So, thanks for coming.

Yeah, so I'm going to talk about my film We Who Remain, which you got a little introductory about. So, my background is I'm a documentary filmmaker and photographer. And I recently, about a year and a half ago, started into looking at virtual reality

as a tool for storytelling, specifically journalistic or documentary storytelling. And I think, first of all, anyone who's excited about storytelling or thinking about new mediums, this is kind of this incredible space to be in right now.

It's a really unique moment where you get to play with a new language, essentially. You heard a little bit, the guy before, talking about, a year ago, I thought this, and then another year ago, this wasn't true. This is sort of a living, breathing entity right now in a lot of ways. And there's no rules, and there's no...

We have this history of filmmaking where people know how editing affects you in certain ways. And right now, virtual reality is, in a lot of ways, the Wild West. So I think it's a really exciting medium to be working in as a storyteller. Yeah, so I'm going to be talking about my film We Who Remain.

So this is a virtual reality, immersive documentary that takes place in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. So this film was a partnership with the New York Times, AJ+, which is part of Al Jazeera, and Arte, Nuba Reports, and Emblematic Group, a lot of folks.

So the story takes place in Sudan, North Sudan, in this area called the Nuba Mountains. Which is basically right at the border of North and South Sudan. So in 2011, South Sudan became the world's newest country, and pretty much...

And so the people of Nuba were fighting with South Sudan before the country split. But when they drew that borderline, the people in the Nuba Mountains were left on the wrong side of the border, essentially. So while South Sudan was celebrating, a war pretty much immediately broke out in the Nuba Mountains.

So the people in the Nuba Mountains have been sort of figuring out how to navigate life in a conflict zone for the last six years. And the government of Khartoum has banned humanitarian aid to this area. They have bombed over 4,000 times in civilian areas in what's called using Antonov cargo

planes. And it's basically sort of this psychological fear tactic where the bombing is really indiscriminate and it's not very accurate. But when you, every single day, are constantly having to think about getting bombed, it

makes you want to leave your home and leave where you live. So they just push these barrel bombs outside the back of the plane, and people have to hide in holes in the ground, basically, and hide in caves. So the government has also banned journalism and information from coming out of this area. So basically, it's this hidden war that nobody is supposed to know about.

So how many people in the room have actually heard of the Nuba Mountains and the conflict? So a couple of hands. So it's a war that essentially Sudan doesn't want anybody to know about, and it's quite hidden. So it kind of begs the question, why tell this story in VR?

This is this new medium, hard to get it out into the world. Why take this important story and try to tell it in this way? So to answer that, I'm going to talk a little bit about this organization called Nuba Reports.

So Nuba Reports basically started reporting in this area in 2011, right after this conflict started. And they work with local Nuba journalists, they train journalists, and they basically find ways to extract information out of this area and try to tell the story to the broader world in a larger context.

And they've done a lot of really incredible things. And to this day, I mean, you can go to their website, you can actively see what's going on in Nuba as much as possible, and the government, you know, obviously tries to suppress information. But it's still very, very hard, I mean, especially in this current media landscape

where, you know, today Donald Trump, you know, dominates the news every single moment of our lives. I'm from the US, so maybe just my life. So how do you get stories like this out into the world, right? How do you connect people with these types of things? And that's why virtual reality is this incredible tool for multiple reasons, right?

So we can take you to the Nuba Mountains, right? As I mentioned earlier, humanitarian aid is banned here, journalism is banned here, the UN can't even go to this place. But as journalists, you know, and it's a risky sort of thing to do, but with virtual

reality, we can take people from anywhere in the world and bring them to the Nuba Mountains to sit across from the people to understand, not understand, I think that's a mischaracterization of what virtual reality does, but give you an essence of what life is like for

these people in a way that Sudan doesn't want the world to see. And it's this incredibly powerful tool. So, I mean, and it's interesting because, so like I said, Nuba Reports has been reporting about this conflict in multiple ways for years, right? So traditional documentary photography, reporting, traditional documentaries, you know, here's

a photo from this area, from the same cave that is in our film, which you can see upstairs. And you know, it's just, let me see if this will play, no, will not play. But it is just such a different experience to, instead of having this sort of like abstracted

moment, this frame from time, this thing standing still, to be put inside a cave with, you know, 50 children who are hiding while planes are overhead, you know, trying to bomb. I mean, and you're not forced to look anywhere.

