The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Building Worlds with VR, Art, and Narrative

Episode Date: January 27, 2017

Once upon a time, Robert Stromberg got a phone call from "Jim" Cameron (aka James Francis Cameron of Terminator and Titanic fame) about a little project called Avatar. Before he knew it, he was responsible for designing the organic world of Pandora, from bioluminescent plants to lush mountaintops. That was when Stromberg realized how much more technology could do, when ready, for creating more such virtual worlds. He'd actually been creating such worlds for ages, from drawing monsters in childhood to doing matte art, production design, art direction, and more for films. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, the two-time Academy Award winner (for production design on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland) and director of Maleficent shares his views on the evolution of filmmaking, narrative, and virtual reality. Stromberg directed the VR gaming experience based on The Martian (which received a Cannes Silver Lion award) and co-founded The Virtual Reality Company, which is re-imagining the film studio for the next generation of tech. What challenges do we face in an immersive medium, what will narratives look like, and what new (or even retro) techniques will we need? All this and more in this episode -- along with a16z partners Kyle Russell, Hanne Tidnam, and Sonal Chokshi -- continuing our series on new medium storytelling. image: Wikimedia Commons The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is continuing our new medium storytelling series. This episode in particular is focusing on virtual worlds and more broadly, filmmaking techniques and the evolution of narrative. Joining this conversation, we have two-time Academy Award winner Robert Stromberg. He won Oscars for production design on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. He was also the director of Disney's Maleficent, and he directed the Martian VR experience,

which received the Can Silver Lion Award. Also joining this conversation, our deal-in-investing team partner Kyle Russell, an editorial partner Hannah Tidnam. But we began the conversation with Robert telling us about his career, which went from being a matte artist to visual, effects to art direction, to production, directing, and now co-founder of the virtual reality company, a studio for this new era. So we're really excited to have you and I think what's really especially unique about your background is, A, the immense variety of things and the range of things that you've done, but also because you bring such a unique perspective that sort of stitches it all together from starting with your own career, which maybe we should start off as sort of your background

and how you sort of got here. It's been an extremely interesting ride. I seem to change careers about every five years, it seems. But I started off, my father was a low-budget filmmaker, and I grew up watching my dad make monster films in our garage. He was a big fan of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. So I was immediately struck with the fascination of not just film, but the world creation. And it was like magic to me at the time.

That led me into sort of creating the backgrounds for some of the stuff. he was doing and that led to an 18 year career as a mat artist and visual effects supervisor, which took me to a point where I met the director named Peter Weir, and we did a film called Master and Commander together. And he's a great man, a gentleman, but we became such close friends that by the time we were finished, he felt like I had designed so much in the movie that he gave me the credit on the film as visual effects designer. And it was really interesting because I hadn't really started off to be a production designer.

I actually wanted to be a director even as a kid. Hard to break into. It is. And, you know, I got a call one day from Jim Cameron, you know, who calls. Wait, but Jim Cameron, you mean the James Cameron. Oh, well, yeah, James Cameron. You're like Jim's my buddy Jim Cameron. Of Titanic theme and blah, blah, blah.

But it was so out of the blue, it was a Sunday. And the phone rang and it says, hey, it's James Cameron. And I said, yeah, right, okay, I sure whatever. Who's playing a joke on you? But he asked me if, because he had seen Master and Commander, and he just loved the realistic qualities and the design of it all. He felt that it was very real and gritty. And so he asked me, you know, would I be willing to help him for a few days?

because he had a studio presentation. I said, okay, sure. And I said, can you tell me a little about it? And he said, yeah, it's a big science fiction film takes place on another planet, you know, and very vague, really. Oh, no. What movie was he talking about? You have to tell us. What do we think it is?

Avatar. I said, can you tell me any more about it? And he said, well, when we get together, we will. But all I can tell you is that it's on a moon that's orbiting a big gas planet. That's literally all he told you about. And he said there's floating mountains. Flooding mountains is on a moon and that's basically what he knew. Yeah.

Can you come see me tomorrow? And I said, okay. Floating mountains, I'm in. Yeah, so I had never met him, but I was so inspired by the call. And I'd spent years doing my own artwork. So I said, what the heck I'll do something. So I just made up this image of vista, you know, and it had giant trees and floating mountains.

and just based off the very little information you had. Just being inspired. I just decided to do something. And sorry, when you say you made up, did you make it up in like some digital form? Was it on paper, the mock up? No, it was it. It was a visual image of Photoshop. Photoshopped image.

