The Foundry and Radical Plans on how they used virtual reality to open up a dialogue about the refugee crisis
Since September creative software developer The Foundry has been sharing episodes of its five-part 360-degree documentary series, Filming With No Borders 360° VR Truth.
No Borders is a documentary that covers the refugee crisis in Italy, giving insight into the lives of the refugees, the reactions to the crisis and the support around the refugee community.
Along with Italian production house Radical Plans, the tech company produced the series to give creatives and filmmakers a closer look into the 360-degree filming process by showing how footage is stitched together and provide an insight into the challenges faced in creating live-action VR content.
Charting the plight of refugees arriving in Italy from their home countries, the films were premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and came on the back of research from The Foundry which found that the channel is growing rapidly with 61 per cent of people from the advertising and entertainment industries saying they believed that VR content will open up new growth opportunities.
The series has centred around stories from the Refugee crisis, featuring commentary from VR experts such as Visualise and Happy Finish. With the final episode being published this week The Drum caught up with the Jon Starck, head of research at The Foundry, who told The Drum: “Shooting and preparing high quality content for VR is still a challenging process. We're still in the learning stages about how best to shoot material and deliver final quality results in post-production.”
“There were some really interesting lessons on the creative side, in particular in creating an emotional impact through the VR experience. We also got to experience first-hand all the challenges from selecting the camera for shooting, the limitations in production through to delivering final stitches in post. This has been a fantastic experience to help define the toolsets we are building to help artists with live action VR,” he added.
Meanwhile, Haider Rashid founder at Radical Plans said that the project was designed not only to break the barriers of classical media but also so that the emotional impact of the film, and the technology it was shot with, would open up a dialogue about the refugee crisis.
He continued: “We faced both technical and artistic challenges. VR is still in a widely experimental phase so it's both scary and exciting to find out how to make things work: making sure that scenes are covered, that the material stitches well and that it can be effective narratively. Artistically it's a whole new thing: you need to leave behind most of the rules of cinema and discover how to tell a story in VR.”
You can watch the final episode of the series in full above.