A virtual-reality (VR) research project developed by Dr Richard Misek, Senior Lecturer in Film, alongside artist Oscar Raby and filmmaker Charlie Lyne, will have its world premiere and be in competition at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) next month.
The project is entitled A Machine for Viewing, and was funded by an AHRC Digital Transformations grant.
The project comprises a unique three-episode hybrid of real-time VR experience, live performance, and video essay in which the three moving-image makers explore how we now watch films by putting various ‘machines for viewing’ including cinema and virtual reality face-to-face.
Across three interlinked episodes (total runtime approx. 20-25 minutes), Richard, Oscar and Charlie turn a physical cinema space and a headset-based virtual cinema into a playground for a series of adventures in vision. Audience members participate either as a user interacting within the ‘VR cinema’ or as spectators in the physical cinema, experiencing the live narration and watching the activity in the VR cinema on the big screen.
IDFA will be held from 20 November to 1 December 2019. The project will be entered into the DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction.
The project is co-produced by Melbourne-based VR studio Vrtov and Live Cinema UK.
To find out more about the VR project at IDFA, please see the page here:
www.idfa.nl/en/film/3984bb8e-6309-4f06-bdaf-609736be63cd/a-machine-for-viewing