Oscar Raby.
After toiling away in a warehouse in East Brunswick, filmmaker Oscar Raby's work, developed in collaboration with the BBC’s Research & Development team, will premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes Exhibition.
The Storyscapes exhibition focuses on cutting edge artworks that explore new uses of media.
Raby's first VR documentary Assent screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition and won the Audience Award at Sheffield Doc/fest in 2014.
The filmmaker's newest project is The Turning Forest, a real-time CGI Virtual Reality experience which tells a fairytale-like story of two children playing in a forest, and what happens after one of them disappears.
“Experiencing VR is a little like finding refuge amongst the tides of social interaction”, said Raby.
“With real-time interactive VR, the unfolding of the story is unique because you discover it yourself, and it happens just for you."
The project was developed in collaboration with the BBC’s Research & Development team in London, the UK-based S3A university research group on future spatial audio, and writer Shelley Silas.
The BBC team developed the intricate soundscape that drives the immersive experience – capturing the audio on location in a forest with a twenty microphone array.
Executive Producer at BBC R&D Zillah Watson said “the fully dynamic binaural sound pushes forward the possibilities of sound in VR for immersion and compelling storytelling. It has been created by BBC R&D in partnership with universities to showcase the future of sound.”
Raby said that hearing the sound design the first time was a staggering moment:
“The amount of work, complexity and subtlety of the sound layers is as breath-taking as is the technical implementation of the sound engine behind it.”
Raby’s Melbourne-based Virtual Reality production company, VRTOV, is currently producing a second VR project for the BBC, as well as an upcoming collaboration on Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams’ next project, Traveling While Black.
VRTOV will be presenting Storia, a VR salon in Melbourne on March 2, where they will showcase a handpicked selection of VR films from around the world.
Tribeca runs April 13-17.