You're basically sitting in this place and you kind of make your own experience. And I think it's an incredibly powerful tool to sort of allow people to be in this place or to have the perception of being in this place in that way.

And I hope if you're, if you're curious about any of this, you know, come take a look upstairs. All right. So what about producing this stuff, right?

So I mean, you saw another, if you were here for the talk earlier, you saw a crazy looking contraption with all these big cameras and this kind of stuff. We used a seven camera GoPro rig. And just for people who don't know, basically in 360 degree video or any of these immersive

virtual reality formats, you're taking all seven of these cameras and you're stitching them together to create one single image. So for every shot that you see in these films, you're seeing a combination of several different cameras put together, right? And it's this totally new way of making films and comes with a lot of new sort of

questions and problems along the way, right? So one kind of strange thing about the process is, you know, the camera sees everything. So you as a filmmaker have to go to these places to create these films, but you have basically somebody is hiding in all of these shots that you're in, which is kind of

a strange thing. I don't know if people have seen other 360 degree documentaries before or something, but often it feels like the world around it in the film is kind of orchestrated for the camera in a lot of ways, even in documentary stuff. And I think this is a big issue, right? Because it kind of gets at this question of authenticity.

And so one thing that we really worked really hard in this film to do drawing from traditional filmmaking kind of ideas of verite stuff is just putting the camera somewhere and letting it run. So you get a whole bunch of footage, and within that you look through this footage and you find these kind of little diamonds, these little moments of authenticity,

and then you use those to build the story. So what you see in this world that we're showing you is real. It's not asking people to sit for the camera. It's not telling people how to walk around the camera. It's all based on real life and reality of what's going on in this area.

So, another kind of relevant issue around this is you hear a lot of people talking, and I'll talk about this as well, just this idea of empathy, right? People say virtual reality is this empathy machine and it has this incredible way of transcend, blah, blah, blah, sort of all this language.

And this is important, and I think it's interesting to think about what does this medium do that's different than a traditional film or radio or whatever. But at the same time, it kind of misses the point of a lot of this, right? Because if you don't have people coming to, if people can't access your films,

if people can't engage with what you're making, if you can't get this out into the world, you know, if we made this film about these people in Sudan and brought it just to film festivals for, you know, whatever, a hundred people to come watch, then it's a totally sort of pointless, you know, exercise in a lot of ways, right?

So, how do you get this film out into the world? What do you do with this stuff after you make it? Which is kind of a big hurdle in the virtual reality world, but one that we thought a lot about when we were trying to create this. So, one of the partners, other partners on the film was called Emblematic Group, which if you're interested at all in virtual reality storytelling and immersive journalism, you need to check these guys out.

They're definitely the leaders in this industry. And I think someone in the last talk was asking about sort of volumetric capture and sort of storytelling in that way. And they actually just premiered one of the first films using volumetric capture.

So, like, a space where you can actually walk around and it's all real, essentially, and still storytelling in that way. So, anyways, check them out. They're incredible and they were one of the early people who helped us and obviously throughout the entire process to make this a reality. So, yeah.

So, beyond that, OK, so how do you get this out into the world, right? And one way we were thinking about this was kind of segmenting audiences, right? So, you have this mass consumer audience, right? You have film festivals, you have all this sort of stuff. So, in one way, so we partnered with Arte, so there'd be a German and a French version

of this coming out on the Arte app either this week or next week. The New York Times, so you can go through their app and sort of access the film as well. But in some ways, this is still, there's still a lot of barriers to accessing the films and engaging with this content, right?