It started off as a sketch and then into Photoshop. But I said, what the heck? So I went into meet Jim the next morning. He and John Landau, the producer. And we were talking for some time and we all agreed what we could do. Okay, good. And then I said, hey, you know, Jim, I did this piece of art. You know, you want to see it.

And he said, sure. And I put it up on the screen. And he literally sort of turned white and pounded his fist into the table. And I said, what the heck have I done? And he pointed at it. And he just looked at it. And he said, that's my movie. Oh, my God.

That's amazing. And that four days or whatever was going to be turned into four and a half years. Working on Avatar. That's how long it took. Yeah. And as a production designer, so it was my very first production design. What did that entail roughly? We're not familiar with the industry, so production design includes everything from...

Oh, every plant, every, everything about the world of Pandora. You're creating that world from scratch? Yeah, every single element of it. It must feel like being like God almost to be creating from plants to mountains. It's very spiritual, I have to say, I mean, it's a... sort of nod to how I feel about creation in general. It's sort of an honor to be able to do that stuff. How much free reign did you have?

Complete. Totally your vision. It was really just Jim and I in the beginning. Later on, a guy by the name of Rick Carter came on who was a week co-production design. He did the human elements, the military base, and I did the organic world. Let's talk about some of your directing work. And so you directed Maleficent, which, by the way, is. an amazing movie because I love the fact that you tell the story of the dark queen that

people have always wondered. It's a different perspective, you know, and I think that's what was compelling to me. And I think if we had just told a straight out of the box version of Sleeping Beauty, people wouldn't have been as engaged. I think the unique part about the film was that we got to see a different point of view and see some things that we might have wondered about if we had seen Sleeping Beauty. So to me, that was really, uh, really, uh, really interesting. What was some of the adjustment in making the shift in doing, say, production art and design to the directing, I mean, beyond like the scope of what you're doing? It's kind of interesting. I was doing a panel in Oslo, Norway, and someone in the audience

asked me what makes somebody an artist and another person not. That's a great question, actually. And, you know, I thought about it for a long time because it is a great question. And what I came to was that I believe that creative types or artist types are better observers of the world or more curious somehow about the world itself. And what happens is by paying attention to all those small little details that nobody else cares about, those are the elements that allow you to complete a problem. If you look at art as a series of questions and answers that you ask yourself to get to the finish line. If you know those little subtle answers, you're able to get there. I once heard John May to say that the distinction

between design and art on a different note is that design answers question and art asks questions. That was kind of an interesting way of sort of thinking about it. So one question we have is that, so you have this incredible rich background and so many ranges of filmmaking. And now when you think about this fact that you created entire worlds, like from down to the plants in an avatar, how does that sort of translate to VR where it seems it's almost like unmooring? There's no place to necessarily anchor yourself almost. Oh, I thought it was extremely exciting. You know, I mean, what we were doing, I'm not saying that that Avatar created VR. What I'm saying is that for the first time, we were felt like we were pioneering and entering into something

new. Why is that? Well, the first time, because it was the first time we were, making a movie in a 360-degree world with a virtual camera. The only thing different is that the camera wasn't attached to your headset. So what you're describing was for the camera setup with Avatar, basically there was a pre-made virtual world of what Pandora looked like, and actors were in front of large green screens, and while filming you'd look through a screen on the camera that would show you what that person looked like in the context of the virtual world.

Is that correct? Partly. So actually, the entire movie, there was, was a section of the movie that was shot in New Zealand, which were actual sets and actual actors. But the majority of the film was actually all motion capture, which means that all the actors had a motion capture suit on. And we were in a warehouse in Playa del Rey. And it was just a big gray, huge building with infrared cameras everywhere. And we had terrain simulations on the ground so that when the actors went up and down and over logs and things.

It would feel like they were. Yeah, and we just replaced that with the digital stuff. The camera itself was completely virtual. In other words, you were looking at a screen, but Jim had the ability to, you know, change that into any lens, any scale of movement. So you could have a techno crane move or just a little bitty move, all with the same.

