When I was 7 years old — during that crucial, game-changing summer between second and third grade when you figure out who you are and what you want to be — I spent nearly all my free time watching Grease. I’d profess my love for Danny Zuko and his tight T-shirts and greased up curls to my closest confidantes (read: little sisters barely old enough to speak).
But, looking back, I was clearly magnetized, almost addicted, more so to Sandy. Not as the goody-goody cheerleader, please. But in her post-makeover, sexed-up cat woman look, carefully crafted to attract the T-Bird of her affections. I’d watch transfixed as Sandy slinked on the scene, pouty and self-assured and apparently rid of her Australian accent. I’d pause and rewind to study the wildly cool way she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as piercing as a silent, scandalous “checkmate,” and the dumbfounded Hoo boy! expression on Danny’s face.
Basically, I was Jan, who appears to be touching herself in the background of this scene.
It’s not quite accurate to call Sandy my first crush, because she was something far more powerful. I both idolized her and desired her, but mostly idolized the intensity with which she was desired. She was the first manifestation, for me, of that intense combination of lust, envy and inspiration that makes ladies want to please a man so badly they can’t stop desiring women. I call such objects of desire sex muses, and imagine them as the contemporary feminist response to Socrates and all the young, hot pupils he inspired and banged. Sandy was my Socrates.
This morning, approximately 20 years later, I scrolled through my Instagram feed, saw a post on one of the many Rihanna fan accounts to which I am but a meager minion. I paused on one, featuring Rihanna and “dat a$$,” as the caption states, moving like a maple syrup ninja to the beat of her hit song “Work.” I watched it about 14 times, put on the song, danced in the mirror, considered doing more butt-toning exercises and buying purple lipstick. I eventually returned to work, ashamed yet invigorated. These are the terms of our relationship.
The special bond between a woman and her sex muse, however intimate and rapturous it may be, is in part emblematic of a patriarchal culture, one that places male desire as so paramount to a sexual encounter it can supplant, or at least skew, a woman’s own. On the surface, our infatuation with sexualized celebrities stems from the urge to be desirable ourselves. I want to be Sandy to attract Danny, and yet it’s Sandy I can’t look away from. Adoration begins to resemble attraction, and what may appear at first glance as a dearth of women’s sexual agency actually speaks to the complexity of our sexual desires.
Rihanna is but one of a sea of hot babes women fantasize about fucking, but also fantasize about fucking as. Writer Tess Barker coined the term Bey-Sexual to describe the nearly ubiquitous straight girl syndrome of lusting after the Queen B. “I sometimes refer to myself as a Bey-Sexual,” she writes, “meaning that I’m such a typical straight woman I would absolutely sleep with Beyoncé. When I watch her expertly and confidently gyrate her leotard-clad rear as her perpetually fan-blown hair waves, I am really fantasizing less about having sex with Beyoncé, and more about having sex as her. What she represents is the ultimate combination of autonomy and desirability, which is so appealing to me that it’s barely distinguishable from literal attraction.”
Women are encouraged to obsess over sexualized celebrities, to a degree that rivals yet remains separate from sexual attraction. Terms like “girl crush“ serve as a distancing mechanism — saying I admire her but not like that. Then why are so many women so damn infatuated? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that women don’t just have sex, they see themselves having sex, and thus their own self-actualized sexualization is folded into the experience of pleasure.
“A woman must continually watch herself,” John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself ... From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”
This holds true, of course, in sex. Women are conditioned to see themselves, and arouse themselves, through the way they look, the way they sound. “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear,” Berger summarizes. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Although I will never have sex from the perspective of a man, I turn to the hilarious (very NSFW) adolescent fantasy in the band Is Tropical’s “Dancing Anymore” as a guide. In the music video, featured below, a preteen boy masturbates during a housesitting gig, while, in his imagination, he has sex with a variety of computer generated VR partners, ranging from a hot blonde to a redheaded mermaid to a literal giant, the fantasies growing stranger as the video progresses.
Throughout the video, however, the boy remains clad in his red polo, containing his prepubescent frame. He is not folded into the fantasy, as outlandish and all-engulfing as it becomes. He has no interest in watching himself have sex.