You have to download an app, you have to get it on the phone, you have to do all these steps, right? It's a big problem for virtual reality because you need people to be able to engage with this stuff all over the world and in different settings. So, the last partner that we worked with was AJ+, who people might know from their Facebook videos with all the crazy text and, you know, yeah.

So, and what we did with AJ+, is we created something called WebVR. And I don't know if this will let me click it or not. Nope, it won't. But if you go to this URL or you can come check it out upstairs, basically it's this idea that you can access virtual reality films

without the barrier of having to download an app, right? So, you can go through just the web browser on any phone or any computer and just put this in and basically be able to access this film. And that's true for anywhere in the world, right? So, you don't even need a headset anymore, you know, you can put that into your phone browser

and then pull up the experience and find ways to engage with this. And you can even, if you do have like a little cardboard or something without an app or anything, like with these other ones, you can still sort of access this content. So, again, this is one sort of segmented audience, right? And it's still, in my view, sort of like this passive audience, right?

Like a lot of people will look at the film, but what does that really accomplish in a lot of ways? It's sort of this passive thing. But, so we're thinking about, OK, what are the other ways that we can sort of have this film having a meaningful impact in the world, right? So, another way of thinking about that is, first of all,

bringing it to policymakers and politicians. So, basically, you know, and it's an old idea of like targeting very small groups of people who can have a bigger impact, right? You know, when we can have a policy maker who will never, or even people in the UN, whatever, who will never go to the Nuba Mountains,

who will never know it, that have any sense of that experience outside reading that 4,000 bombs dropped on a piece of paper. I mean, it's kind of meaningless in some ways. But when we can take those people and put them into these experiences, it kind of brings them to a different sort of understanding of the impact of that, right?

So, that's another sort of audience that we're thinking about. Then the final audience we're thinking about is bringing this back to Sudan, right? So, bringing this back to the Nuba Mountains on one side of it. So, for instance, so this is two of the people from our film, Mosquito, who's a journalist from the film, who ended up getting bombed

while reporting on things happening in the Nuba Mountains. So, here he is checking out the film. This is Ordania, who is a student who also went through a series of bombing experiences also watching the film. And so, Nuba Reports does this thing called mobile cinema, right? And they've done it traditionally with bringing films to people

in incredibly rural areas in the Nuba Mountains and showing them films reporting about what's going on in their areas, right? And now we're also doing this with virtual reality, so finding ways to bring these films to people all over this area.

So, that's one side of it. But then the other side of it is bringing this to Khartoum, bringing this to the north, bringing this to an area where people are basically shielded from knowing anything, even within the country, from knowing anything about this conflict, about what's going on. And, you know, this is something we're actively trying to figure out

because it's obviously a very complex thing to do. But, you know, our hypothesis here is that if we can show people on both sides of this conflict what the other side is sort of dealing with, not that it's necessarily going to totally change everyone's minds and everything's going to stop, but it's something that someone in Khartoum will never have that experience

of knowing what the government is doing to these people because this information is actively shielded from the press. So, I mean, and I think this idea of kind of bridging this gap between two sides of a conflict through storytelling and through virtual reality experiences is something that could be a really compelling thing

to bring to other sort of conflict zones and in other places around the world. So, finally, here's my info if anyone has any questions. If you want to know more about the film, you can check out our website, wewhoremain.squarespace.com.

And, yeah, so I thought I'd leave a few minutes for questions. Does anyone have any questions? Yeah, right here. Hi, my name is Christian. Thank you for the interesting insights on how you're using VR. My question is, it appears to me that you are using the VR

in kind of to trigger a specific emotion in people, like in order for them to kind of be one with what is happening there, trigger a certain emotion which will then eventually lead them to take part in finding ways, let's say, in contributing and making an end on this conflict.