Tool. The ability to use any lens or any camera movement. If you just move your hand three inches, could be a 100-foot move or it could be a 3-inch move. So the ability to scale and to move around was unbelievable. And that was just to record the actors. And we were seeing back real time the actors as their Avatar characters. Right. But it wasn't in full fidelity, right?

It was kind of a lower quality rendering. Yeah, I used to call it the crayon version. Ultimately, what the film would look like. Obviously, when we first started Avatar, I remember the first meet. meeting where we saw the test of motion capture and the capabilities. The first test was just one figure hopping over a little gray log and Jim said, okay, we can do this, right? But by the time we were finished, technology had advanced so rapidly that we suddenly were

making the movie in a fully detailed world. I mean, it was sort of what we, sort of a pre-vis state. It was like video game level. It wasn't, you know, full fidelity. but everything that we did on that stage went to the visual effects people who just upgraded that to higher res models and all that stuff. So you had a very early sense of what it would be like to create a kind of virtual reality world and film. But when was the first time you felt what it would be like to consume it, to experience it on the other end? Well, even then, at the end of the avatar, I was thinking, geez, it's just a matter of time before we are able to create a viewing system where we'll be able to sort of walk.

around Pandora, you know, and actually go there and... Pandora being the world of Avatar, yeah. But, you know, at the time, the movie came out. The tech wasn't there for the headsets and all that for VR. But I did want to keep my eye on what was happening. And I went off to do other things. It designed Alice in Wonderland right after that. And then Oz, the great and powerful after that.

Do you remember the first time you put on, you know, that you actually experienced it? So one day woke up, I was during the middle of Maleficent and read that Facebook had bought, you know, a company called Oculus. Which, by the way, is an investment of ours, just to say, full disclosure. So that very day, I read it. I got up and I actually cold called Oculus. They were still just a small group in Irvine at the time and asked if I could come see what they were doing. And they, you know, cordially said yes. And so I immediately went down there and they invited me into their little secret room. And that very day, what I saw was exactly what I hoped I would see.

And that is that finally, you know, we have a viewing system that would allow us to step into these worlds that I've always dreamed about. And it sort of shocked me in a very big way. And so on that same day, I walked down to the cafe of their building and called my, two other friends and said, we're starting a company today. And that was the virtual reality company, VRC. Fantastic branding, by the way. Owning that right from the beginning. Well, that tells you how long ago it was.

You know, I have a question for you on the technology and the creative sort of the balance. Because one of the things that I know a lot of people complain about, for better or worse, about George Lucas and some of the newer Star Wars movies is how at the end of the day, those movies kind of became unmoored because it was just him playing with a lot of toys and CGI and kind of losing sight of like the narrative and the plot. And a lot of people feel like Rogue One, for example, sort of addressed some of those wrongs. And they were sort of proud that Disney took that on in a way. And one of the questions I have is when you describe the ability to create a world from scratch and having come at it from filmmaking and now going into VR, how do you

sort of keep everything sort of not unmoored? Because one of the things that I see at a lot of early VR art, it has almost an overly fantastical quality to it, overly video game like. And it doesn't feel, and I know, Kyle, you've argued in the podcast in the past that you don't have to feel fully real. Just a figure that's sort of rough can even convey the same thing. How do you navigate this, not letting the technology unmoor the creative or vice versa? I think very much like Avatar. I look at things, not today, but, you know, five years from now. Ideas will always be ideas that are catching up and the tech is catching up with, they're constantly in a sprint together. Yeah, it's like they reinforce each other. Yeah. So I think that, you know, the fidelity

will get better. The viewing systems will get better. And one day you'll be, you'll be able to go into the worlds of Pandora, wherever you want to go, but in a very, very real way. You know, right now, you know, when we're running at 90 frames a second and through game engines and things like that, that there's a tremendous amount of material and information happening. And we all know that that stuff will get better over time. You know, a lot of these movies that you've done and worked on, have this archetypal story feel to them, the fairy tale or even Avatar sort of a Jungian, you know, archetypal story. Are there genres or types of stories that you think you'll do a better job of telling with VR that they'll open up a different kind of way of talking about

and we're telling stories? I do. And I was just on the phone this morning with somebody talking about this because, you know, when I was doing, not directing, but when I was doing visual effects, I would work on all types of movies. And each one of them is singing, if you will, different songs. So for instance, when I was a visual effects supervisor and I was doing a film like Walk the Line, no one knew there were visual effects in it. Wait, Walk the Line is in the Johnny Cash story. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize you did that. Lots of movies where you didn't know there were visual effects in them. But what you get known for is the fingerprint and that's the fantasy stuff. So in VR, what we haven't seen yet is, and what I'm trying to do with VRC is to bring the gaming world and

