of drawing on this shared baggage, or human experience, whatever you want to call it, and using it to connect your world with the audience’s. In VR and XR in general you need to counterbalance some of these serious threads and find ways to make the experience entertaining as well”.
Building your own fandom, immersive style
Connecting with the characters and the world is part of storytelling as a whole, of course. Every good story- every story that really matters- delivers these elements to its audience. To mention an example for Venezia81, that’s what OTO’S PLANET by Gwenael François does, and it’s an experience that won the Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize at Venezia81, and was also one of the five pieces most liked by the audience of experts in the informal survey conducted by Voices of VR and XRMust (we’ll bring home the indelible memory of the adorable Skippy and of a story whose plot and surprising ending we couldn’t help but love).
On the other hand we have projects with less narrative elements, but in which I, as the user, am intimately involved: if I were not there, there would be no work. In a way, I myself become the story, the artwork. I am thinking, here, at the aforementioned FREE UR HEAD, but also at GARDEN ALCHEMY, a beautiful project on intimacy and connection we previously discussed with Uri Kranot, who created it together with Michelle Kranot.
And then there is that beautiful moment when presence, intimacy, co-authorship, characters, worlds, storytelling come together to create works that speak the language of mainstream audiences, and fulfill what so many of us have always dreamed of experiencing. Works that not only can reach potential users, but have the ability to move fandoms.
WHAT IF…? AN IMMERSIVE STORY, UNCANNY ALLEY: A NEW DAY, older experiences that have been on the scene for years, such as our dear THE METAMOVIE PRESENTS: ALIEN RESCUE… These are, perhaps most of all, the productions at the true frontier of a new audience today, and those whose journey into immersivity we are eager to keep following.
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