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Reliving Moments of Truth Several new animated VR projects are inspired by personal and socially relevant matters.
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ith the SIGGRAPH confab just around the corner, we thought it would be a good time to spotlight some of this year’s buzzy VR titles and catch up with the brilliant creatives who have been raising the bar of this innovative medium with each new project. Not surprisingly, personal and more socially aware topics are dominating the field this year:
Replacements
Directed by Jonathan Hagard Produced by Andreas Hartmann, Nova Dewi Setiabudi Co-production of Kampung Ayu, Ossa Film, Suwe Ora Jamu Jonathan Hagard’s Replacements, which won top honors both at Annecy Jonathan Hagard and the Venice International Film Festival, is a follow-up to his 2009 film Time Lapse, which chronicles the changes experienced by a small village in Jakarta. After the Islamic parties won the 2017 elections, the country went through more radical urban and cultural changes, so Hagard decided to cast his net wider and capture how a small community evolves through four decades. “My grandmother once told me, it’s important to remember your roots to understand the future,” says Hagard. “My response to the 2017 event was to make a new story inspired by this universal and human philosophy to remember and appreciate an Indonesian typical alley and how it changed in four decades. On one hand, I was inspired by my own family’s story and their house in central Java to add more emotions and nostalgia to the main protagonists. I also used the results of more serious urban researches I made in Jakarta’s alleys for about 14 years, to enhance its documentary and objective aspects.” In 2018, after making several trips to Indonesia, Hagard completed an initial version of the project and his first VR prototype, which convinced him that the medium was a perfect way to tell this particular story. “That was the beginning of two years of intense production,” he recalls. “In the first year, I mainly focused on recreating the eras between 1980 and 2020 and the environments based on personal memories and actual archives. During the second year, I was more dedicated to the animation, post work and on deciding and shaping the final scene, which was actually different from the initial storyboard, due to the evolution of Jakarta’s situation and a certain pandemic.” The filmmaker first created digital paintings of the village throughout the decades as wide panoramas without focusing on one main element, which he compares to Asian traditional paintings or a 360-degree Japanese ukiyo-e. “Although I first thought about creating the animation in CG, I finally decided to make it in 2D to enhance its handmade and blurry, memory-like qualities,” he notes. “It was a mix of traditional 2D animation and rotoscope on top of 360 videos of actual people and actors in Jakarta.” He also decided to switch from stereo to ambisonic (full-sphere sur-
round) spatial sound to add more depth to the VR experience. Hagard says he was attracted to the VR medium because of the freedom of exploration it offered him. “Replacements is a linear film, but it is full of small stories and elements that you cannot watch at the same time,” he explains. “Just like real life, you have to choose which element to focus on and which element to skip before it fades away in time. Just the fact of being able to turn your head and discover new stories and people —sometimes by choice, sometimes by accident— can be a great storytelling technique. Like one of Jakarta’s inhabitants, the viewers are challenged by their inability to focus on everything at the same time, they share their moods, routines and frustrations in front of the complexity of the surrounding space and the speed of the passing time.” The filmmaker tells us that he counts great Japanese masters such as Satoshi Kon, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki as three of his biggest sources of inspiration. He adds, “I am also very inspired by illustrators such as Nicolas de Crécy and, of course, Moebius. Outside the animation world, Jacques Tati is one of my biggest inspirations for the attention to details, the multiplicity of small stories and the absence of dialogue. In the VR world, Patrick Osborne’s Pearl is my favorite: It is not just beautiful, but it fully takes advantage of the 360 environment and is still until now one of the few VR pieces that almost made me cry.” Hagard has a crucial piece of advice for future VR filmmakers. “I would say, don’t use an idea that you could make in a conventional film and then convert it to a VR film, because it would be too much work and it won’t add much in terms of storytelling. I think VR storytelling should be detached from other storytelling mediums. Think about why your story is the right one to explore in VR, more than any other storytelling methods.” And what does he predict for the future of the medium? “Unfortunately, VR is still currently not so accessible,” he responds. “I hope with the arrival of lighter, easy to use VR sets, this technology will be more democratized. VR can be not only a way to immerse ourselves into a fictional world, but I hope it can also help us to relearn truths about our actual environments.” Website: cargocollective.com/jonathanhagard/replacements
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