Hollywood together in a way that hasn't been seen before. I was going to say that's one of the things I found most impressive about the Martian. If the virtual reality company is famous for anything today, it's the first production that you did with Fox Innovation Labs, which is The Martian, basically letting you be Matt Damon stuck on Mars for a couple minutes. Siencing the shit out of everything. Yeah. And it's beautiful.

many conversations we have with people in Hollywood and kind of more traditional film mindset is the idea that, oh, well, VR is this big, tricky puzzle to deal with because we don't have editing and quick cuts and camera movements don't work the same way. And so it's all these disadvantages, how it's always framed. But when I played through the Martian, you know, you were taking advantage of the very latest capabilities of the headsets out there on the HTC V that you were using positional tracking, hand tracking where my moving around on the Mars surface, it was the exact same motion of my body and hands in my living room. Right.

And it's not so much that you weren't able to cut to other significant events happening in a specifically timed way. But I got to spend time actually there. And what's game like about is the fact that the story, it's not controlled entirely by the filmmakers. It's you have to have some kind of input on the world. world for the plot to move forward. And so... Choose your own adventures. Yeah, exactly.

And so I'm curious, are there other kind of limitations that people talk about when it comes to film that you think, actually, that's not a weakness. It lets us experiment in these other ways. We entered into that, and like we entered into Avatar, which is really, can we do this at all? And, you know, this is long before any of the hand controllers were available and all of that stuff. So we were working with literally, like, soldered together, hand controller, prototypes and

things. And but rather than having like floating hands like we all see in VR, we actually came up with a way to, you know, do the IK for. And that's inverse kinematics. So working out from the movement of your hands, what your arms and elbows and every other joint's doing. That's right. Because when you see, wait, why is that such a hard problem? Because there's just so much, you know, so much happening. And, and by the way, you know, this is taking the, you know, the Vive and and Oculus and their equipment and adapting to what we needed to do as well. So you're kind of customized in the hardware, too. It's like the early days of computing.

One of the biggest hurdles of even that the Martian was developing the arms, you know, which are completely textured. So you could put your arm right up close to your face and see the same controls that Matt Damon had in the movie on his arm. And you're in a spacesuit. So, you know, if you don't have that, you don't have a complete sense of immersion in what's happening. So that was incredibly important. and I think, you know, groundbreaking in many ways.

That's on the technical aspects. On the narrative side, did the people who played the Martian, assuming they hadn't seen the movie and they don't know the narrative, how do they sort of know how to direct themselves in the environment? Because this is the question that constantly have about VR. I was talking to Ridley along the way. And he was kind enough to let us work while he was in editorial still on making the actual film. But he allowed us to take their footage and experiment with it. So I came up with this thing I called box cut.

which is basically floating windows that come up and down like an edit. So it propels. You're still in VR and things feel dimensional, but it's still propelling the narrative forward. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting ways that people have a sort of find, it doesn't have to be linear necessarily, obviously, but it's interesting how people are finding these ways of almost providing a weird sort of skemorphism for VR, for lack of a better afraid. Yeah. Some other narrative experiments I've seen, they've got done away with putting sci-fi-y floating text in front of you instead have what looks like a physical road signs, like with a giant arrow saying, go here next.

Talking of gaming, there's a game that I played. I don't play that many games, but it was a game called Extra Solar, which was all like exploring Mars and super high death. And it was very scientific and you were on this mission to find it, but you had no, I abandoned it after a while because I had no idea what to do next. And that was a game, not a VR immersive environment. I mean, the rule book is still not been written on how to make narrative storytelling in VR. I like to sort of look at it a little bit like a Broadway play, for instance, you know, where there's a director and actors in front of you that are conveying a story to you. And you can sit in any seat in the theater and still be told the same story.

Now, if you were to jump up on stage and get in the middle of all of that, you would feel as though you were intruding. There's a lot of psychological elements that go along with, you know, creating storytelling in VR. And not to mention other cues, like oral cues and other things as well. Well, it's like real life. I'm looking at you guys. And when you talk, I look at you. And when you talk, I look at you. So it's not just audio cues.

