The 6th annual FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories

In a time when attention deficit runs high and news and marketing bombard us from all sides, immersive stories have a singular ability to envelop the viewer and transmit context and culture that is so often missed. I firmly believe in nurturing the evolution of this medium, which has enormous transformative power and untapped potential.

Since we created the FIVARS festival in 2015, we have pushed our small and intrepid team to its limits to maintain the highest standards while pushing the outer limits of what a 21st-century festival can be. We have always been as focused on new approaches to user experience as we have been uncompromising in our search for the finest new content creators from around the globe.

In June of 2020, we rapidly iterated and launched a true spatialized conference in the web browser, studying, learning and building upon the very latest techniques, code, design principles and ideas for what socially distanced conferencing can become. Almost immediately following, we had to bring together six years of experience and input to do the same for our beloved, public-facing immersive stories festival.

As always, FIVARS 2020 is an experiment. Building on extremely powerful, highly customized open-source code, powered by a grant from Amazon Web Services, we have designed a truly independent, spatialized, accessibility-minded platform for the exhibition of instant-on 4K, spherical video with ambisonic or 5.1 audio that runs in your browser with no buffering time, proprietary software or downloads required.

Check out this video that explains how this online virtual theater for immersive content works and some of its features:

Here are a few more selections:

Inside Lieutenant Gustl Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler and being one of the first virtual theatre experiences, “Inside Lieutenant Gustl” immerses the viewer in the mental headspace of a young Austrian officer from 1900 grappling with an existential crisis. Missing Pictures: Birds of Prey Hard times, bad luck, tight spots, mishaps, quarrels, setbacks, hiccups, destiny…some films, it seems, become recipes for misfortune, never to see the light of day.

Swing VR The story unfolds in overlapping acts that depict the internal and external struggles of a frustrated girl who is attempting – and failing – to swing on a playground swing. As she struggles with the swing, she imagines the demise of the children swinging successfully around her. Indirect Actions Join a documentary filmmaker on a mission for justice at Standing Rock, where over 300 indigenous tribes stood together in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Hominidae Creatures have evolved in surprising ways, with humans, birds, spiders and frogs sharing unique anatomies. This experience follows an Arachnid Hominid, an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, as she struggles to raise her young in a hostile environment. Mutatis At night, strange men in white suits enter a botanical garden. A young woman’s inanimate body is found there. The garden hides other bodies, buried, sunk in the deep flora. Then, a strange light appears from the women’s bodies…

Sleeping Eyes A Korean soldier compares his undiagnosed narcolepsy to quantum mechanics in this eerie memoir. Warsaw Rising A Warsaw insurgent received a note with a message from his daughter when he was leaving to fight in the Uprising in August 1944. At the time, he did not know yet that the note would influence his further fate.

With the Wind and the Stars With the Wind and the Stars is a 360/VR docuseries that takes you on an adventure into the lives of women who fly. Episode One features Teara Fraser: a pilot, mother, and proud Métis woman setting out to launch her own airline. A Safe Guide to Dying The quest of a self-deprecating man exploring different suicide methods inside a lifelike video game simulation.

In the shadow of the FAANG companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix controlling what we see, how we see it and for how much, it is more important than ever to build spaces that belong to artists, creators and programmers, beholden to no one.

FIVARS launched October 7th and runs through November 2nd, 2020, showcasing an expertly-curated selection of immersive experiences from around the world.

For more information, visit
https://fivars.net 

Find Tickets

The post How A VR Festival Is Showcasing A New Kind of International Cinema appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Godard does with 3D in Goodbye to Language what he did to cinema’s conventions with Breathless. Pushing dimension into low-grade cell phone footage, or exaggerating the depth to the extreme of a street scene, at times rendering different images in each eye. But the surprising star of the show was the play of sound, volume in particular. The event’s host told us that the projectionist wanted the disclaimer made that all extreme leaps in volume are deliberate and not a technical error.

“I have always detested characters. From birth, we are forced into them.”

