Screenwriting for Virtual Reality

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) lets viewers choose their gaze direction within cinematic content encircling them in 360 degrees and can in some cases also enable user-influence on both events and existents within the represented environment. This particularly applies to animated CVR where computer-generated content can respond to user actions. This chapter explores how the boundaries between the diegetic and extra-diegetic dissolve when the user becomes an existent, influencing both narration and audio-visual representation. The analysis is based on qualitative close readings of two works, Agence (Gagliano, Pietro. 2020. Agence. Directed by Pietro Gagliano. Produced by Pietro Gagliano and David Oppenheim. https://​www.​agence.​ai/​.; Gagliano, Pietro, interview by The Foreign Film Academy. 2020. Agence: AI and Dynamic Filmmaker (feat. Pietro Gagliano);) and Bonfire (Darnell, Eric. 2019. Bonfire. Directed by Eric Darnell. Produced by Baobab Studios.). The titles will be assessed considering previous studies of CVR, and other interactive narrative media, investigating how planning and conceptualising can be carried out for these kinds of experiences. The aim of this chapter is to suggest ways of authoring a diegesis in interactive CVR, considering that the experience will be affected differently by the interaction of the user. One proposal is to plan forking-path plots through flowcharts, similar to those used in video game development. The second is to conceptualise spatial relations within the diegesis graphically, akin to architectural floor plan drawings. These means are proposed as methods to support screenwriting for VR.

This chapter explores the dynamics of narration in cinematic virtual reality filmmaking (CVR), with a focus on the options for the positioning of the viewer, who find themselves in the middle of the story world, with control over their gaze. Through the use of a case study that involved the development of three short CVR film works, the chapter establishes the main ways to conceptualise viewer positioning: either as an invisible and unacknowledged presence; an acknowledged but invisible character; or as an embodied being visible to other characters in the story world. The chapter argues that once a viewer is acknowledged, they become a character in the world, almost certainly present in every scene, and known or knowable to other characters. This type of presence demands a high level of consideration from the screenwriter, much as any central character in a narrative would receive. With embodiment comes another set of challenges, both technical and ethical, but whatever positioning is chosen, CVR filmmakers need to fully consider the changed nature of narration with the medium in order to make the best use of its immersive properties and ability to generate emotion and empathy.

Over the last several years, significant screenwriting research has explored cinematic virtual reality (CVR) narratives; however, less work has considered the development of narrative-driven VR works with multiple interactive elements, such as those that move into the territory of game design or live performance. As a part corrective to this situation, this chapter presents an analysis of the writing process that gave rise to The Future of Houses: Designing for a Circular Economy, an interactive, educational VR experience born out of a larger project seeking to communicate scientific research into ‘Energy Futures’. The writing process associated with the gamified element of The Future of Houses involved regular meetings over a period of approximately three months by a team of narrative designers with varying backgrounds and experience. In this chapter, I analyse an approach to narrative development that foregrounds spatial storytelling, the user’s journey and user experience (UX), and that highlights the challenges and opportunities of working with a multidisciplinary team.

Screenplay formats for Virtual and Mixed Reality are not yet standardised. Innovations in screen production documents are frequently occurring alongside the project development process. This chapter focuses on the development of an interactive MR essay called In a Minor Key (IaMK). The significant body of work described as interactive factuals offers some models for writing interactive documentary VR and MR. However, writing interactivity is not the only challenge. With the filmic, frame-based Master Scene method proving inadequate to convey spatial, immersive and multimodal experiences, new strategies are required to write works predicated on interactants being able to move around in 3D environments containing sites of interaction that determine branching structures as well as setting out the placement of objects, sounds and features within the landscape and describing the environmental conditions. Through an examination of the writing and development process for IaMK, this chapter considers the conditions in play when writing an essayistic MR work as an experiential system. This analysis is part of an ongoing conversation about screenwriting for emerging forms that advocates going beyond set formats and encourages writers to apply a range of tools from adjacent disciplines to continue expanding the possibilities of what the medium can be.

