University of Bristol immersive VR documentary to be shown at Venice Film Festival

When Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer, she decided to create a film and VR project which would explore each step of her journey from diagnosis to recovery. She began with a smartphone short. Shot entirely on an iPhone X, Victoria filmed her time in waiting rooms, surgery, consultations, CT scans and chemotherapy. 

The Waiting Room is an unflinching portrait of the blood, sweat and tears of cancer treatment. Victoria makes visible the often invisible parts of cancer treatment, the sickness, the fatigue, the tears and the hair loss. At home she filmed with her teenage son, as they came to terms with how family life was transformed by a year of living with cancer.

The Waiting Room: VR explores the cultural myths and language of chronic illness, asking us to confront what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us. “We have made cancer our enemy,” says Victoria, “a dark force to be fought by a relentlessly upbeat attitude. The Waiting Room is the antidote to the ‘tyranny of positive thinking’. It challenges the cultural myths that surround this disease, putting under the microscope the language of illness. The Waiting Room begins with a personal journey but as cancer affects one in two of us over the course of a lifetime, it also tells a very universal story.”

The lynchpin of this VR piece is a 9-min durational 360 take, a reconstruction of Victoria’s last session of radiotherapy, which marked the end of nine months of breast cancer treatment. This experience is counter balanced by a CGI journey inside Victoria’s body. Working with 3D artists, Victoria has bought to life the medical imaging she’s collected through out treatment. Cancer cells, CT scans, mammograms and ultrasound provide a 3D portrait of her body from the inside, out.

The film was broadcast on The Guardian as part of their documentaries strand with the second part, Victoria’s first foray into Virtual Reality, receiving its premiere at the 76th Venice International Film Festival from 28 August to 7 September, 2019. The Waiting Room film and VR project will tour festivals, exhibitions and hospitals throughout 2019- 20.

The Waiting Room: VR production credits

• Writer / Director: Victoria Mapplebeck
• Producers: Shehani Fernando & Darren Emerson
• Creative Technologists: Luca Biada & Conan Roberts
• Sound Design: John Wakefield & Henrik Oppermann
• Executive Producers: Catherine Allen & Darren Emerson
• Production Company: East City Films

 Experiencing Immersive #VR Documentaries #FutureofEducation

The immersive and pathfinding documentaries include ‘The Waiting Room’, ‘Love & Seawater’ and ‘Transplant’. Audiences will be able to experience the nonfiction works first-hand using a variety of headsets (Oculus Go, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive).

The project investigates the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for journalism and documentary, and the impact the platform has on storytelling and audience experience.

The showcase will also include panel discussions giving the audience the opportunity to interact with the artists and producers. They also will be joined by special guest Nonny de la Peña, CEO & Founder of award-winning innovation company Emblematic Group who is flying over from America to attend.

The Virtual Realities: Documentary Encounters project, funded by the EPSRC, is a collaboration between the University of Bristol, University of Bath and UWE Bristol (the University of West of England) in partnership with the Watershed, BBC, the Guardian, Aardman Animations, VRCity, Jongsma + O’Neill, Archer’s Mark, VRTOV and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

About the Documentaries

The three projects were chosen from among over 150 applications based on their originality and innovation.

The Waiting Room:VR

The Waiting Room, from Bafta Award winner Victoria Mapplebeck tells the story of her own breast cancer from diagnosis through treatment to recovery. Her first exploration of VR; this project explores the cultural myths and language of chronic illness, asking us to confront what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us.

Love & Seawater

Love and Seawater is the first VR work created by filmmaker Lisa Harewood and creative technologist Ewan Cass-Kavanagh. This work addresses the legacy of the separations between parents and children that have been a feature of Caribbean economic migration, and takes a participatory approach to production, involving those affected by this theme in developing a VR treatment of this previously invisible aspect of global migrant culture.

Transplant

Transplant is a new work by producers Oscar Raby and Katy Morrison of the Melbourne based VRTOV studio, whose field-defining VR projects have been shown and celebrated from Sundance to Sheffield DocFest. Set in Chile under the dictatorship of General Pinochet, Transplant centres on the ideas of biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, as he undergoes a liver transplant, it asks; how do we repair a damaged organism? How do we reorganise a damaged society? Transplant asks us to consider, through interactive VR, the relationship between body and mind.