The Interactive Experience: Tribeca Storyscapes

While some Tribeca Film Festival-goers filed into rows of movie theater seats, others wandered through their films — physically and virtually. The Tribeca Film Festival’s 2016 Storyscapes, open to the public April 14–17, featured ten immersive films, including virtual reality experiences and installations. Stories varied in topic as well as presentation, offering a potent mix of playful and haunting, whimsical and newsworthy. Here were some of the highlights:

Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (by Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton and James Spinney), a virtual reality film based on the audio diaries of writer John Hull, was nothing short of mesmerizing. Hull lost his eyesight in 1983, and personal recordings of his journey to understand his world without vision provide the narration for the film.

As Hull describes the distinct sounds he tunes into, the 360-degree environment becomes more complex and dynamic; shimmering blue lights take the form of rustling newspapers, jogging feet and paddleboat splashes. In another portion of the film, a children’s choir is represented by pulsating wisps of colored light. As the concert ends, the sound of applause beckons the viewer to turn around, where a cloud of orange light grows to the size of a clapping crowd. The effect is unexpectedly moving — even breathtaking.

“It blew my mind,” said filmmaker Sebastian Diaz, after removing his headset. “It’s minimalistic and poetic. ”

Some of the virtual reality films played with other senses, not just sight and sound. In DEEP VR (by Owen Harris and Niki Smit), viewers wore a belt and sensor at diaphragm level to track their breath. A floating circle on screen expanded and contracted as the viewer inhaled and exhaled, sending it floating through a calming underwater realm. In The Turning Forest (by Oscar Raby), viewers were outfitted with leaf-covered vests that pulsed and vibrated when a monstrous creature crashed through the CGI (computer generated images) woods they inhabited in their headsets. The dreamlike film was pure fun.

“It took me back to my childhood days,” said viewer Maxine Grant. She also enjoyed the additional interactivity of The Turning Forest. “It wasn’t just guiding me,” Grant said. “I felt like I was really participating in it.”

SENS (by Charles Ayats, Armand Lemarchand and Marc-Antoine Mathieu), a VR project based on the French graphic novel of the same name, provided a game-like experience. The viewer navigates a sparse, monochromatic landscape by focusing the headset’s sensor on arrows. Viewers spend much of the journey in a silent, seemingly unending world of white, with only a shadow as a companion (that of a man in a trench coat and hat). Tribeca staff kept an eye on SENS users, who often crept unknowingly toward the walls, their feet itching to step forward as they followed their virtual arrows.

Other films took on more serious subject matter: Among them, the poignant 6x9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement (by The Guardian’s Francesca Panetta and Lindsay Poulton). The entire film takes place in the prison cell, literally trapping the user for nine minutes in order to mirror the experience of solitary confinement.

Text, a traditional film tool which can be tricky to translate into virtual reality, was integrated elegantly, dissolving in and out of the cell walls like graffiti. The psychological toll of solitary confinement is artfully emphasized through out-of-body experiences and ghostly hallucinations. At one point, the viewer floats above the bed as the room begins to blur. Occasionally a mysterious figure materializes in the corner, a figment of the prisoner’s troubled mind.

For one viewer, Jeff Sackett, virtually experiencing solitary confinement helped him empathize with those living it in reality.

“It gives people a sense of what we’re doing to these [prisoners],” said Sackett. “Those guys don’t have a voice.”

The Ark (by Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill) takes more of a traditional documentary approach, telling the story of the rangers and scientists fighting to save the last four northern white rhinoceros on earth. The Ark makes notable use of split screens as a transitional tool, allowing one scene to slowly wipe away into the next and sometimes, even more interestingly, remain side by side at once.

Other Storyscapes incorporated unconventional display into their narratives. It was impossible to miss Network Effect (by Jonathan Harris and Gregor Hochmuth), which was grounded by a methodical thump-thumping heartbeat that could be heard throughout the entire room. A frenetic, four-paneled display of Internet video clips, Network Effect sought to imitate the addictive, ceaseless nature of digital consumption. The design felt sophisticated and intentional, yet it was the first foray into installation for creator Greg Hochmuth.

“Having a space to stay and experience and reflect is very powerful,” Hochmuth said. “People are mesmerized and silent; they can’t stop watching.”

Seances (by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and The National Film Board of Canada) explored old media, allowing viewers to collate silent film footage into bizarre, unique combinations. The footage is recreated by the filmmakers, based on descriptions of silent movie clips long lost and destroyed. Seances is an attempt to revive those films from the dead.

Across the room, Intersection of I (by Whitney Dow) explored race through the lens of white millennials. The project included a collection of interviews to choose from, in which subjects spoke frankly about privilege and perception.

The Argus Project (by Gan Golan, Raquel de Anda, Julien Terrell and Ligaiya Romero) was notable for its merging of community activism, film, as well as creative costume design. The piece pairs a film about police accountability with a physical suit of armor covered in cameras. Costume designer Pierre Mendy said that the Argus team is working on smaller, subtler model, made up of a simple strap that will hold a camera phone at the center of a cop-watcher’s chest. For Mendy, the suit is about empowering communities to defend themselves against police misconduct.

“I’m against injustice, profiling, brutality,” he said. “The police are supposed to protect the people, but who can protect us against the police?”

With the answer to that question still unclear for many victims and their families, the camera may provide some form of protection.

While the quality of the projects presented at Storyscapes was excellent, screening interactive and VR films presents particular challenges. With so many projects sharing the same space, sounds often bled from one experience to the next. Interactives that relied on the power of their soundscapes were muddied by others in close proximity. Virtual reality films, which can run ten minutes long and rely on the availability of individual headsets, racked up lengthy waitlists and frustrated festival-goers, some of whom never saw the short films they came to view.

The silver lining is that demand for Storyscapes is high. If Tribeca’s room of immersive projects is any indication, there’s plenty of appetite for virtual reality and transmedia experiences among filmgoers.