Venice Immersive: Bugs, Birds and Books

.

Venice Film Festival

VERDICT: David Attenborough and Neil Gaiman are two of the star players in this year’s Venice Immersive lineup.

Every year, in addition to its conventional selection of motion pictures, the Venice Film Festival also provides an overview of what’s going on in the world of virtual and augmented reality, via the programming of the Venice Immersive sidebar (formerly Venice VR).

Situated on the Lazzaretto Vecchio island, a two-minute boat ride from the Lido, the selection consists of a main competition, a “Best Of” program, and other themed offerings. And while it generally caters to a more arthouse crowd (in so far as that term applies to these installations and experiences), the 2023 lineup also has a few items with a decidedly mainstream appeal. One of these, Wallace & Gromit in ‘The Grand Getaway’, has been covered separately. The other two we’ll deal with in this dispatch.

A global icon thanks to his BBC programs and, more recently, Netflix Originals, British naturalist David Attenborough was perhaps – pardon the pun – a natural for a VR approach to his work. Conquest of the Skies, a 25-minute film directed by Lewis Ball and produced by Alchemy Immersive and Meta Quest in association with Atlantic Productions, ZOO VFX and 1.618 Digital, is a look at the evolution of flying creatures, from insects to birds via reptiles, with stunning nature footage captured up close alternating with CGI that was used to recreate more ancient species based on the most recent paleontological discoveries. All of this is conveyed, of course, in Attenborough’s authoritative yet kindly tone of voice, cementing his status as natural science’s jolly old grandpa.

Given the quality of the footage associated with his regular television and streaming work, it makes sense to convert his expertise into an immersive experience, bringing us even closer to the animals within a stunning 180-degree environment that allows the viewer to take in much more than what would normally come across when listening to Attenborough in one’s living room. It is meticulously crafted, although the higher frame rate (60 frames per second) occasionally makes some of the more obviously digital elements a bit jarring. But even those moments are easy to gloss over once Sir David opens his mouth, as though we were being guided by an old friend. Aimed predominantly at existing fans of the British TV icon, the film will probably find a suitable home in any natural history museum or exhibition wishing to add a more technological component to proceedings.

Conquest of the Skies is part of the Best of Immersive selection. The main competition, on the other hand, houses Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens, the most inventive use of augmented reality this writer got to experience this year. The setup is very simple: the viewer/user (the room used on Immersive Island could accommodate up to five people) is provided with a headset and a book-shaped prop. As one turns the pages, the story unfolds in the form of a digital pop-up book, with the user actively encouraged to move the book around in their hand, thus enhancing the 3D effect. At the halfway point, flipping the book leads to the second half of the tale.

The project derives its name from Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, a hybrid live-action/puppet TV series where an old narrator (John Hurt) gave us his spin on various European folk tales. A reboot of the series has been in the works since 2019, with Neil Gaiman attached as an executive producer, and it is the famed English author who lends his voice to the interactive fairytale experience. The Seven Ravens, about a family torn asunder by a curse, is a particularly compelling blend of the show’s core concept and Gaiman’s own recurring motifs (seven brothers are an important element of his novel Stardust). But one doesn’t need to be a fan of the people involved to enjoy this creative way of making augmented reality a physically less cumbersome activity for fantasy enthusiasts. The version available at Venice was glitchy in places (some movements would cause the page to start over from the beginning), but overall it was smooth sailing for 20 minutes. To borrow a clichéd expression, it is a classic good story, very well told, with the reader’s active input.