On-Location Storytelling
On-Location Storytelling in AltspaceVR started as a simple idea. Find delightful worlds in Virtual Reality and tell stories that relate to them in some way.
The Museum of Archeology in VR helped kickstart the events. I used Balcony House, part of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, as a setting for The Gambler, an old legend with many versions among the indigenous people of the southwest. I used a virtual crypt in Kapitelsberget, Norway to help tell the story of The Norse Crusade, featuring an armada of super warrior Christian Vikings that sailed all the way to Jerusalem destroying any Islamic settlements they found along the way.
After six years on the road, the Viking Warlord returned and built the crypt I was telling the story in, virtually, to stash the sacred treasures he brought back with him. It felt great to be there but I realized as I was telling it that we shouldn’t have waited for the Viking to come home.
We should have gone to Jerusalem with him.
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Maybe some Worlds are so central to some stories that you wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, but sometimes several places drive the story line. In VR, if the story moves, we can create worlds on the fly to serve as props and move with it.
I used my own 360 pictures of Angkor Wat to create a sequence of worlds, all within Angkor, to present, The Churning of the Sea of Milk, the cosmic story Angkor Wat is built to illustrate and to help believers experience directly.
I tried to help the people who came to On-Location Storytelling that week to experience the story directly too. Starting from an overview, moving down to the long Angkor Wat causeway, then inside the main temple with soft ambient chanting, and finally to a quiet spot on the lawn for thoughts and reflections.
Twenty-four people joined me in that experiment. No one got air sick way up over the Angkor Wat, but it was breathtaking. Everyone was strongly affected by the movement, by the overall experience. At the end, people were full, like after a big meal.
The idea of global stories and a series of worlds to convey the real dynamic force of the narrative led me next to the Opium Wars, a crucial episode in world history that still reverberates today.
I knew that prior to the First Opium War (1839–1842) there was one location and only one location in all of China where western traders were allowed to unload, warehouse and sell their merchandise.
That location was Shamian Island, a tiny sandbar where the Pearl River meets what the West once called Canton and is now called Guangzhou. I’ve been to Shamian Island and I know what it feels like to be there today for anyone who knows its history.
I found a way to let people be there virtually, while I showed them pictures of what the sandbar looked like with all the opium warehouses back in 1830. I also pointed out where Incorruptible Commissioner Li confiscated an illegal shipment (it was all illegal) and emptied it into the stream below us. And where the British Navy pounded mainland China with an artillery assault it had never felt before.
You had to be there and we were.
And it’s not even half the story.
We are told in most versions of the Opium War saga that Bihar and parts of Bengal, which the British had just conquered, were perfect for poppies. Too bad for them. Over the first half of the 19th century, thousands of acres of eastern India were converted to a monoculture dedicated to poppies. Thousands of former subsistence farmers found themselves working in massively scaled operations the world had never seen before — industrialized drug factories.
I built an opium factory in VR with a friend of mine in a few hours.
Of course it wasn’t a seamless masterpiece accurate in all its detail. It didn’t have to be. It was full of seams but it was accurate in the visual impression it conveyed.
There are large and very detailed lithographs of actual opium factories readily available in Wikimedia Commons. It’s not hard to find a free 360 image of any old abandoned factory. Throw some gigantic blow-ups of the lithographs against the walls. Build a floor, add a graphic layer that feels like it belongs. Very soft ambient factory noise in the deep background.
For the 25 or more people who joined us in the Opium Factory, it was astonishing. I didn’t even have to be the central figure, the storyteller with my props. The World is the story and I invited everyone to explore. Production data was on display. Giant images reward close scrutiny.
After ten minutes, I led them to Canton. They knew what was in the warehouses they could look down on and imagine. They had been in the factory.
I’m an opportunistic short-cut cheating world builder.
Real world builders use high-level software and have at least some coding proficiency. The worlds they make are mathematically described, which means they can be changed and interacted with easily. Some real world builders are also artists with a flair for little details that complete the experience in ways we’re not even consciously aware of.
I’m not good at any of that but I do know how to make a world quickly and inexpensively that does the job I need for this story now.
I suspect there will be some meeting in the middle.
As quick-and-dirty gradually converges with labor-of-love, here are a few VR storytelling principles that I think will apply to any level of production.
- Don’t start the story in the story. Begin the storytelling event in a world that is specifically not one of the story worlds. To use a theatrical metaphor — let the audience mill around in the foyer for a few minutes, (be sure to make the foyer world an easy place to mill around in). Then when it’s time, let the audience have the shared experience of teleporting to the first story world and all arriving together.
- A dramatic first story world is always a good start, but it is equally important to establish the narrative flow right at he beginning. Usually it is a problem to be solved, which is why I start the Opium War story at an English countryside cottage where even ordinary people are getting used to their tea. The problem is having to buy all that tea from China with nothing to sell back to balance the books or even come close.
- Use multimedia as a sideshow, not the focus of attention. I add a screen for showing pictures to help tell the story in some worlds. I place it off to the side, never in the way of important features of the world.
- Some worlds require no presenter and no presentation. I told people opium was the product Great Britain finally figured out how to make and sell to China, thus restoring the trade balance and underwriting the British Empire. Drug dealing. Then people just checked out the place for a little bit. I told everyone to treat the time like a Quaker Meeting, where folks are quiet unless they have something worth saying to everyone, in which case they say it and then go back to being quiet.
- Ambient sound can be an active part of the world. In Churning the Sea of Milk, there was no presentation on the Angkor Wat causeway — just the driving chapei sound of Master Kong Nei that created a sense of forward motion toward Temple. Cambodian Buddhist chanting added to the sense of presence once we were finally inside.
- The last story world should include a portal back to the world where the event started, the ‘foyer world.’ My version of the Opium War ends over Hong Kong Island with a huge image of the ‘Return of Hong Kong to China in 1997’ hanging in the sky. With the events still taking place in Hong Kong today, the location evokes different emotions and raises many questions. It’s good to give people the option of leaving Hong Kong to wind down a little, maybe with light conversation, back where they started.
I expect the bar to be much higher within a year than it is now. Our impressionistic opium factory gets by on originality. The next version will have to be better.
I am 72 and I have been working with new media technologies for 50 years, one digital development after another. I have never been more excited than I am right now. This piece is an early dispatch from another media frontier. It focuses on one aspect of my on-going VR activity. There are several others.