In this vein, Goodbye to Language is an ontological exploration actually well-served by the exploitation of the media’s limits: Immediately in the title sequence, Godard delineates the 2D from 3D planes and then effectively makes the 2D the more reliable, as 3D low-grade images smear across in the background, searching, searching, just the like the dog upon which he spends most of the film – pointing out that through the gaze of an animal are we able to access the real world.

Friday, January 23 – Thursday, January 29, 2015
Exclusive Los Angeles Engagement – 3D
Aero Theatre Santa Monica
1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, 90403
More information at American Cinemateque

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From Zeitgeist films, two things struck me about this epic film – the incredibly personal footage that the filmmaker captured amidst the pandemonium and sheer size of this movement, and the insight it affords into one of the most powerful but least understood countries in the world. In spite of its scope, it focuses on the individuals and tells a powerfully intimate human story.

Last Train Home – official US trailer:

Sweetgrass (2009)
“As much a work of cultural anthropology as it is a documentary, this unique film traces the path of a family of Montana sheepherders as they drive their flock down from the treacherous and beautiful Absaroka Beartooth mountain range. With no guiding narration, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor let the natural images speak for themselves, capturing the danger, pathos and humor in this haunting elegy to a bygone way of life.”

If there is a thing that links the five films I have selected together, it is the ability of the filmmakers to render from seemingly abstract subjects, legitimately engaging stories focused on the people inside of their contexts. On the surface, Sweetgrass may appear a remote subject to city dwellers, and yet it works as an analogy that in spite of the incredible feats of which we are capable, the greatest obstacle is often within our own minds. An awe-inspiring document of a reality leaving the modern world perhaps forever.

The trailer for Sweetgrass:

The Cool School (2007)
“In the late 1950s, when Pollock and de Kooning were being hailed as revolutionary artists in New York, Los Angeles was still dealing with a blacklist that gutted creativity in all media. This is the story of the two men who changed all that. Recording a pledge on a hot dog wrapper to open a cutting-edge gallery, Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz took the West Coast art world by storm, embracing artists from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol.”

Los Angeles is a city like no other. It is a lens and a megaphone, a magnet to the luminaries of so many small villages scattered around the world that transforms and ignites their minds. And yet it is often looked upon as a vapid cultural cesspool. In The Cool School we explore the transformation of a dustbowl into a hotbed of cultural significance that would be exported and impact perceptions of popular culture irrevocably.

The Cool School trailer:

Superheroes (2011)
“Filmmaker Michael Barnett takes on the ultimate odd job in this eye-opening documentary about real-life “superheroes,” ordinary people who don capes, masks and alter egos in their spare time to right wrongs and make criminals pay for their actions. Among other characters, you’ll meet a tight-knit Brooklyn foursome that tackles tough cases as a squad dubbed the New York Initiative and a San Diego security officer who calls himself Mr. Xtreme.”

We collectively pay a lot of money into the blockbusters centered around the fantastical comic book heroes that raised us. Some take these examples of benevolence, courage, public service and yes, pageantry to heart, and in a quest to emulate them, find ways to substantiate their obsession by attempting to make them real. Beyond the rubber-necking curiosity that these real-life characters may elicit, comes a poignant message about being proactive and taking the risk to make a change in the world as opposed to a passive onlooker, judging their often dangerous lifestyle from the sidelines. A parable about taking responsibility and not simply being an innocuous voice of dissent.

Here is the trailer:

Samsara
“A nonverbal film described by the makers as a “guided meditation”. The film uses very high quality images, scenes of nature and mankind to stimulate the viewer. The film contains no plot or actors, although there are several performers in the film. Samsara is Ron Fricke’s 2011 follow-up to Baraka.”

In the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words spirit of Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi, “Samsara” affords us yet another lovingly executed, desperate look at our beautiful planet. At present, Samara, which had its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival is awaiting distribution. You can help coordinate a screening at the official site.

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For some The Magnetic Fields are icons, for most, they remain unknown. Strange Powers, the documentary about The Magnetic Fields directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara provides an unprecedented, intimate look at the band’s difficult-to-interview, enigmatic and brilliant leader Stephin Merritt.

