American Cinematographer - March 2017 - 60

Surveying the Virtual World
mold, with its 50-million-plus installed
user base.
On the mobile side - with Gear
VR, Daydream and Cardboard - the
entry barrier is much lower. So many
VR-capable phones are already in
use. The audience we've seen ranges
from 15 to 65 years old. There's a lot of
content available, albeit in bite-sized
entertainment pieces.
Alexander: I like to frame it more
from the angle of what we're targeting. Our goal is to discover immersive
stories. What is storytelling in these
new media spaces? We've moved
more recently on higher-end/roomscale VR, where you can walk around
and take part directly in these stories.
Trials on Tatooine is a room-scale VRpiece, where you can interact and experience the story you're in.
AR hasn't quite caught up technology-wise, but mixed reality is where
the most impactful media will exist for
me personally. The technology that
understands where a real table is, or
where the walls in your room are, so we
can bring a character into that environment and have them sit down in a real
chair. Those are the kinds of things
we're supremely interested in, where you
interact with characters and have a
meaningful experience.

Above: The
Astronauts Guild's
Scott Connolly
(right) and Grant
Martin set up
Radiant Images'
Dark Corner rig
with Sony a7S
cameras fitted
with Canon
lenses. Right:
Spohr (right)
served as director
of photography
and VR supervisor
for a documentary
project about
Clorox's cleanwater initiative in
Piura, Peru.

for five to 10 minutes and then take it
off. So, there's a bifurcation of usage
between tethered and untethered.
Mansouri: We see the biggest
trends in 360 video on Facebook and
YouTube, which leverage existing
mobile devices. It's phones, iPads, Apple
TV and Amazon Fire providing interactive control of up/down, left/right
perspective. VR requires a headset,
whether it's purpose-built like HTC
Vive and Oculus Rift or more systemintegrated like Samsung Gear, Google
Pixel, Daydream, etc.
Many users are watching
less content on the big screen and
TV, especially if we look at Asia, China,
India. The majority are streaming
60

March 2017

content onto their devices, and we can
either fight that or try to be a part of
it. Lots of brands are bringing their
content onto those platforms. They're
releasing for theatrical but also creating
an alternative version for VR and 360
that's being consumed in small chunks
of two to eight minutes.
Wagener: Price point at this
stage is an entry barrier for the more
casual person interested in VR. It's $800
for a headset, plus $1,000 to $1,500 for
a powerful-enough PC. That's a steep
investment. With tethered headsets,
you're talking about the 18-to-30
demographic as the main group, and
they're already adept gamers.
PlayStation VR is branching out of that
American Cinematographer

What are the most promising
applications of VR? Is VR even suited
to traditional linear storytelling?
Alexander: VR is a new media
space and we're all trying to discover
what storytelling is within that
space. Telling a story in a film versus
telling a story in VR is really different,
and ultimately [the latter] will probably
look nothing like a movie either in form
or function. We've released smaller
VR experiments, but we're also in
production on full-on longer story experiences. Our focus is the immersive
storytelling angle.
Safreed: I'm looking forward to a
level of gamification or interactivity
within VR video. Yes, it's video, but you
have the ability for the viewer to decide
which part of the story they want to see,

Bottom photo by David Darg; both images courtesy of The Astronauts Guild.

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American Cinematographer - March 2017

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