It's visual cues. You can edit, by the way. You just have to do it in clever ways. I've done a lot of research in motion because obviously if you artificially give somebody a sense of motion, they can not feel well. So I spent a lot of time figuring that out. And one of the things I figured out is keeping the horizon correct at all time. Fascinating.

Because our equilibrium is so. delicate that if you're off a little bit, you feel it, you know. And also, it's very important when you're moving the camera that you're moving really, really smooth in a path. Constant motion, no acceleration. Yeah, let on a rail. Let the people do the looking. Because when you take that ability away from them, they feel that as well. You know, I think that eventually we'll probably see some sort of motion rating system. So you mean like content rating? G, PG and everything. Well, but for motion.

So, like, if we had this sort of, like, a color base, if it had orange, blue, green, you know, the orange level is for kids and so on and so on. Fascinating. Communicated well enough today is the fact that nausea typically, it's not the hardware itself. Oh, if you use this gadget, you're going to get sick from VR. It's experiences built in a certain way,

using acceleration in a certain way, moving the camera in a certain way. That's what leads to it. And it's something that you can, label and highlight and say, hey, this experience tends to do things in a way that to a subset of people might make you feel a little easy. So if you don't like roller coasters, don't watch that. Right. Isn't it enormously about your own inner ear too?

Totally unique to the individual? But I think you could say like this, to this, to the extent that you are susceptible to it, this experience would contribute to those things or these. Right. If you're someone like me who gets seasick on a rowboat, you'll probably, you may get. But that's a different kind of motion. That's a constant up and down motion where the horizon is changing. If you're on a roller coaster, you're on a smooth. rail and you are you have the option to look around so so that's where the horizon becomes so

so fascinating i love that you mentioned uh the play the theater experience too because something that struck me about vr is that in a way it's like almost like going back to reading and being so psychologically immersive right and it's almost removing the the screen when that you know that put us it's screenless yeah like the chapter wasn't really a standardized function of the novel until the Bible. The point of view wasn't a common thing until Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker. What are some of the tools that you're starting to get inkling? This is actually going to open up a different opportunity for us rather than just problem solving to make sure that we don't get sick, you know, that the horizon is the same. That feels like it allows us a new kind of access

to emotional. Right. That doesn't reference existing. Yes. That does existing tools. What you're going to see in VR is there's going to be more choices of what experience you want. I mean, there will be the possibility for you to participate in a film. And there'll be other times where you want something to unfold in front of you and just take it in and let somebody tell you a story. I have the choice right now to go to a movie theater, sit back in the dark, and let somebody tell me a story. Or I could go home and turn on the Xbox and control my own moves. So screenwriters now are going to have to write 500 stories of one movie. Well, I don't know. It's actually really interesting because VR is, it's literally a brand new

medium. I mean, and it's still in an infancy, if you will. Right now, it's been introduced mainly in the gaming world, but part of the important part is to find that first. narrative story-telling event in VR that is so compelling and emotional. Like the killer story. Yeah, with real actors and makes you feel something. And once that happens, I think a floodgate of other storytellers will get involved. When I first saw the movie, Gravity, for instance, I thought, oh, I love that movie. Yeah, I said, oh, man, that's make a great VR film.

You have these super long moves. You're floating. It's emotional. 85% of that movie was CG anyway. Gravity is an interesting example to me because I actually saw it in two forms. I saw it in its regular movie, like the flat version. And then I saw it in the 3D, which I know is not VR just for the sake of terminology and clarification. But I found the 3D version to be more distracting because while there was a very immersive, tangible, tactical quality to it,

it was very distracting from the actual emotional experience. Whereas the first time I saw it without the 3D, I was completely emotionally immersed because I was just so lost in this story of a woman trapped in space and in her own life, essentially. Avatar was in 2D and 3D. You know, the majority of the people I talk to found the 3D version, you know, compelling and emotional. So I think it's an argument for both, but look, it's always going to boil down to storytelling, writing, a compelling storyline. and really interesting characters. In VR, I hate to say this,

but I feel like we're at this sort of parlor trick, stage of things right now. Unfortunately, it's a bunch of little proof of concepts of, oh, we actually can guide your attention from one side of your body to the other without needing to necessarily control where the camera's pointed. How do we keep your attention,

