A sunset - arguably the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen. You're out in a small fishing boat, wondering if the coast of Borneo is, in fact, a fantasy planet that specializes in sea and sky. A man beside you in the boat is chatting away cheerfully; a fish flops around the floor of the vessel. You look to your right and see other fishermen in tranquil boats, and still more fishermen paddling behind you; dirt and moisture speckle their hulls as seawater claps up against them...
So ends Sea Gypsies, a virtual reality encounter with the Sama-Bajau people by Felix and Paul Studios. Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël - founders of said studios - are in the business of wonder.
They are immersive storytellers working in virtual reality - a still-nascent medium often, yet unsurprisingly, mistaken as a subcategory of filmmaking. Upon closer inspection, however, there are about as many similarities between VR and film as there are between film and painting. Both are vehicles for conveying messages, but the real metric by which to discuss VR - a metric that both distinguishes VR from film and good VR from bad VR - lies with something much more profound.
THE PRESENCE
"Presence is the art of virtual reality," Félix begins, and already we're intrigued. "If you put a VR headset on, you are immersed, which is a given to the medium. But presence is not a given. It's something you really need to craft. When we achieve that, the emotional intensity of the whole experience is much higher. If presence fails, then whatever you do might be entertaining, but it's not going to be transcendent and powerful."
The studio recently completed a project in which the viewer has a friendly encounter with a dinosaur. Ironically it's the little details that best illustrate this sense of presence, rather than focusing on the docile prehistoric beast standing three virtual feet away from you.
"We thought of the viewer as a park ranger; everything is set up in a way that strengthens that concept," Paul says. "So you see your ranger (vehicle) nearby, your walkie-talkie, your coffee thermos... Then the dinosaur wakes up, comes and sees you, is very friendly, and all of that makes sense and tells a story even though it's not an overt story."
All of this serves to introduce an emotional presence to couple with the physical one, providing a sense of familiarity even as the VR world stands out for its exoticism - more like getting a greeting from your dog upon returning home rather than watching a movie about dinosaurs.
Teasing a narrative out of the ether is not new for these two. The present - as it exists outside the VR headset - finds Félix and Paul writing their own chapter in the history of virtual reality as a discipline. It's a creative Wild West right now, and studios have had to make things up as they've moved along - often inventing the very technology they use to get the job done.
"We're coming from 100 years of cinema, and we've got a lot of baggage in terms of the way we understand technology, the internet and two-dimensional computer interfaces," Paul says. "For VR to take off, we need to let go of everything we know as storytellers and embrace this medium - not focus on the things we could do with film that we can't do anymore - but really dive wholeheartedly (into) the things this medium offers. At the time we stop comparing VR to movies, it will really take off."
THE PAST
"When I grow up, I want to design virtual reality experiences," is not, as yet, something you'd expect to hear from a child. We wondered how Félix and Paul found their way to the medium.
"My father is a professional illustrator," Félix says. "And so when I was a child, I would go down to my basement and he would have all of the drawings on the four walls of the basement. I would be totally immersed in images and drawings. That really got me started, you know? That speaks to what I do today."
Paul, too, was excited about VR before he knew he was excited about VR.
"I started getting interested in how technology could contribute to storytelling," he says. "I was interested in video games - I felt that there was a very different kind of immersion that came from interactivity - and films that had a super experimental power to them. To me, those are a great inspiration because I felt like, 'Wow, this is a kind of storytelling that completely opens a bubble which the viewer can fall into, even though they are on a two-dimensional screen.'"
Once teamed up, Félix and Paul struggled constantly to extricate their creative process from the rules of cinema to which they had grown accustomed, and to minimize the second-guessing that accompanies such a leap of faith into a brand new medium.
"Maybe five or six years ago, I recall us really telling ourselves, 'Okay, now we have to go all in. This might be career suicide, but it just feels right,'" says Paul.
It's important to remember that early VR creators had no precedent from which to work: no famous directors to look to for guidance on creative decisions or career moves, no award-winning VR experiences to serve as baselines for greatness, and, often, not even the proper tools to do the job - because they hadn't yet been invented. Félix and Paul were lighting their own match in a cave that was completely dark.
"When we started doing cinematic virtual reality (in 2013), we hadn't seen anything like it," Félix says. "We didn't even know if that was a thing. We had never really shared our VR work, (as it) was more of an experiment at the time."
But then the reactions came. People who had seen the project began reaching out to the directors to tell them things like, "I remember it as if I experienced it in real life," and, "It feels like it belongs to me."
"All of this very powerful emotional reaction led to a very transformative moment where I realized, 'Okay, this medium really does have an impact on people, and it's worth communicating through that art form and that medium," says Félix.
THE FUTURE
There are, however, limits to this mind-bending thing known as virtual reality. Movement, for example, continues to challenge directors; the technology has yet to evolve to the point where viewers can move freely through a VR world without image quality taking a nosedive. The medium also lacks the capability to harness other senses, such as touch and smell.
As they wait for the technology to catch up, Félix and Paul have grown adept at shooting scenes in a way that compensates for this.
"If you look at Sea Gypsies, these people have been living as nomads on the sea for centuries, so water is in the heart of their very experience of reality," Félix says. "We wanted to feel a sense of water throughout the experience so that, as a viewer, you walk away feeling like you've actually been in the water. The high photo realism still activates your brain from (that) sensorial standpoint."
Virtual reality has been synonymous with "The Future" for so long that asking Félix and Paul where the medium goes from here feels like asking what the future's future will hold.
"I think that people will get used to presence and will eventually demand it," Félix says. "VR is such a powerful form of expression because of what it activates inside of you as a human being. It's not going to be something that is just sort of coming in and out, like 3-D cinema, because, at its very core, the nature of this presence is so fundamentally aligned with the human experience."
Thinking about VR as perfectly aligned with the human experience seems like an oxymoron. Until you try it.
Until you're suddenly sitting face to face with a member of the Maasai tribe in a sleepy alleyway of a Kenyan village.
You're thinking that the concept of cinematography now seems completely outdated. But more than that, you're just thinking about how this man is blinking just as often as you are.
"You know, we're not really interested in the dimension of the visual spectacle of VR," Félix says. "We've created projects with (certain partners) that have a spectacular component, but it's not that dimension of VR that truly matters for us. It's really how we can bring a sense of human connection like no other medium has ever allowed."
Which, of course, is spectacular in and of itself.