Fire Escape (2019) is an award-winning interactive VR series that engages users in a fictional murder mystery set in a Brooklyn apartment complex. Produced by New York-based production company iNK Stories and influenced by Hitchcock’s voyeuristic thriller Rear Window (1954), it comprises three episodes that unfold in real-time as a hostile landlord is murdered and his several tenants become suspects. Designed for the Google Daydream VR headset, the experience includes interactive devices such as the ability to answer phone calls and activate branching narratives. This chapter interrogates the format, writing, and development of the series to highlight the challenges and opportunities related to screenwriting for VR projects with multiple interactive elements. My analysis draws upon a close reading of the series and an interview with co-writer and executive producer, Vassiliki Khonsari. Through my analysis of the elements listed above, I demonstrate the ‘user-focused’ nature of the project’s screenwriting and development process. The study uncovers the technical and logistical factors specific to VR production that impacted on choices made regarding narrative structure, the inclusion of characters, and user agency.

Although Virtual Reality (VR) is a 40-year-old technology, its use across various screen-centric industries including entertainment, design, and education remains significantly varied, arguably limiting the emergence of a clear history of practice through which the medium can be coherently theorised. Against this background, VR software and hardware has become increasingly accessible, allowing contemporary visual artists to create VR artworks that interrogate the technology’s formal and conceptual conditions, and in turn expand the experiential potentials of the medium. Similar to how avant-gardist film and video art practices of the twentieth century enriched the language of the moving image, contemporary visual artists making experimental VR can greatly contribute to the medium’s still-emerging formal language and expand the framework of theory and practice. This chapter will explore the processes of creating experimental VR in this contemporary art context; locating the medium’s spatio-temporal qualities in the lineage of art history and describing how a digital bricolage methodology streamlines the creative development process to draw out new experiential and conceptual understandings of the medium.

In order to speak of CVR as an emergent paradigm of practice, one must develop a vocabulary concomitant with its formal and aesthetic principles—its operative and experiential ground rules. Towards the end, this chapter offers a historiography of practice, that traces the development of ideas and evolution of form in this emergent medium, through a close reading of some early trailblazing works. While Morton Heilig’s Sensorama of the late 1950s, and Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) may be considered early precedents of CVR as we know it today, it is around 2015, with VR consumer headsets becoming widely available in the market, that a spurt of documentary and fiction content begins to proliferate in this fledgling medium. Among them Notes on Blindness (2016) Invasion (2016) and Testimony (2017) stand out for shaping CVR discourse in terms of their development process, the nascent screenwriting concepts they employ, and the experience design they propose. In each instance the approach of the CVR writer-designer tends towards an aesthetics of revelation and epiphany rather than purgation and catharsis as I will show, suggesting that this is the new paradigm that CVR heralds.

The telling of first nation screen stories by outsiders presents a complex set of challenges. This chapter maps the ‘invisible’ scripting practices of Australian VR creative Lynette Wallworth in Collisions (2016) and Awavena (2018). These case studies are explored via analysis of a long-form interview with Wallworth and through a praxis as research approach. The chapter frames ‘screenwriting’ for VR as problematic because it fails to capture the critical early interactions between the parties and the dance of understanding, listening, and trust which, for Wallworth, must be in place for the story to be offered and received. Wallworth has described her process of working with communities who want to articulate something to an audience as a ‘gift’ or ‘transmission’ (Munro 2019). This ‘joint approach’ moves the work from the ‘feeling of being there’ to becoming attuned to the perspectives of those who actually ‘are there’. Of key significance is the question whether Wallworth’s discoveries at the frontiers of new technologies could be transmuted back to traditional forms of documentary/drama ‘scripting’, offer clues to challenge the ‘straightjacket’ of prescribed mainstream screenwriting’ (Ross and Munt, Journal of Screenwriting 9:191–209, 2018) and development funding, and introduce innovative strategies for inclusive filmmaking.

Among recent attempts employing newer methods of communication with more user engagement is the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to produce immersive experiences centred on the plight of refugees. With the features of the VR environment designed to induce more immediacy and participation, VR videos are produced targeting audience empathy through virtual proximity to the dire living conditions of refugees. This chapter poses the following questions: How far have psychological and literary elements of catharsis informed the use of VR technology and to what degree has VR redefined catharsis as a mode of empathy delivered via an audio-visual and spatial immersive media experience? Adopting immersive media narrative analysis, this study examines films produced by the United Nations in a project known as UNVR to present various humanitarian causes. Focusing on two UNVR films, Clouds over Sidra (2015) and Life in the Time of Refuge (2016), the chapter examines the potential for empathy through the intersectionality of VR technology and narrative in light of the concept of virtual catharsis.