but still give you the freedom of feeling like you have agency and you can look at whatever you want? It's like writing little poems instead of a novel. We haven't seen Merrill Street. in VR yet. Just for our listeners, this was recorded the day after the Golden Globes. You know, I go back far enough where I witnessed analog to digital, right, in the first

place, where computers were these things no one knew about. And what was interesting is in the early days of computer graphics, it was the people that built the equipment themselves that were making stuff. And I remember a very specific time where when the creatives of Hollywood and visual effects and all of those people joined forces with those technical people. And that's when all of a sudden you saw an explosion of really good visual effects, CG work. Is that what you think this is the shift of an entire medium, like to HD, or more like how 3D was? Well, the reason I say that is because creative people in general, And once they join forces with the smart minds and the technical people behind all of the new technology, then we'll start to see it really sing.

So in the shift, we're talking about the handset and the hardware makers. We're talking about the studios. And we're talking about the content and the creators. We're talking about the filmmakers, old and new. And in between there's all these different players. There's distribution and there's platforms. So we have this whole ecosystem. Where do you fit?

Well, from day one, I knew that there was going to have to be a symbiotic relationship between the technical and the creative. And so from day one, my intent was to be a pioneer in the content of VR and not an innovator in any new sort of hardware. So something I'd love to touch on is kind of the intersection of your art and the business of it. as a creator and someone wanting to take advantage of the capabilities of the underlying platforms, because with VR today, you know, there's kind of the high tier where, again, as with the Martian, you've got your head and hand tracking that lets you be this other person. Whereas on mobile, it uses the same sensors that are in your phone for checking whether you turned it to the side so that it should play video horizontally to detect rotation of your head.

And so it's kind of this fishbowl of video around you. the thing is because it's so much cheaper, it's something like 5X more devices have been sold than on the high-end things attached to a PC. So how do you think about kind of the tug of, I want to reach a bunch of people and the tug of I want to make the coolest things possible with VR today?

The high-end. Well, again, I think we're in the infancy stages of things. I mean, you know, you can play a 2D game and be compelled on your iPhone, or you can go home and turn on your Xbox. It depends on, you know, a decision that you make and what sort of fidelity and, you know, interaction you want. But what we're trying to do, and it's in these early days, is be platform agnostic and pay attention to all platforms.

It's looking ahead three years from now, you know, and what's going to happen. And planning now for when the market is there, when people adopt to a certain platform. So right now, a lot of what I do is thinking about the future and where the technology is going and try and match a marketing plan and a business plan that will meet that, you know, at that junction. How do you think that people are going to access the content? He's going to pay, too. Yeah, do you think that it's something along the lines of Netflix or HBO where you kind of pay for this all-access bucket?

Is it something where you basically pay for a session? You get to spend 20 minutes in Avatar for $10? The business model will change. I think, you know, over time when there's enough content and there's enough library to, you know, to sustain a subscription. Right. When people talk about, oh,

what's Netflix for VR look like? And by the way. There were decades of backlog of film content that Netflix could tap into. In fact, some people complain that Netflix is now changing that whole nature, how people interact with those archives

because it's such a limited subset. Yeah. Initially, when you have sites like Steam and, you know, Oculus site and all these. These will be the first places that you're able to sort of download,

but I can see very clearly a time when you will have, have this sort of Netflix-like library to choose from and pay for a subscription. So given the rate of adoption of these VR headsets, you know, several hundred thousand units each for the Rift and Vive, let's say, does the idea of having some other form of getting to people sound? Like, are you interested, for instance, in the, like, arcade model of set up places at a movie theater where you go see Star Wars Episode 8 and here is a Star Wars tie-in VR experience? or here is Ready Player 1,

here's a Ready Player 1 VR experience. There's lots of talk of that, and we're talking to people about that. I think you can very realistically see, you know, 30, 40 seat theaters pop up with seats, motion-based seats that are synchronized to the experience itself. So you'll have that option or you can go home and perhaps everyone will have their VR set up at home

in a very similar model. Right now it's so early And You're right that mobile is where we're really focused on right now But that's going to change over time As people I'll tell you what the key is When there's more compelling content

There's content that people are willing to buy It'll happen It's a difficult tautology to deal with Because it's when the things are there That you would buy, people will buy it You have to have television shows If you buy a TV, you know So, and that's where we're at now.

