QPORIT

I enjoyed prize-winning novelist Marisha Pessl’s  two most recent novels, NIGHT FILM and NEVERWORLD WAKE. She seems to be a writer who excels – through meticulous planning, preparation, and skillful plotting -- at creating a supernatural mood, while providing the possibility of a rational and natural logic.  She shows great style in using words and creating sentences, and employs a plethora of similes and metaphors. Marisha also displays a keen sense of humor, with sharp observations that made me laugh.

• Marisha’s technique for understanding her characters and their environment in detail, way beyond what is explicit on the page, is one reason her stories seem to me so well adaptable to VR. She makes it real.

• Her ability to create strong, mood-rich experiences matches well to the feeling that VR creates when you put on an HMD and move into another world – a rich, suggestive, atmospheric, attractive, surprising, real world is the most compelling.

• The story has a driving momentum, and the characters have interesting layers. Mysteries translate well to video.

• While NIGHT FILM had these same features and could make a profoundly powerful VR experience, it is a complex book. A VR promotional preview could be awesomely powerful. Creating a VR feature length version might be daunting.  NEVERWORLD WAKE is simpler.

• Marisha stocks NEVERWORLD WAKE with many interesting locations that would translate well to a 360 3D world in which the viewer can look around in all directions.

• The locations and scenes are also optimal for each scene to be played out like location-specific theater.  This is actually a terrific way to create VR, because it allows the director and crew to be out of the picture, and allows the action to flow longer and be more realistic.  For VR, it is important to create a feeling of presence and immersion, and it requires that the scenes are allowed to ”live” as they would in reality. The many locations in which action occurs allows for stories in each location to play out, while having enough different options to provide significant variety.

• Most VR cameras have lenses for which the best distance for detail is about 4-5 feet from the camera.  With a small set of characters who talk to each other, scenes can be set up to take advantage of the optimal distance for filming.

• The story is told in the first person: The principal character tells the story as it is happening. She is at the center.  This means placing the camera at her location is a natural place to station the camera for most scenes.

• Narration can sometimes be a problem in videos, but when done with restraint and realism it can work.  It fact, is not necessary that everything be told from the first person viewpoint.  It would be possible in many scenes for there to be an alternative view of the scene. The image can fade from one view to another. Or, even more interesting, in many places in the video the user could interact with the video, selecting the way to view it.

• Some practical, mostly financial reasons why adapting NEVERWORLD WAKE for VR makes good sense: 
• There are not a lot of characters, and they can be played by top level young actors, just out of the best film acting programs.
• There are a lot of practical (ie existing, real-world) attractive locations.
• There are few special effects, or second unit action teams required.
• For VR, probably the greatest expense is hand-stitching (ie VR cameras have lenses pointing in different directions, and all the images must be “stitched” together so there are no seams). But stitching programs are getting better and better; careful placing of the action and the cameras and the background is now reducing the impact of the stitching.
• Most VR videos are only a few minutes long. However, I have watched complete movies on Netflix in the Gear VR and the Oculus Go with no problem. I rather like it.  When a story is good, and the images are attractive, VR is now capable of presenting feature length content.
• At most VR meetups, the attendance is about 80 – 90% male (I’ve counted), and 25-45 years old, well past their teens.  
• NEVERWORLD WAKE, by contrast, targets female teens way more than other demographics. 
• However, for anyone interested in bringing young females into technology, VR is the perfect place to start.  It is as true now of Virtual Reality, as William Goldman said years ago of movies, “Nobody knows anything.”  We are all at the same starting point.  There is no reason that young females could not and should not participate in the development of eXtended Reality at equal levels with males. 
• But they are not there now.  So a feature VR film of NEVERWORLD WAKE is unlikely to make a lot of money in retail sales, but it is a perfect vehicle for sponsorships from people interested in bringing women into technology: sponsorships to promote VR video to young women. 
• The beginning is the right place to start: watching a VR video feature, and catching the bug!
• And, of course, creating a pioneering VR Video feature would be a superior promotional adventure!

Labels: AR, eXtended Reality, Marisha Pessl, MR, Neverworld Wake, Night Film, NYXR, Virtual Reality, VR