For women, however, incorporating themselves into the fantasy can be part of the fun. If Berger is correct that women can’t help but see themselves all the time, sex included, then a woman’s sexual persona caters not just to her partner but to herself, as well. After a lifetime of watching music video vixens bump and grind with envy and awe, when a woman feels seductive and in control during sex, it benefits herself as much as her partner. What may have initially started as a desire to please a man — to be sultry, confident, magnetic — has morphed into an authentic point of pride and pleasure.
Celebrity worship can empower a woman to be her best sexual self, channeling her sex muse to please her partner and herself. Yet as more and more individuals become aware of the fluidity of sexuality, the more terms like “girl crush” seem out of date. Pop culture may not have intended for women to acknowledge their physical attraction to their sex muses, stripped of the male intermediary, but it’s happening.
In a recent episode of “Broad City,” resident queer queen and Rihanna believer Ilana Glazer expressed her confusion over her feelings for a badass investor visiting her place of work, played by Vanessa Williams. “I don’t know if I wanna be her or be in her,” she says. Eventually, Glazer decides that, actually, she wants to have sex with Williams, tells her so, and is promptly told to go home. With the same casual ease the “Broad City” ladies often employ to subtly shift the expectations young women face today, Ilana acknowledges the ambiguity of her girl crush feelings as well as the reality that, yes, you can have your idols and fuck them, too.
Perhaps the ubiquitous cultural obsession with feminine sexuality speaks to the fact that the purely straight girl is seeming more and more like a myth, as the satirical Reductress article “Is Everyone Super Attracted to These 6 Female Celebrities or Is This Me Finding Out I’m Bisexual?” playfully suggests.
“25-year-old Australian starlet Margot Robbie has a very symmetrical face and what appears to be very soft skin and I would definitely roll around naked with her. Not sure whether or not this means that I am bisexual. I’d love for someone to rate how normal this is on a scale of 1-10. Anyone?”
The narrator grows progressively more frantic — “Guys??? A LITTLE HELP HERE????” — speaking to the silence that often surrounds women’s sexual desires. And though celebrities may be the gateway to not so straight fantasies, the widespread adulation of women, teetering between the urge to look and to touch, extends to mere civilians as well.
A personal essay on Slutever by Misha Scott, about her first time actually sleeping with a woman after years of considering herself bisexual, expresses a similar confusion regarding woman’s sexual urges and where exactly they stem from. “Was I gay enough not to be straight? What if I was just trying to fulfill a taboo manufactured by the porn industry?” Scott asked. “What if I thought I was being a sexually liberated woman but was actually participating in a historically sexist pattern of lesbian eroticism as performance for the male gaze?”
We’re constantly fed images of women we’re meant to worship but not want, and then left in the dark if the two start to become confused. Of course, we’re confused. It’s as if the patriarchal machine designed to make women hate themselves has somehow malfunctioned. Instead of minimizing female desires, it ends up awakening a more fluid understanding of sexual attraction. And now, more than ever, women are understanding that they both want to be and be in their celebrity dream girls. As explained in a recent Broadly piece, 48 percent of Gen Zs identify as exclusively heterosexual, compared to 65 percent of millennials aged 21 to 34.
I am not trying to say that a teenage girl saying “I’d tooootally do Beyonce” qualifies as coming out, or conflate the queer experience with celebrity worship. Nor do I believe that any celebrity, however sexy she may be, has the power to “turn anyone gay.” As Ruby Rose said around the time everyone in the world was falling in love with Ruby Rose: “When people say to me that I turned them gay, I just laugh, because that’s not really even a possibility. It sounds like I did something against their will in the middle of the night, as if I crept into their brain and pushed the gay button.”
I am interested in how fluid and complex our sexual desires always already have been. That since we were single-digit girls, flipping through magazine pages and ogling the pop stars plastered on their glossy spreads, forces of attraction, fear, desire, insecurity, aspiration, envy and lust are at play. A sexual spectrum where a relationship as intimate, deranged and totally delusional as a sex muse is commonplace for women who identify as straight in a world too convoluted for such a simplistic label.