“Stephen does not suffer fools,” says Daniel Handler a friend of Merritt’s and author of the Lemony Snicket series of books.

Indeed until the arrival of Strange Powers, virtually any interview conducted with Merritt since the band’s beginnings over two decades ago, has afforded little more than wry quips and deflections. Seen in the context of Merritt’s surprisingly candid participation with these filmmakers however, the reputation for being difficult or impenetrable dissolves quickly and in fact reveals itself to be nothing more than an extension of his pop-cultural wariness, razor sharp wit and erudition.

Back in the early ’90’s, whilst night club staff blasted Nirvana’s Nevermind whilst sweeping cigarette butts and beer bottle caps off the floor from the night before, The Magnetic Fields would be loading their instruments, consisting primarily of a cello, an acoustic guitar, several ukuleles and perhaps a piano through the stage door.

Their show would consist of songs about love, sex, heartbreak, romance, college and plays on words delivered in an almost childlike, most certainly non-rock format, fronted by Merritt’s irreverent, baritone voice, occasionally singing in duet with pianist and band-manager Claudia Gonson. Sam Davol would meticulously execute Merritt’s cello arrangements and John Woo would add air and rhythm to Gonson’s piano lines on acoustic guitar. Between songs Gonson and Merritt would carry on the banter they forgot to leave at the car in which they traveled from city to city, betraying the unique nature of their maternal, fraternal, incestuous, Platonic relationship much to the delight of the crowds.

“[There were definitely shows] where the band felt bigger than the room,” recalls cellist Davol: “It felt like something momentous was happening – or maybe the audience was just drunk…”

With archival footage dating all the way back to their teen years, growing up in the punk scene in the 80’s, to interviews with Merritt’s former employers as a copy editor and later writer for SPIN and TimeOut, through Merritt’s recent migration from New York to Los Angeles and even interviews with his mother at his new Cali home as he sits writhing in embarrassment, Strange Powers legitimately affords an intimate walk through and alongside the history of its enigmatic subject – a brilliant lyricist, arrangist, composer and performer with all the class of Serge Gainsbourg, all the lyrical capabilities of Leonard Cohen, and all the humor of Lord Buckley.

Fortunately the film is not only engaging because of its subject, but also because it is well paced, sequenced and edited, with visual elements delicately smattered throughout, allowing the personas and songs within to be revealed without ever over-saturating with adulation.

If you are not yet hip to the Magnetic Field’s catalog, get there now. Once you do, see this film and let your love grow.

Despite the fact that band fills large venues and is a darling of the New York middle aged hipster crowd, mainstream attention continues to elude them. In fact for this Canadian premiere of the film, the theater was only a quarter filled. Outside, lines stretched out half a block in anticipation of Biutiful. So it is difficult to say what sort of distribution this may find, and when it does, whether you will know well enough to lend it your eyes and ears.

If you are in Vancouver, one screening remains:

Sun, Oct 10th 11:00am
Vancity Theatre
Tickets available through the official VIFF Website or at the door

69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields remains one of my favorite “albums” of all time (I use bunny ears only because it spans three discs. We discover, in the film that Merritt’s original intention was to create 100 love songs, each using a different set of instruments, drum sources whether acoustic or synthesized) and to this day, whenever I put this collection of songs on, I invariably want to run out onto a rooftop and proclaim how utterly overwhelmingly brilliant it all is. But instead, I typically end up keeping it to myself, like a small inexpressible wonder. After seeing footage from the recording of their eighth release, “Distortion,” I am not only ashamed of not yet having heard it, but more excited than ever to be exposed to their subsequent creative output.

