Tribeca Games and Immersive 2023

Over the Rainbow is moving entertainment away from prescriptive storytelling. The avant-garde immersive film aims to create an open-ended experience for audiences—where viewers can see themselves in the art, feel like they’re “implicated” in it, and cocreate their experience of it.

“This is like looking at an abstract painting or work of art,” director Craig Quintero tells VML. “It's less about telling you that there's one answer or there's one way to read it—it's really creating a mirror. So, when the audience sees it, they can also see themselves. It's less to tell you something and more to create an encounter. You're implicated in the process…You're watching it, but then you're in the work yourself.”

Pixel Ripped 1978 also puts the player into the narrative, giving them the perspective of the game creator. “We wanted the main character to be the creator of it all,” Ricardo Justus, founder and CEO at Arvore Immersive Experiences, the studio behind Pixel Ripped, tells VML Intelligence. Set in the ’70s, the game transports the player back to “the golden age of video games” and the birth of Atari (who coproduced Pixel Ripped). “VR is a very creative medium,” Justus says; “a medium that facilitates [cocreation].”

Several films pushed dark messages and emotions to the surface to create a more impactful and lasting response from viewers, leveraging fear to inspire action.

Director Poulomi Basu explains that Maya - The Birth (Chapter 1) is “a long term investigation of violence against women.” In the film, the viewer is the woman herself. “It puts the viewer into this inferior, marginalized space.” Her aim, she explains, was to inspire empathy and action through this character’s life portrayal. “I think people leave this experience feeling empowered and powerful and tapping into their energies, ready to face their own monsters. There’s this hidden power within us, we just have to awaken it and unleash it and take action to make the world a better place for those who are marginalized.”

Monstrorama’s projection of metaphorical monsters pulls another form of sympathy from its audience. Director Clément Deneux tells VML Intelligence that feeling fear, and facing fear, was a large theme in the film. “The idea is to use your own fear, created with the monster, and to free the monster,” he says.

Over The Rainbow, directed by Craig Quintero and produced by Su-Ling Yeh, also plays on intense feelings and scenes. The viewer is made to feel like the subject of the performance, with the characters breaking the fourth wall to make direct eye contact. The piece taps into "a sense of discontent with our own lot, an unquenchable thirst for what is just beyond our reach. Over The Rainbow explores this precarious balance between desire and happiness, fantasy and the familiar."

Creators are democratizing history with the use of AR—redistributing power structures and making stories more accessible.

Kinfolk: Black Lands is using augmented reality (AR) to bring Black history out of textbooks and put it into the hands of people who have lived—or are living—that history. “The point of the technology and the work that we do is to empower folks to capture their own history,” Idris Brewster, founder and executive director at Kinfolk, tells VML Intelligence. “A lot of the issues that arise with Black history being erased have to do with these power structures around the archive in which the community doesn’t really have any say in what is archived…We need to do things on our own terms. We want to provide the ability to monument make to anyone.”

Fortune, meanwhile, is merging traditional entertainment with social media. Fortune is a segmented, interactive documentary presented in a series of true stories in augmented reality for Instagram & Snapchat. “The idea was to make it accessible, and that’s why we wanted to experiment with social media [via] Snapchat and Instagram,” Claire Meinhard, a project creator and director, tells VML Intelligence. “It was a challenge, because the point of [social AR] was not tell stories,” she says. “We really pushed the technology to tell stories.”