TL;DR
- Spatial storytelling has yet to take off, but advances in hardware and trailblazing storytellers like Emmy Award-winning immersive director Michaela Ternasky Holland are changing that.
- “Nobody has it figured out,” Ternasky Holland says, noting that the industry is still in its early days and that people are still making mistakes as well as good work.
- She says the “beauty” of XR storytelling is that it can proximate the embodiment of day-to-day life in ways that traditional mediums are unable to replicate.
- Ternasky Holland and a panel of her fellow directors, producers, and creators will be speaking at the NAB Show session “Creative Lens on Compelling Content: Artistic and Commercially Successful AR, VR, and Mixed Reality.”
- Register with code AMP05 to attend.
The rise of virtual reality storytelling is inevitable due to the fact that human beings are innately tuned to spatial 360-degree three dimensional experiences. Slowly but surely the hardware and the development ecosystem is catching up with the storytelling possibilities that are already being explored by trailblazers like Emmy Award-winning immersive director Michaela Ternasky Holland.
“Nobody has it figured out,” she says. “It’s early days for the medium and people make mistakes, as well as good work. But because the hardware keeps improving, we’re going to start to see a rise in spatial storytelling.”
She adds, “We all know what it’s like to move in space from the moment we are born. The beauty of XR storytelling is that it can proximate the embodiment of what you feel in your day-to-day life in ways that you would never be able to replicate with a traditional medium.”
Ternasky Holland and fellow directors, producers, and creators at the NAB Show session, “Creative Lens on Compelling Content: Artistic and Commercially Successful AR, VR, and Mixed Reality,” have been working with emerging technology since the early days. They have already shattered boundaries to deliver impactful, immersive, and commercially successful experiences in AR, VR, and mixed reality (collectively categorized as XR), and will share the secrets of crafting world-class experiences that captivate audiences while generating profit.
Part of the Core Education Collection: Create Series, the panel discussion will be moderated by Archetypes & Effects founder Laura Mingail, and will also include Emmy Award-winning immersive director Elijah Allan-Blitz, Emblematic Group founder Nonny De La Peña, and Meta’s Eric J. Krueger. The session will take place at 10:00 AM on Monday, April 15 in Room W219.
“A lot of people who would love to do this type of work but perhaps feel that it doesn’t have a distribution platform like traditional film/TV or there’s not really a clear publishing platform, like traditional journalism,” says Ternasky Holland. “It’s true that there is not yet a robust sales pipeline but that doesn’t stop great work from being made.”
Allan-Blitz was the first VR director for Time magazine, and has since partnered with Van Jones to create The Messy Truth VR Experience, starring Marvel actors, and also directed the first AR short film for Disney+ called Remembering.
Named “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget, The Guardian and others, De La Peña is now working as the founding director at Arizona State University’s center for Emerging Media and Narrative. As founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, she uses cutting-edge technologies to tell stories — both fictional and news-based — that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers via immersive virtual, mixed and augmented reality.
She has been on the cover of the Wall Street Journal magazine as a WSJ “Technology Innovator of the Year” and Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative” for her pioneering work in immersive journalism, a field she is widely credited with establishing. She is also one of CNET en Español’s 20 most influential Latinos in tech, and a Wired Magazine #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change. A former correspondent for Newsweek, she has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV, and her virtual-reality work has been featured by the BBC, Mashable, Vice and Wired.
Krueger is head of production for the Metaverse Entertainment Team at Meta, and is constantly working on how to translate big commercial IP into the VR space, with projects ranging from Wallace & Gromit to Darth Vader.
Ternasky Holland herself is an Emmy winner for her work creating the first VR climb of Everest for Sports Illustrated. She has partnered with Meta to create multiple VR projects, examples of which she will present in the session. These include the reimagined series made in collaboration with writer-director Julie Cavaliere, which revisits lesser-known folk tales and animates them for VR.
“We don’t think of things the same way as a filmmaker or a journalist does. We almost think like a choreographer,” she says.
Questions around camera placement and location as a character will sound familiar to a filmmaker, but in the context of 360 video the answers will be very different.
“What is the activity around the camera?” poses Ternasky Holland. “We’re not just thinking about creating amazing environments, we’re also thinking about potential interactivity and how the camera moves through 3D 360 space. We’re thinking about how people are going to be depicted and whether they’re going to exhibit the ‘uncanny valley’ as avatars or whether we’re going to capture them in real time with volumetric 3D video,” she says.
“What we’re really trying to do is define a new media of creativity and a new visual language for storytelling.”
Ternasky Holland will also speak about her role as impact producer for On The Morning You Wake (to the End of the World), a VR documentary where her focus was on a mobilizing a target audience.
During that production they found a stronger reaction among viewers to the 3D immersive version of the film than a similar 2D animated version.
“VR is not necessarily an empathy machine, it just lends an immersion quality that heightens emotional responses. In both 2D and immersive 3D cases the participants felt connected to the story and connected to the characters, but just on that level of emotional impact we saw the difference VR can make.”
One goal of the panel is to act as a rallying cry for others to come and explore XR. “You don’t have to turn your back on traditional mediums in order to be a part of this industry. Nor do you need to have a technical background. From VR animation platforms to games engines there are so many products helping to make XR experiences accessible to people without an engineering or coding development background,” she says.
“We want to see an industry that has true diversity and inclusion. We want artists, creatives, and storytellers and we want producers, we want good lawyers to build up an ecosystem for XR experiences.”
She describes XR as a sandbox environment where serendipitous events should be allowed to happen. “Traditional filmmakers come from a background where they control and edit every single frame and as a result they are constantly in control of the viewer. There is no denying there is tremendous power in that but if you want to get involved in this more immersive, interactive storytelling landscape then you have to let go of that control.”
She adds: “This medium is more like immersive theater where you create the rules of the world but you have to recognize that your audience has agency and will make decisions based on what interests them.
“That is both the secret sauce and the powerful part of this process. If traditional mediums are a passive experience, XR allows people to explore the embodiment of being inside the story.”
The latest advancements in VR/AR headsets such as the Apple Vision Pro are unlocking a new era of immersive experiences, but Ternasky Holland is cautious about jumping too soon.
“I always hesitate to say the word ‘explosion’ because it seems we’ve been on the cusp of that for the last 10 years. Every new headset that comes out makes a slight improvement whether that’s in the weight distribution of the headset or in the pixel count of the display. We now have external cameras streaming live video into your vision for better mixed reality and with the latest headsets we can take advantage of eye-tracking technology,” she says.
“I do think though that one day we will all have some sort of mixed reality headset, whether that’s for work, similar to the way we all have laptops, or whether it’s an entertainment device,” she continues.
“I don’t think we’re going to get there any time soon, but that’s just fine because I’d prefer us to slowly build and grow the hardware and the content in parallel to be able to manage expectations. For me it’s a little less about an overnight change and more of a gradual transition.”
Why subscribe to The Angle?
Exclusive Insights: Get editorial roundups of the cutting-edge content that matters most.
Behind-the-Scenes Access: Peek behind the curtain with in-depth Q&As featuring industry experts and thought leaders.
Unparalleled Access: NAB Amplify is your digital hub for technology, trends, and insights unavailable anywhere else.
Join a community of professionals who are as passionate about the future of film, television, and digital storytelling as you are. Subscribe to The Angle today!