So cheers to the sex muses of the world, the sexualized pop culture knockouts who sneak their way into our fantasies, top our celebrity would-fuck lists, and inspire hours of booty shaking in our bedrooms. May they make us more confident and adventurous in the bedroom as well as in the giant bedroom of life. And may we all be so lucky as the audience member in the video below and feel the gentle bump and grind of Rihanna in the flesh.
Friday, April 15, 2016
Deep in the virtual world: A newbie's first brush with VR
NEW YORK -- My descent from the boat, gliding through schools of fish and clouds of phosphorescent jellyfish, seemed to be going pretty smoothly. At least until the shark emerged from the deeper gloom and tried to tear its way into my protective cage.
Of course, it wasn't really a shark. And I wasn't really in a cage -- or underwater or even anywhere near the ocean. But it sure felt like I was.
At its best, this is exactly what you can expect from the much-hyped technology of virtual reality. All you have to do is put on a headset that blocks out the surrounding world and replaces it with one that's fake -- but often utterly realistic. Suddenly it's like you've stepped out of your life and into someone else's.
With the debut of new VR headsets from Facebook's Oculus unit, Samsung and Sony over the past few months, virtual reality hype has been off the charts. To its proponents, it's the Next Great Thing, a whole new way of "immersing" (a word you'll be hearing a lot) yourself in games, movies, even live music or sports.
Until a few weeks ago, though, the prospect left me cold. The first wave of VR entertainment consists largely of video games, which have never much interested me. Reports that VR can make you nauseous also put me off. Eventually, though, I had to try it, and my first brush with the technology was intriguing enough to keep me exploring.
Just not enough to plunk down more than a thousand dollars for a full-fledged VR system anytime soon. Current VR offerings have a lot of room for improvement; many of them get old quickly once the initial "wow" factor wears off. It's also hard not to feel self-conscious wearing goofy-looking headgear, especially when surrounded by strangers you can't see.
The experience, though, had its moments. Zombies and sharks pushed me uncomfortably close to real terror; a few contemplative moments lost in a blind man's virtual diary, by contrast, proved unexpectedly affecting. And there was another big plus: no queasiness. (For me, at least. Your experience may differ.)
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
My first plunge into VR involved a virtual roller coaster. Which is funny only because the real things scare me to death. If I ride them at all, I get on somewhere near the back and keep my eyes shut tight.
This Samsung demo, featuring the company's Gear VR system, got extra points for realism. Its VR video, shot at a Six Flags park, was synced to mechanical chairs that jerked around in time with the coaster's virtual movements. And of course, the video put me right in the first car.
For all that, the virtual ride proved sort of tame, at least for a coasterphobe like me. For once, I could keep my eyes open and enjoy gawking at fellow passengers or the trees below me. It may not have matched the adrenaline rush of the real thing, but that was just fine.
Going deep into Zombieland
A demo of Sony's PlayStation VR headset, due out in October, was mostly devoted to games ranging from space shoot-em-ups to family puzzle games. A lot of them were enjoyable, but few were as dramatic as "The Deep," which had me shaking alone in a dimly lit shark cage while what felt like the real thing circled outside.
I had a similar moment playing "Until Dawn: Rush of Blood," a horror game set in a zombie-infested amusement park. (Yes, it was a lot like the finale to "Zombieland," just like "The Deep" bore more than a passing resemblance to an up-close-and-personal version of "Jaws.") I knew the zombies weren't really rushing at me through the darkness, but I couldn't help ducking anyway.
A virtual film festival
Film festivals are starting to showcase VR films as directors explore the new medium. At New York's Tribeca Film Festival, which opened Wednesday, I watched "Allumette," a dreamy short based on the fairy tale "The Little Match Girl."
For 20 minutes, the story took me around a dollhouse-like town built in the clouds. It was charming to crane my neck to look at houses from different angles; at one point, I even stuck my head into a flying boat to see what was going on.
"Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness," meanwhile, translates the audio diary of man who'd gone blind into a virtual representation of his world. I found myself in a minimalist landscape in which sounds from a park formed ephemeral images -- laughing children, barking dogs -- that dissipated as their echoes faded.
Virtual conclusion
Bottom line: My VR experiences to date have mostly been interesting, but still not entirely compelling. It's clearly a medium in its infancy, and creators are still devising new storytelling techniques that can exploit the technology's power. But it's impossible to deny the technology's underlying potential.
Maybe it'll even help me lose my fear of roller coasters one day.
Of course, it wasn't really a shark. And I wasn't really in a cage -- or underwater or even anywhere near the ocean. But it sure felt like I was.
At its best, this is exactly what you can expect from the much-hyped technology of virtual reality. All you have to do is put on a headset that blocks out the surrounding world and replaces it with one that's fake -- but often utterly realistic. Suddenly it's like you've stepped out of your life and into someone else's.
With the debut of new VR headsets from Facebook's Oculus unit, Samsung and Sony over the past few months, virtual reality hype has been off the charts. To its proponents, it's the Next Great Thing, a whole new way of "immersing" (a word you'll be hearing a lot) yourself in games, movies, even live music or sports.
Until a few weeks ago, though, the prospect left me cold. The first wave of VR entertainment consists largely of video games, which have never much interested me. Reports that VR can make you nauseous also put me off. Eventually, though, I had to try it, and my first brush with the technology was intriguing enough to keep me exploring.
Just not enough to plunk down more than a thousand dollars for a full-fledged VR system anytime soon. Current VR offerings have a lot of room for improvement; many of them get old quickly once the initial "wow" factor wears off. It's also hard not to feel self-conscious wearing goofy-looking headgear, especially when surrounded by strangers you can't see.
The experience, though, had its moments. Zombies and sharks pushed me uncomfortably close to real terror; a few contemplative moments lost in a blind man's virtual diary, by contrast, proved unexpectedly affecting. And there was another big plus: no queasiness. (For me, at least. Your experience may differ.)
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
My first plunge into VR involved a virtual roller coaster. Which is funny only because the real things scare me to death. If I ride them at all, I get on somewhere near the back and keep my eyes shut tight.
This Samsung demo, featuring the company's Gear VR system, got extra points for realism. Its VR video, shot at a Six Flags park, was synced to mechanical chairs that jerked around in time with the coaster's virtual movements. And of course, the video put me right in the first car.
For all that, the virtual ride proved sort of tame, at least for a coasterphobe like me. For once, I could keep my eyes open and enjoy gawking at fellow passengers or the trees below me. It may not have matched the adrenaline rush of the real thing, but that was just fine.
Going deep into Zombieland
A demo of Sony's PlayStation VR headset, due out in October, was mostly devoted to games ranging from space shoot-em-ups to family puzzle games. A lot of them were enjoyable, but few were as dramatic as "The Deep," which had me shaking alone in a dimly lit shark cage while what felt like the real thing circled outside.
I had a similar moment playing "Until Dawn: Rush of Blood," a horror game set in a zombie-infested amusement park. (Yes, it was a lot like the finale to "Zombieland," just like "The Deep" bore more than a passing resemblance to an up-close-and-personal version of "Jaws.") I knew the zombies weren't really rushing at me through the darkness, but I couldn't help ducking anyway.
A virtual film festival
Film festivals are starting to showcase VR films as directors explore the new medium. At New York's Tribeca Film Festival, which opened Wednesday, I watched "Allumette," a dreamy short based on the fairy tale "The Little Match Girl."
For 20 minutes, the story took me around a dollhouse-like town built in the clouds. It was charming to crane my neck to look at houses from different angles; at one point, I even stuck my head into a flying boat to see what was going on.
"Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness," meanwhile, translates the audio diary of man who'd gone blind into a virtual representation of his world. I found myself in a minimalist landscape in which sounds from a park formed ephemeral images -- laughing children, barking dogs -- that dissipated as their echoes faded.
Virtual conclusion
Bottom line: My VR experiences to date have mostly been interesting, but still not entirely compelling. It's clearly a medium in its infancy, and creators are still devising new storytelling techniques that can exploit the technology's power. But it's impossible to deny the technology's underlying potential.