Magnetic Fields Select Discography:
Distant Plastic Trees (1991)
The Wayward Bus (1992)
The House of Tomorrow (EP) (1992)
Holiday (1994)
The Charm of the Highway Strip (1994)
Get Lost (1995)
69 Love Songs (1999)
i (2004)
Distortion (2008)
Realism (2010)

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Winning the race
For your digital fix
Living your life
With a clickity-click
(Repeat)

“So every day I swear
I’m gonna go to bed at like eleven.
And all of a sudden its 4AM . . .
And I was just watching Youtube and
reading Wikipedia for five hours.
It’s like MAN . . . you ask me the
next day. I can’t even remember
what I was doin. Crazy.”

– Tay Zonday “Internet Dream”
(writer of Chocolate Rain)

*author deftly opens his umbrella to protect himself against the thundering Chocolate Rain*

I have had the good fortune to attend a wide variety of so-called new media conferences, hear people who drive the “content market” speak about the present and future of the various “media distribution platforms”, how to “drive traffic” to your site, using Web 2.0 social networking sites to make friends where you would have previously just been tossing spam into the anonymous gray mass of stats , the importance of making your site interactive and sticky, how long visitors will wait for a page to load (3.2 seconds) and the importance of viral marketing.

They usually call out YouTube as the de facto turning point and how “anyone in America, and the world for that matter” can now “make movies with their cell phones” with the hopes that they will become the next “Chocolate Rain,” “Star Wars Kid,” “Lolcats,” “Tron Guy,” or that weird snaggle-toothed Japanese girl who just stares into her webcam and draws millions of views for doing seemingly nothing (it helps that she has a big rack).  Now a site like TubeMogul allows you to instantly upload your homemade insertion into the pantheon of filmmaking to virtually all the major “video aggregation and distribution sites” our there including Vimeo, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, How-To Cast, MySpace, Revver, and of course YouTube.

Have you caught on yet?  This blog entry is one big fat collection of keywords, something used in “SEO” (search engine optimization” and to promote higher “CTR” (click-through ratios) for my “affiliate ads” (but, you know this already) – another thing that they talk about behind the velvet curtain which now seems to enfold pretty much anyone else sitting at home bored and lonely and wondering how to get everyone’s attention.

And when they do, they realize they have not yet figured out how to “monetize” all this traffic.  ROFLcon, which took place at MIT this year was a conference for all the people who somehow managed to garner said attention for one reason or another and came together to figure out what to do when the general public shows up and says “Here we are now, entertain us.”  That’s all well and good but unfortunately the creators of these phenomena forgot to hire a door person with a cash box.

This is not leading to a discussion on “how to monetize you content” so much as it is underlining William Gibson‘s astute assertion that the very idea of Fame is becoming extinct due to it massive over inflation; if everyone is famous, then really, no one can truly be famous.   Everyone is broadcasting and those same people might be watching.  But are they watching, or are they trying to figure out how the hell these heat-seekers pulled it off?  Well that was then. So I get to my point: we now have this glut of Web 2.0 “guerilla marketing” -savvy ingenues who will stoop to progressively lower depths to grab a piece of the “eyeballs” / “asses in seats” pie.  It makes me feel like I ate way too much cotton candy with my mustard-covered hot dog.

It isn’t even the “content” that bothers me.  It’s that fact that everyone thinks that they can somehow pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes using the above mechanics.  It’s not just preaching to the choir, it is an infection in the culture.  It is indeed a virus in the system, that thrives at the expense of its host, adapts rapidly to any form of inoculation and then proliferates to any other candidate that comes within range.

Snap out of it folks, you’re having a bad fever dream.  You have tools at your disposal that defy the imagination of your former self ten years ago.  You are Marshall McLuhan‘s cautionary observation that the medium becomes the message – your very source has become your pitch, you are making trailers for things that don’t exist, like specters that haunt the territory where they died –  but lest you click-away at my posting yet one more iteration of that now tired cliche – recognize that I am appealing to you to bring something to the table. 

Forget viral marketing.  Forget spending your days and nights checking your visitor stats; these activities have supplanted the very act of creating itself!  Make things.  Make things that come from you.  If you still have something within that you can remember being distinctly your own, then call on it.  Viral videos are so DRM ago.

Have you had enough of viral videos,  or do you think we are just getting started? 

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