Already four years ago! This was my last VR short film shoot. It’s been very long I haven’t touched VR. Good news, it’s back!
What an intense year this is turning out to be! Bringing opportunities of transformation, asking those questions that with the words of David Whyte “can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.…” (Sometimes by David Whyte)
Well, they have been lingering around for long, needed a pandemic to hold a flashlight on them while creating space, away from distractions, to discover them if I dare. Not an easy call, a lot of compassion is needed to oneself and others in moments when it gets super tough.
We were all invited to look at closer to our relationship with ourselves, with others, with nature and with technology, to do the necessary reparations through acknowledgement, anger, courage and honesty. It is still in the distance, but I now have a sense of the light at the end of the tunnel and lots of hope in my backpack to make it through.
As for me, healing majorly comes from art. This year it was time to repair my relationship to technology, particularly VR.
Thanks to the bursary I received from a-n The Artists Information Company and Arts Council England I was finally able to learn creating cinematic VR / 360 video from beginning to end with my equipment. I had the ideas, the equipment, experience in recording and displaying, but I needed to learn post-production, editing and stitching to produce this kind of unique artistic content.
I’ll attempt to lay down my entire journey with VR here. There were and are so many unexpected turns, trying challenges and empowering support, it is hard to believe life can create such a meaningful narrative.
A short version of the above VR work from 2016 and its installation views at the Crypt Gallery can be found on my website at https://rekaritt.com/360-short-films#360-one-4 When you look at it, consider, that the film is a VR installation within another, a physical installation. They are parallel and complementary to each other. The swing is used as a vehicle, like a spaceship, to connect the two realities and transport the experiencer from one to the other and back. With this in mind, the snippets on the website might make more sense.
