Toronto filmmaker and game designer Thomas Wallner envisions a day when going to the movies becomes going into the movies.

“I don’t think you need this to tell better stories,” Wallner said of the Liquid Cinema software his company DEEP Inc. (Digital Entertainment Every Platform) is developing to create immersive film experiences via virtual reality.

By wearing a VR headset to watch projects made with 360-degree cameras, a movie will seem to flow all around the viewer, opening the door for filmmakers to express themselves differently and engage audiences in new ways.

Two major Canadian directors have already expressed an interest in working with the expanding technology, Wallner said.

The tech is rapidly evolving. Virtual reality headsets Oculus Rift — made by the company recently purchased by Facebook — and Sony’s Project Morpheus are speeding through prototype stages. That involves getting the hardware to developers to allow them to create a wide range of applications for VR before the headsets, expected to be priced at about $300 or less, hit the market sometime in the next 18 months.

Gamers are enthusiastically embracing VR, said Wallner. Now it’s the filmmakers’ turn.

“We don’t have to dream some day that this technology will get cheap enough to use,” said Richard Lachman, digital media associate professor and director of Ryerson University’s RTA Transmedia Centre. Previous incarnations were “flops,” he said, because headset viewers were uncomfortable, unresponsive and far too expensive for home use.

“I think that the field is exploding right now and a lot of people are excited about different things,” said Brooklyn-based filmmaker and computer programmer James George. “It’s a convergence between the gaming world and filmmaking world. That’s the most interesting intersection.”

Clouds, the award-winning interactive documentary George and co-director Jonathan Minard debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, was viewable as an installation or through the Oculus Rift.

George also recently converted a friend’s 360-degree-shot music video to VR, using what he calls “a very basic open source tool,” that he made available free online through software development sharing site, GitHub.

Wallner had participated in shooting 360 video in the Arctic for a documentary titled The Polar Sea and hit on the idea to watch the footage in VR. Ryerson’s RTA Transmedia Lab, which is now helping create the Liquid Cinema software, aided in setting up a viewer.

“We had no idea what to expect,” Wallner said. “So we created a viewer and we watched the footage and we were just amazed by it.”

DEEP is using two very different projects to help develop the software tools for Liquid Cinema.

One is The Polar Sea, part of a multimedia project on the Northwest Passage for TVO, French-German public television network Arte and British Columbia’s Knowledge Network.

The other is Heaven Must Be Boring, a web-based 360 video comedy series co-produced through the RTA Transmedia Lab. Helmed by showrunner Dan Redican (Puppets Who Kill), Heaven Must Be Boring follows five comics from different religious backgrounds who are sent by a Toronto-based NGO on a cross-Canada tour to promote tolerance through laughter.

“I think we’re part of a historical development,” said Wallner. “I believe we’ll look back on this … and realize it was a very special moment in the history of cinema and imaging.”

“It’s an innovation that allows storytellers to use forms that exist to address you directly with an explosion of creativity,” observed Lachman, who said putting the tools in the hands of filmmakers will define how Liquid Cinema is used. “It doesn’t mean staring at a screen; I can be surprised, I can be shocked.”

Certainly, the two-minute highlight reel from The Polar Sea engaged those who put on the VR headset to view it at the Star recently. The movie plays through the headset, giving you the ability to turn your head to see in a complete circle, as well as up and down, putting the viewer in the centre of the scene. We could even gaze up to see the drone that was used to shoot the footage, propellers whirring as it floated overhead.

There were sensations of flying over Arctic landscapes, floating above a cruise ship’s deck to look out at jutting icebergs, or riding along bumpy roads on an ATV, before popping into the ship’s kitchen and dining room.

“Because I’m a filmmaker I’ve come to realize quickly we have the ability to capture and play this back but where it gets interesting is to evolve, to be able to bring narrative to the experience,” Wallner explained.

There are still many unanswered questions about filmmaking and VR. Lachman believes it’s best suited to short films for now, rather than feature films. Wallner, meanwhile, wonders how can a director work with actors if there’s no place to stand off camera when filming takes place in 360 degrees? Storytelling tricks like steering the viewer’s attention to a specific element or close-ups will also need to be rethought.

“I’m of the mind right now that I’d like to keep things simple and experimental and human,” said Wallner, adding he can see applications where VR is interspersed with conventional film and static images. “We just want to be taken somewhere and swept away.”

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George agrees. “I hesitate to guess what the future will hold,” he said when asked about the potential for movie theatres filled with people in VR headsets or primarily solo use.

“Everything will happen but to what degree and to what success?” he added. “For me what’s most exciting is there is really a context for people with a background in code to work with people with a background in film.”

“This is not about technology, but an immersion into a piece of art,” Wallner pointed out. “And for that, we would like to create the tools.”

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