But then I'm wondering, to what extent is that actually effective in the sense of by with having emotions as the main reason for actions, that simply implies that once the effect of the emotions vanishes,

then those actions, people's interest on the conflict also stops. So, how do you make sure that, one, that risk is not present for using VR, and how do you also consider the use of VR in this case

as a potential danger in actually creating an ungenuine sense of interest in the conflict, basically? Yeah, so it's a complex question, obviously. I think, so I think on the one hand,

you know, this isn't, the ideas of what we're trying to do with this film, I don't even think are really necessarily original to virtual reality, or creating virtual reality experiences, right? If we had made a traditional film, a traditional documentary,

you'd still probably be trying to engage people in an emotional sense to make them think about this conflict more, right? And I think, so I mean, I think that question is more a storytelling question in some ways, and whether or not this film is successful at making it

more than sort of just this thing that's pulling at your emotions. Is it a more nuanced experience than sort of trying to be this sensational sort of exercise in showing you a faraway place, right?

Yeah, sorry, what was the second part of the question? In a sense, how do you make sure that the use of VR is not kind of, yeah, not leading people to do a short term, to have a short term interest in being engaged in those kind of conflicts,

because referring back to the emotion side, basically. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, again, I don't know that this is necessarily just a VR question. Like, in a landscape where people are, you know, scrolling through bloodied Syrian children in a photo,

and then looking at cat pictures two minutes later, I think what's really incredible about this is, we can take people and bring them to this place. Okay, let me answer this in a different way, right? I think, again, I think it comes down to a storytelling question, right? So in our film, for instance, within the confines of dealing with publications who have,

you know, want to help frame the story, we try to create scenes where it's not, first of all, the entire story is told through the voices of the people, of four different people who are living on different sort of sides of this conflict, right?

So you have a student who's had sort of experiences with bombings, you have a journalist who's recently been bombed who's in the hospital, you have a frontline soldier, and you have a mother whose home recently got destroyed because it became the frontlines and now she's hiding in caves, right? So we took, because I think this is important,

and we took great pains to not have this voice of God narrator who's telling you like, okay, now feel sad, now feel happy, this is what's going on, right? I mean, we wanted, what's incredible about this is we wanted you to be able to have this experience and sit across from these people, hear them tell you their story, and I think that's as much as we can really do,

is kind of create these scenes where, not create, we kind of like present these scenes where people can make their own sort of judgments about what's going on and present people's stories to people. And I can't control what the outcome of that is, I can't control what people's emotional connection is to this,

whether they have it for five minutes and it's ingenuine or they find something genuine out of it, I think that's sort of as a creator, you sort of put your best foot forward in thinking about these things and trying to confront some of these in working in a medium that has no rules and is completely new and try to do your best at it. I mean, that's what I can kind of say about it.

Yeah, because the only reason why I ask is because, as we all know, sometimes we can see some UNICEF flyers around saying, oh, I lost my whole family, blah, blah, then you kind of create that connection, and in case those same, let's say, call for action could have been done

by recognizing the people's worth in a way, just that was the reason why. I would encourage you to come watch the film, because I think that if you watch this film, it's not a story about these poor people who are so downtrodden in this place. I mean, everybody, first of all, these are people who have chosen to stay in a war zone.

They're not refugees. They're not fleeing to South Sudan. They're not fleeing to other countries. They're like, this is my home. I'm fighting for my culture. I'm fighting for my way of life. I'm fighting for representation in the government, and that's what they're expressing to you, you know? It's not about feeling really bad for these people,

or at least I hope that's not the takeaway. It's about showing their resilience and showing the things that are at stake and what they're fighting for, and these people probably fight sometimes to the detriment of their own well-being. I mean, Hanan, one of the characters who has to live in caves because her home got destroyed, she could leave and go to South Sudan

