The National Film Board of Canada is bringing together a slate of six virtual reality and immersive media productions for Toronto’s POP 03 installation, running August 19-21 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The pop-up exhibition showcases new approaches to storytelling, and is presented by the Toronto International Film Festival in collaboration with NFB.
The selection includes five VR experiences as well as a groundbreaking “film-generating installation.”
Way to Go from AATOAA studio’s Vincent Morisset, Philippe Lambert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and Caroline Robert is an immersive journey through the woods that combines hand-made animation, 360-degree video capture and music. Produced by Hugues Sweeney for NFB’s French-language Interactive Studio in Montreal and by Boris Razon for France Televisions, Way to Go is the winner of three Webby Awards and marks Morisset’s second collaboration with the NFB, following his 2011 interactive animated film BLA BLA.
Munro Ferguson’s VR animated film Minotaur takes a journey through seven stages: birth, childhood, mission, labyrinth, monster, battle and death/rebirth. Through abstract moving images, Minotaur conveys corresponding emotional states: calm, love, joy, surprise, fear, anger/hate, and death/rebirth, leading again to calm. Canadian composer Kid Koala’s score accentuates the hero’s quest for redemption. Winner of a Genie Award for his 3D animated short Falling in Love Again, Ferguson is a leader in developing new creative applications for IMAX’s Sandde hand-drawn stereoscopic animation system. The VR producer of Minotaur is Jelena Popovic, with Michael Fukushima as executive producer for the NFB’s Animation Studio.
Also on tap are Loïc Suty’s The Unknown Photographer — a surreal documentary/dreamscape experience exploring the work of a forgotten WWI photographer (Turbulent/NFB); the Beta for Vincent McCurley’s immersive VR experiment Cardboard Crash (NFB Digital Studio); and the 360 VR documentary Cut-Off, which places viewers in the middle of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s historic visit to First Nation site Shoal Lake 40 (VICE/Occupied VR/NFB/Canadian Film Centre). Forging new ground in interactive storytelling is Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s Seances, which allows viewers to “conjure” their own films by selecting text fragments on a 55-inch touch-screen, summoning a collaged story of dynamically reassembled lost films.
Visit http://tiff.net/pop03 for more details.
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