I think this next year is very exciting because a lot of attention will focus on better compelling content. So what are some of the things just to wrap up that you are excited about and that you're thinking about next? Well, we just, we just completed an 18-minute piece with Steven Spielberg. Ooh. I'm surprised you didn't call him Stevie. Stevie.

Yeah. Really quick story is that when it first started, VRC, one of the first things I wanted to do was prove that it could be a cinematic tool and not just a gaming tool. So I did a four-minute test that I called there, which is basically a little girl taking you through this dreamlike landscape. And I ended up showing that to Stephen. And it was, I just remember the look on his face. It changed everything in his view of VR. And so I was at his house. He was inviting all his grandkids and everybody else to watch. And it was just a really moving moment. And what it proved to me is that you can do something, you know, in storytelling that's emotional and compelling. And where we're going now is we are doing branching narratives, which is really cool. The choose your own adventure. So you can be going through a story being told to you.

And depending on where you look, take different paths and different stories. So the idea of rewatching it again is there. Talk about Alice in Wonderland. It's like, drink me. But the next generation of gaming platform or storytelling is the same as the first computer game or game narrative format. You've entered a room. Go through the door? Yes.

It's just that with much more impressive visuals. I'm just so interested in how you write that kind of choice into the story. It will have to be a story that has a kind of multiplicity to it. adding free will into it. That's the hard part to figure out where that fits into narrative. The writing challenge around that to make it not, like Kyla saying, choose one door. Well, it is Alice in Wonderland. But we can read a book and we can adapt that to a screenplay and we can do certain things.

I think we can follow character paths, character arcs, and write a story to each of those arcs, which all ties together at the end with one broad narrative. of it. Well, it actually does go back to the early days of filmmaking and the idea that you couldn't translate plays to movies and movies now to VR. There's going to be a lot of the new language and a storytelling medium being created, but yet sometimes using some of the same fundamental core principles about what makes people emotionally moved. Well, I just love this idea that we can have multiple stories at once and not necessarily have one have more weight and more authority. The truth version. Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a lot of social aspects

to VR as well and how that could change the way we socialize together. In fact, Kyle, you argued in one of the blog posts last year that actually social, and Kevin Kelly argued this on our podcast too, that VR would actually be one of the more counterintuitively social platforms. As opposed to walking out the rest of your friends. Right, which is, I think, true of any computing platform in the end. We're all staring at our phones, but it's to see what our friends are up to somewhere else. So, I mean, all that will change.

I mean, there's so many tentacles in VR. It's not sort of one-trick pony. I think you'll see successes in certain areas and failures and others. But, you know, for me, this next year is going to be really focused on proving that you can tell an emotional tale, have it compelling enough for people to sort of engage and want to sort of see more of. And sustain it, right? A longer one, not just four minutes in a dream world. Yeah, we've already started what I will call a feature length.

VR film. And I'm also thinking of reinventing the intermission. I love this when these details about the format, you know, these little like the chapter, like the intermission. Can you talk about that? What would that mean? Well, I mean, we used to watch films that were very long and they would have an intermission in the middle. By the way, Indian movies still have intermissions and then Bollywood movies. They still have intermissions. We go to a stage play. There's an intermission. Especially in VR, I think we want to be able to sort of give the viewer the option to take a break. can, at least in these early stages of where we're at and give, you know, you can take some drama mean maybe. Sorry.

I'm just kidding. You think about I'm doing my job well, damn it, no. Only if you're watching VR on a boat. Yeah. So bring back the intermission. That's super exciting and interesting. I also like the narrative tool that the intermission was. You know, one particular divides it into two a before and after and there's a pause.

Take a sec, digest. And where are we when we come back? You know, it was part of the story architecture also. It was actually where the climax peaked and where the denouement kind of started. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like the old cereals. You would sort of end on a point, made people talk and come back into it.

Right. TV before we got the binge culture from Netflix. Which is also another interesting way of reinventing a medium reinventing a story. Yeah, but intermissions in television are commercial. So that actually does open up interesting questions for advertising as well. So everything from bringing back the intermission to ratings and we could keep talking. for hours, but this is just fascinating. Thank you so much for your work and thank you for being on the A6 and Z podcast. Thank you for having me.