How the creators of the Invasion and Asteroids are pioneering 360-degree VR films

Above: The aliens in Invasion! by Baobab Studios.

Image Credit: Baobab Studios

GamesBeat: Is the market progressing the way you would want it to?

Fan: It’s funny. Headset sales are great, but what needs to happen for VR to become mass-market is more content out there. If you pick up the Gear or Rift or Vive, there’s only a certain number of quality experiences. What will get you to keep coming back is more content in the ecosystem.

We’re specifically trying to—we feel like a lot of the content out there speaks to specific audiences, like hardcore gamers, the hardcore Rift users. There are documentaries about Syria, very deep themes. But we saw a need for universally appealing content. We’re trying to figure out how you get VR to the masses, not just to niche markets.

Our hypothesis about why Invasion has done so well – Samsung uses us as their main demo – is because it’s something that grandmothers and kids and everyone in between likes. I hope there’s more content like that. Content, ultimately, is going to get people to purchase headsets. They have to get excited about something. And it can’t just be a trailer. It has to be something meaty, something you can only see in VR.

GamesBeat: I didn’t detect too many things in there that made it a sort of must-be-in-360 experience.

Fan: Right. The reason people say they couldn’t have seen it on a regular screen—when you’re breaking the fourth wall, the character acknowledging you is a big deal. In a feature film, when the character acknowledges you—first of all, just in general it’s a no-no. You don’t do it. But if it does happen, in something like Deadpool, you still don’t believe that character’s really talking to you.

In VR you completely believe the character is real. Something in your animal brain makes you believe it’s real in a way that you wouldn’t believe it in a theater. Specifically, when the character is hiding behind you—because you feel like you’re the only thing between that bunny and the aliens, it makes you feel pressure, almost fear, in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise.

Eric and I had a debate about this. I’m naturally—I don’t like to be as active. I wanted the bunny to stand here when the aliens were shooting their antennae. Eric said, “No, that’s not real. Virtual reality should be more real. The bunny would hide behind you.” I said, “But that’s stressful. Just make it easy for me.” And he said, “No, that’s the power of VR.” I lost that argument, because after showing it to about 2,000 people, the majority of them came out saying, “When that bunny was hiding behind me, that was the moment.” They cared about the bunny. Getting you to care about characters is winning. We would never have been able to do that in a film.

Another thing, for example, is how you direct the viewer’s eyes. The entire point of VR is that the audience has agency. But then you have Spielberg’s famous remarks about how VR is dangerous, because filmmakers need to have complete control. A film director forces you to look wherever they want. In VR you can look wherever you want. So how do you get the user to look where you want, especially when pacing is important?

Eric developed a lot of techniques through experimentation. When the bunny looks to the right, you instinctively look to the right. But then we’d better bring in the spaceship pretty quickly, because if the user doesn’t see something interesting they’ll look away again. Still, you feel like you’re making the choice, so you feel more empowered, even though the director moved you to follow the same shot they would have. That’s another thing that’s very different between VR and film.

Above: The hero of Invasion!

Image Credit: Baobab Studios

GamesBeat: How do you settle on what format is the best way to create a particular kind of content? Between something short like this and a two-hour movie, you have lots of different choices.

Fan: It’s a trade-off. There are some statistics about how people don’t necessarily want to put the headset on for a long time. Even if we could make a two-hour movie in VR, I don’t think it’s a smart thing to do right now. We want people to have a good experience and that may not be a really long one. That’s why it’s important for us to keep them short.

We also do that because millennials, younger audiences, prefer to have things in bite-sized pieces rather than longer sessions. We learned that at Zynga. We had to design for super-short session times. We want it to be a comfortable experience that fits into people’s lives. That’s why we’re focused on short things.

It also allows us—as soon as you put out one thing, you learn so much from it. If we were to make a 90-minute film, by the time we were done, the technology and the cinematic language would be far out of date. By doing shorts like this, we can quickly take the things we learn and put them into the next project. We’re always experimenting. In the future, we may go longer. But we need more people viewing it and a more comfortable experience.

GamesBeat: Do you think seasoned filmmakers are generally doing well with VR now, or will it be other people?

Fan: Anybody can, but it requires—when you were asking me if this was a film or a game, that’s where you need to not think in those terms. Half of my team is from the game side. I’m more from the game side. Then Eric is from the film side. We’re constantly challenging each other, because VR is its own medium. We need to think about it differently.

That’s why Eric was excited to do this in the first place. He says, “I can make Madagascar 20, or I can be part of creating a new cinematic language.” He started at Dreamworks as an intern at the very beginning. He directed Antz, their first feature film. He says that VR feels like the beginning days of computer-animated movies, where nobody completely knows what it’s doing, but it’s a merging of art and tech. He’s throwing out everything he knows, but bringing in some of the things he’s learned over a lifetime.

The funny thing is, he graduated with his MFA from Cal Arts, where a lot of famous directors studied, but his master’s was in experimental animation, not just traditional animation. This is something that appeals to him, throwing the rules out the window. Whenever he does his speech – we’re giving a speech here on Friday about storytelling in VR — the first thing he says is to ignore all the rules, everything people say today about what you can and can’t do, including what we say. It’s too early to say what you can and can’t do.