Shooting an Interactive VR Film: Zena's Case Study
ZENA is an immersive and interactive film set in Genoa, Italy. The story unfolds in a 360º environment created through 360° high-definition video capture developed to create virtual reality experiences such as Cinematic VR (cVR). In ZENA, the user plays an active role inside the narrative by taking part directly in the story: s/he decides which way to go in a Maze type structure (Ryan, 2015), if s/he wants to follow or ignore the advice of some character, or access extra information that contributes to story understanding. The narrative structure has been inspired by the labyrinth of alleys in the historic center of Genoa, where passersby come face to face with choices that lead them to interact with different environments and people. ZENA, which means Genoa in genovese dialect, was recorded inside the historical center of Genoa (Old Town), which is a World Heritage Site. The scenes, that develop in the alleys and in some important palaces in the Old Town, show these environments for the first time in VR.
The main objective of ZENA is to bring together an interactive film narrative inside a 360º environment to be enjoyed with a Head Mounted Display (HMD), in order to create an interactive and immersive cinematic experience: an Interactive VR experience similar to hyperfiction, in which the user rearranges a choice of story fragments into different configurations (Ryan, 2009), placing him/herself between a passive reception, as it is the case with cinema, and a highly active role, as in videogames. In this paper, the shooting process of ZENA is reported, highlighting the main challenges we faced and hindsight gained. For the production of ZENA, we based our methodology on the traditional cinematography production workflow, being cinema the audiovisual art form closer to this type of experience, but adapting it to Interactive Narrative (IN) (Dettori, 2016) and the immersive nature of Cinematic VR.
Looking Forward, Looking Back: Interactive Digital Storytelling and Hybrid Art Approaches
edited by: Rebecca Rouse, Mara Dionisio
This volume collects documentation of the 2017 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling Art Exhibition and new scholarly texts from the artists involved. The work traces themes of Time & Tempo across Digital Poetics and Literature, Digital Heritage, and Urban Space and Politics.
This volume collects documentation of the 2017 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) Art Exhibition and new scholarly texts from the artists involved. The work traces themes of Time & Tempo across Digital Poetics and Literature, Digital Heritage, and Urban Space and Politics. Since 2013, the ICIDS Art Exhibition has been chronicled online, as well as documented in a printed catalogue.
This collection documents the 2017 exhibition, held in conjunction with the ICIDS conference at M-ITI Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal, Madeira, November 14-17, 2017. This represents the first time the ICIDS Art Exhibition catalogue has been published, and it is also the first time the catalogue has been expanded to not only document the work presented, but also collect textual scholarship from a subset of the artists involved, reflecting on a range of challenges and questions in the field.
The blended nature of this volume, including contributions across traditional scholarship and theory as well as research-creation art practice helps to expand notions of knowledge production by highlighting and bringing together these multiple approaches in the interactive narrative field. In addition, the wide range of creative works exhibited here pushes the boundaries of what ‘counts’ as interactive narrative.
These two moves toward expansion (expansion of what research means; expansion of what is defined as interactive narrative) are meant as productive and generative provocations for the field.
Pages: 148
Language(s): English
Release Date: 30.11.2018
DOI: 10.1184/R1/7406924
ETC Press
ISBN: 978-0-359-11468-9