Just watched on Hulu. Congrats guys. Well made throughout. :)

I tried this on a short film about a year ago, and have never gone back. It's a fantastic way to work. 99% of your shots will have usable in-camera sound, but for the 1%, you can always pull from the main audio files. Pretty sweet.

You know what's equal parts scary and sad? You had to EDIT that last reply.

I was gonna ignore it, but I couldn't resist. How often do you get to say literally anything and sound brilliant by comparison? I do appreciate it.

Not only that, but with all your talk of the peasants sitting in theaters sucking the intellectual teat of their betters, you manage--and this is an accomplishment, believe me--to make even ME look humble. I didn't mean to spend this whole reply sucking you off, but I have to thank you again.

You're a pleasure to speak with, if only because I come away looking witty, collected, thoughtful and even demure. I suppose that's the main thrust of this reply: thanks.

This article makes me wonder if early prose writers bragged about how "in a few hundred years, poetry won't exist."

I mean, VR and filmmaking are two different art forms. Sure, they're both visual. But one's sculpture and the other's painting. It's not like one has to dominate the other. Let's add VR to the canon like we have video games. Doesn't mean film will die away as a consequence.

You get the sense, listening to VR advocates, that they overestimate the power of their medium. Don't get me wrong; VR is amazing. But it is not fundamentally more emotional or powerful than film.

VR makers say things like, "When you can interact with a story, it feels more personal, more emotional, like you're part of the story and it's being told uniquely to you."

This sounds good and makes sense on the face of it. But I don't think the human brain really works that way. I think stories can feel just as personal and powerful when we are SHOWN them, rather than being forced INTO them. This has certainly been my experience in the cinema, and with VR so far.

Statements like "Kids growing up with this immersion will naturally will get used to it and want all their content to be like this" strike me as begging the question. How do you know this? What makes you think that, across the board and given the choice, a kid--or anyone--prefers interactive stories to stories they're shown?

I can think of a few problems with VR as a medium that film solves. The obvious one being, when you're watching VR, you've always got to wonder whether you've seen the whole thing. Was there something behind you that eluded you? Have you really experienced the whole story? Or for another example, take convenience. Just how often does any of us find it pleasant to give up our eyes? At home, late, when the kids are asleep? Maybe? Or, finally and perhaps most obviously--VR is not a shared experience. When my wife and I are casting about for something to do on a Wednesday evening, I don't know that VR will come to mind. There's something about "you watch the right corner and I'll watch the left" that isn't so much relaxing as it is taxing.

Music doesn't become better if you're asked to hum some of the notes. Sculpture isn't BETTER than painting, just because you can choose your perspective. We like to be told a story, just as much as we like to experience one.

One art form doesn't have to dominate the other. They're just different. And that's ok.

Luan - the politics being pushed are usually exactly aligned with mine. But nobody likes being preached at. And making a movie specifically to push politics is very different from making a movie for its own sake, which happens to be part of a politically influenced culture. That is the critical distinction that you seem to miss (you seem in good company on this thread).

If you can't see the difference between the political force of The Avengers and, say, Hidden Figures, then I'm horrified to imagine what else film school (or a hilariously and obviously inflated ego) has stolen from you. That, and I pray the pages we're on stay as far apart as possible. Saying EVERYTHING is about politics is about as useful as saying "everything is about history" when a friend tires of the history channel. This kind of statement is exactly what daniel dennett calls a deepity: true in an entirely trivial sense, and meaningless in the relevant sense. As for your desire to look for the hidden meaning in everyday things....deep, bro. We boring, ordinary folk can only gape. Meanwhile, I think I'll go watch a thriller.