VR 360
The eight VR360 experiences listed below can be accessed via phones for FREE using the “Imagine VR Expanded” app from the App store (iPhones) and Play Store (Android). The experiences will become available at midnight on 7 April and will remain in the apps until 18 April. You can watch all the experiences using the phone alone (magic window mode) or put your devices in any headsets working with smartphones (cardboard, Gear VR etc.).
Geimu
The avid gamer Emi draws her friend Hiroshi into a dangerous game, hacking the console and the VR set to physically experience the consequences of their actions in the virtual world. Filled with techniques bringing to mind the mechanics and aesthetics of RPG and FPS games, Geimu explores the borderlines between the cinematic and the gaming uses of VR.
Japan 2020
Director: Dorian Goto Stone
Duration: 23’
Replacements
Drawn in delicate lines, the animation is based on the director’s personal memories and years of studying urban, environmental and cultural changes happening in the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, since the 1980s. In only 13 minutes, we experience half a century of history, learning how the passage of time changed city’s architecture, soundscape, and the lives of particular families.
Indonesia, Japan, Germany 2020
Director: Jonathan Hagard
Music: Efek Rumah Kaca
Animation: Jonathan Hagard, Kaori Kida, Dewi Hagard
Duration: 12’
Look at Me
Zhang, like everyone in the near future, is addicted to the perks offered by the virtual reality. Things start changing for him as his girlfriend chooses cybersex over their physical sex life. Following a meysterious girl, Zhang stumbles across the place where phones are forbidden and people fight with their bare fists.
Taiwan 2019
Director: Wi-Ding Ho
Duration: 14′
Odyssey 1.4.9
A breathtaking VR experience exploring Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “Space Odyssey” in one monumental take. Not only a personal tribute to the movie, but also a sensory immersion into its heart. Odyssey 1.4.9 stages the famous dark monolith by turning it into an impossible object composed of hundreds of film frames. A vertiginous, abstract journey in which relations of scale and size are completely overturned.
France 2019
Director: François Vautier
Duration: 8′
Dream Droplets
Take a deep breath and immerse yourself in the imaginary world of Dream Droplets, hidden from the conscious mind. Travel alongside young adult Kim in this confronting dream-like fantasy, where grass grows as tall as trees and magical raindrops turn into bursting threads. Take the form of a water droplet, and drift along with the poetic current of her dreamy tale.
Netherlands 2020
Director: Nick Rutten
Duration: 12’
Go home
A collaboration between the legendary director of Ju-On: The Grudge Takashi Shimizu and Tokyo Gore Police’s Yoshihiro Nishimura resulted in the most terrifying 360-degree j-horror to date. “Go Home” invites you to follow a mysterious small girl home from a graveyard. If that alone sounds disturbing then wait for the rest. Imagine proudly presents Takashi Shimizu’s first venture into the VR territory as the second festival in the world (after “Beyond the Frame” in Japan).
Japan 2021
Director: Takashi Shimizu, Yoshihiro Nishimura
Duration: 6’ 30
Hominidae
Against a landscape of X-ray imagery and wild anatomical reimagination, this experience follows an Arachnid Hominid, an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, as she struggles to raise her young in a hostile environment. The story is told in five vignettes, from the birth of the children to the death of the mother in the teeth of her prey.
USA 2019
Director: Brian Andrews
Duration: 7′
Swing
Swing depicts the internal (or more accurately – infernal) and external struggles of a young girl who is attempting and failing to swing on a playground swing. As she struggles with the swing, the gates of hell open up and we’re pulled in to experience the torments of her soul. Masterfully animated, it’s a real treat.
USA 2020
Director Mari Jaye Blanchard
VR Director: Mark Reisch
Duration: 6’