and be a refugee there and live in refugee camps, but she's choosing to stay in that place, and wants to live in Nuba, wants to be a Sudanese citizen, wants that life. And that's, you know, I think a different narrative than you're going to hear about, you know, a UNICEF piece or other pieces that are sort of like, look at this refugee camp and how sad everybody is here

and how their lives are destroyed. Now give us some money, you know? This is not that narrative. So I would encourage you to come check out the film, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, so I understood how creating empathy with VR as far as creating and displaying the experience

and showcasing like what the reality of their experience is, but when you take that VR back to the people who are in it, I'm wondering if there's any sort of like emotional trauma that that brings up or if AR would be like an easier way

to like artificial reality would be an easier way to relay back that information so it's not so immersive from a traumatic experience? Right. I mean, that's a great question. So I mean, right now we're in the process of bringing this to the people out there. But honestly, I think one thing to keep in mind

with this area in particular is this conflict has been going on for the last six years, right? So it's not like people in some ways are just really excited that people are coming to tell their story, right? And to bring it out to the world. So I think more than sort of a traumatic experience of this,

I think from my experience of showing people VR there and sharing this stuff with them, it's them feeling excited that maybe the world will start sort of taking an interest in what's going on there. As for AR in this context, I don't know.

I mean, I've had limited experience with that and I don't know exactly how... I think it would be a different project. I think it would be a different sort of storytelling project and I don't know what that would look like. Yeah, does that answer the question at all? Sorry. Okay. Anything else? Anyone else?

Yeah. Yeah, hi. I'm a filmmaker and I'm curious about your experience with this because I'm assuming you're going to continue to do standard films as well. And the virtual reality is basically the rage and everyone's trying to do it in New York Times. People are pumping money at it. But I've remained a bit skeptical.

Over the years, you watch 3D in movie theaters and it's been relegated to action films. You know, it's never a standard. And I'm just wondering, I saw another film about the same subject, the one done by Andrew Barons. The Frontline piece? I don't know if it ended up on Frontline,

but it was a great film, but of course it had a hard time getting attention. And I think that's one of the issues with VR. I mean, suddenly if AJ plus can promote it, maybe you have 10 times the viewership of a standard film. So I'm just wondering your experience with it. Where does VR fit?

Do you see a real future for this or is it always gonna be sort of a niche? Yeah, I mean, so again, I think this whole idea that VR is here to replace everything that exists and it's gonna, I mean, I think there will always be traditional filmmaking. There will always be radio. I mean, look at radio right now. There's this huge resurgence of like podcasts

and all of these really old forms of storytelling. I mean, to me, all of these are just tools, right? So certain stories are conducive to working with virtual reality. It's not a blanket thing where everything will be replaced by it. So you need to find like certain stories,

certain types of things are good for this experience. And I think people are still sort of toying with what that is. And I think, yeah, I think virtual reality is gonna be huge. And I think it's gonna change the way we think about media and think about storytelling. But again, I don't think it's here to replace any other sort of thing. I think it's a tool.

I think people should look at it as a tool and think about it in that way. Yeah, hope that answers the question. Yeah, do you have a particular, from your experience, do you have a particular sense now of exactly the kind of stories that you would tell with virtual reality versus other?

I mean, I learned a lot in this process and I think to me, I think it's really exciting when we stop thinking about this as an extension of traditional filmmaking and stop sort of applying the same ways that we think about that with, even with like voiceover and cutting

and how we're editing in that way. What excites me is thinking about this as its own language and its own medium. And I think some of the moments in this film that work really well are when you're not, you know, we did lean on some of those techniques for telling this story, but I think, like I'm saying,

the moments that work really well is when you basically are immersed in these environments and as a viewer, you're sort of creating your own, you're sort of working your way around the space in your own way instead of being led around the space by the filmmaker. And I think that's sort of this elusive area right now

with this sort of storytelling, but it's what kind of excites me most and that's a really sort of opaque answer, but yeah. Anyone else? All right, thank you.