Maybe it'll even help me lose my fear of roller coasters one day.
For your consideration at Tribeca Film Festival: VR
The Tribeca Film Festival is known as a showcase for upcoming independent movies. But, as we move towards an increasingly digital world, it's opening its doors to other forms of storytelling, including virtual reality (VR) technology.
The 15th annual New York film festival, which will run from the April 13 through 24, will feature 28 VR experiences. While most of them require the solitary activity of putting on a headset and watching the 360-degree film, much of the VR content will experiment with techniques that filmmakers hope will catch on with the mainstream.
"I don't think it's necessary for VR to become a mass participatory event, but I think it is definitely expanding to be more palatable to the masses," said Loren Hammons, an interactive programmer at the Tribeca Film Festival.
As the popularity of virtual reality technology grows, more artists and filmmakers are experimenting with the medium's potential for interactive storytelling. Still, for it to be a game changer, it needs to be adopted by a broad audience.
A new report from Greenlight VR and Road to VR estimated that 2.3 million VR headset will sell this year in the U.S., which is less than 1 percent of the population. The companies do expect sales to grow to 136 million in 2025. The Wall Street Journal reported that another firm, SuperData Research, recently readjusted its global VR sales projections to $2.86 billion, down 22 percent from figures released in early March.
Nick DiCarlo, vice president and general manager of immersive products and virtual reality at Samsung Electronics America, said it sees a lot of potential in VR given consumer response, but understands its still not there.
"Our vision is that VR can become a mainstream technology," DiCarlo said.
To further bolster adoption, the technology company is actively working to introduce VR to more people through events at places like South by Southwest, the NBA all-star weekend and the Tribeca Film Festival. It also kept its Samsung Gear VR headset price at $99, and made it compatible with six of its Samsung Galaxy phones.
"VR is in early days, but products like Gear VR are ideally suited because they are simple to use, and self-contained, and powered by a smartphone millions of people already have," DiCarlo said.
At Tribeca's Virtual Arcade, 13 VR exhibitors have booths where attendees can chat with the filmmakers and view their VR work, as well as head to two lounge areas to chat with other festivalgoers about what they saw. The experience mimics going to a movie theater, except instead of sitting for one movie people can bounce around to a bunch of short films.
VR content ranges from Penrose Studio's "Allumette," a 20-minute story about an orphan girl living in a cloud city, to Wevr's "Old Friend," where the viewer stands in the middle of an animated psychedelic dance party. Creator Tyler Hurd said he was trying to capture the experience of going to a dance party with friends.
Hurd added that while the experience is for one person right now, the team may make it "multiplayer" in the future. That said, there's also something for people standing around waiting for their turn with the headset — viewing the person doing the VR experience themselves.
"It's basically a music video, and you're in the center of it, and there are lot of fun characters that come and go and do these synchronized dance routines," Hurd said. "It's more of a linear experience that is trying to get the viewer dance… When (the user) gets in there and does it themselves, people can watch from the outside."
Other experiences include Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of Felix and Paul Studios hosting a simultaneous VR viewing, where everyone in the audience will be able to watch the content at the same time. Lajeunesse and Raphaël will "tour" them through the worlds they have created by talking them through the experience.
Chris Milk, co-founder and CEO of VR production company Vrse, said that VR is still in its nascent stages, but there's no reason why it won't evolve in the future. Vrse will have several projects at Tribeca this year, including "The Click Effect," an immersive journalism project about click communication between dolphins and sperm whales as well as "My Mother's Wing," which documents a mother coping with the death of her two children during Gaza war.
Milk, who started his career as a director working with artists like Kanye West, The Chemical Brothers and Arcade Fire, compared the potential development of VR to the emergence of moving picture and sound in the 1800s. From that technology came movies, radio, television and even the telephone, he pointed out.
"I think that with enough people having regular access to the technology, and there being experiences that people want to engage with, (it can be adopted by the masses)," Milk said.
