If there’s one takeaway I’ve gathered from the Tribeca Film Festival, it’s that people are doing some incredible things with VR.
The New York City festival has 18 virtual experiences on display for attendees to check out this year in a Virtual Arcade, and one I kept hearing a lot of chatter about was “Allumette,” a nearly 20-minute animated short from startup Penrose Studios. I heard several people declare it the best VR short of the festival by far.
I agree. It’s excellent.
I checked out “Allumette” (French for Matchstick), which first debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Wednesday evening and was blown away by the experience.
In the studio’s second short, you’re immersed into a small group of miniature floating villages in the sky at nighttime. Directly in front of my eyes was a bridge with an underpass. A small orphaned girl with matchsticks (hence the title) at her side came from underneath the bridge to appear in front of me.
Now, when I first put on the VR headset and headphones for the experience, I was instructed to stand on a small "x" on the ground. I must admit, I’m not very good at listening to instructions sometimes. In this instance, I’m glad I strayed from the “x.”
When you’re dropped right in the center of a giant floating town the first thing you want to do is walk around and check it out. While I could turn 360 degrees around to view the miniature Whoville in the sky and below my feet, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could get up close with the characters in the short.
As the little match girl came toward me through the underpass, I walked up to her and when I crooned my neck I was excited that I could see her from every angle. If her face wasn’t looking at me, I could simply move where I was and watch her from a different stance, entirely changing my viewing experience.
I wasn't just a passive viewer constrained to watching the story unfold from straight on. I was an active participant in the viewing experience exploring a virtual world. If I moved too far forward, backward, or side to side, a simple glow of the boundary in the VR headset appeared to caution me that I was nearly out of bounds.
The nameless girl, looking quite sad, struck a match and I was transported back an entire year to a scene with her mom. (I knew this wasn’t going to end well.) The two were on what looked like a flying boat. If you’ve ever played “BioShock Infinite,” it was like something out of that world.
What really impressed me was what came next. The little girl went below deck on the boat. Curiosity got the best of me and I wondered if I could see what was inside the boat. I stretched my neck up and smiled when I saw that I could see the inside. Could I follow her onto the boat, too? I moved forward and stuck my head below deck and was shocked that I could see everything going on inside the boat. I then pulled my head out and saw the entire outer shell of the boat again. Whoa. This is some next level animation.
I stuck my head back in and took a tour around the boat. There were two different rooms inside. I pulled my head back again to notice that the frame of the boat was taken away so those who weren’t as curious as myself could be in on the adventure, too.
I could have simply stood on the “x” and watched the tale unfold from there. I imagine some others probably did that and your viewing experience would have been fine, but curiosity really paid off with this short.
I won’t spoil the rest of it, because it should be experienced firsthand, but it was an emotional journey showing how this young girl winded up an orphan. If you’re at the Tribeca Film Festival, I highly recommend you make time to check this out in the festival’s Virtual Arcade, but give yourself plenty of time while visiting. When I showed up Wednesday evening, there was about a two-hour wait for the experience. Yeah, it’s that good. Most of the other VR stories didn’t have long waits. I was bouncing from VR headset to headset.
Watching “Allumette,” and most of the other shorts for that matter, felt like being inside a vivid dream. The only difference was that in your dreams you can reach out and touch things and they’ll feel real. Here, I only grasped air when I tried to touch the bridge or a flying aircraft in the animated picture. When I reached out to touch a puffy cloud at one point I smiled when I felt something sort of soft. I was doing it! I was touching a cloud! But then reality quickly kicked in and I figured I must have been touching the curtain of the booth I was inside. Maybe that sensory experience is a few years down the line for VR.
The story itself reminded me of another popular short you may have seen, Disney’s “The Little Matchgirl,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale. It also follows an orphan girl, but Disney’s short shows its character trying to survive a winter in Russia by selling matches. Unlike “Allumette,” the Disney one ends on a somber note, whereas I could have continued in the world of “Allumette” for much longer.
It’s that level of immersion — where you feel like a participant in the actual story — that makes me excited to see what else filmmakers and artists will continue to do in this medium. If Penrose’s “Allumette” is any indication of the potential immersive stories that can be told using this platform, I can’t wait to see what’s next.