At Tribeca, this little VR match girl put Penrose on the map
"Our initial idea is that it's not just Allumette; it's about her town," says Penrose studio founder, Eugene Chung. "It's about this big, expansive space. ... And that's actually part of what's coming."
The 20-minute experience, which follows the titular character to her eventual demise, hews closely to the studio's recent tradition of mining inspiration from literature's past. For its first VR short, The Rose and I, the San Francisco-based studio lifted elements from The Little Prince. But a reinterpretation of classic short stories isn't quite Penrose's aim. Those truncated tales simply fit the bite-sized, serialized format of current VR experiences. In fact, the small studio -- which is made up of Oculus VR, Dreamworks and Pixar veterans, among others -- is intent on building "persistent worlds" that viewers can revisit to eavesdrop on the drama of inhabitants. It's a way for Penrose to successively build out a story's larger narrative in VR. It's also a clever content play.
The little prince of Penrose Studios' first VR project, The Rose and I.
"We definitely have other projects in the pipeline that [are] not living in Allumette's world," says Chung. "But we definitely think ofAllumette's world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more."
While the Tribeca Film Festival in New York serves as Allumette's official long-form premiere -- prior to this, it'd been demo-ed in preview form -- work on the project is still underway. Chung was able to demo only a portion of its planned interactivity, which puts the "matchstick" (via the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive controllers), in the viewer's hand as a sort of torchlight with which to explore the town and light up nearby clouds.
That said, a preview version, Allumette - Chapter 1, will be released "in coming days" to Steam VR and the Oculus storefront as a free limited-time preview. Its final 20-minute festival form, however, won't be made available until later this year. A version for PlayStation VR is also on deck.
"We definitely think of Allumette's world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more."
Eugene Chung, Penrose Studios
WIth its Tribeca debut barely under Penrose's belt, already the studio is considering ways to expand upon Allumette's world of "Wake," a codename that pays homage to James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
"The way we categorize our projects internally is by worlds, [rather] than by stories within those worlds," says Chung. The idea behind this thinking is that it'll allow Penrose to get VR viewers familiar with its characters and worlds, and then invite them back to experience new installments featuring characters old and new.
It also doesn't hurt that this approach builds upon existing assets -- much of which were created within VR -- and dispenses with the time-intensive effort of creating entirely new worlds and engines from scratch each time. Of the five planned "worlds" on Penrose's slate, Allumette's world of Wake counts as the third. The studio's next project will focus on world five, the details of which Chung wouldn't reveal except to say it'd stray from the classic short story format.
It's not by accident that Penrose parallels Oculus VR's own animated VR storytelling studio. Chung, who previously worked in venture capital, and as a producer at Pixar before that, most recently hails from Oculus VR. In 2014, after an enthusiastic visit to the company's headquarters for a VR demo, Chung was asked to join in the newly created role of head of film and media. That role led to the creation of Story Studio, the company's in-house animation department. There, with a cherry-picked group of eager animators, artists, programmers and developers, Chung set the vision for Story Studio and executive produced its first VR short,Lost, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The Oculus stint, however, was short-lived, as Chung departed a year later to form Penrose.
Despite the studio's current public focus on VR, Chung's ambitions for Penrose extend beyond the medium. Its recent round ofseed funding, totaling $8.5 million, is proof. He prefers to describe the studio as more of a "tech company" than VR animation house. And rightly so, as augmented reality is listed as one of the studio's main areas of focus. It's still early days for those in-development holographic projects, and Chung isn't willing to discuss specifics, but he does highlight proprietary VR creation tools similar to the ones used to create Allumette, and extensions of existing VR projects as possibilities.
"Some of the next things you're going to see from us are going to be quite a bit different," he says.Image credits: Penrose Studios
The 20-minute experience, which follows the titular character to her eventual demise, hews closely to the studio's recent tradition of mining inspiration from literature's past. For its first VR short, The Rose and I, the San Francisco-based studio lifted elements from The Little Prince. But a reinterpretation of classic short stories isn't quite Penrose's aim. Those truncated tales simply fit the bite-sized, serialized format of current VR experiences. In fact, the small studio -- which is made up of Oculus VR, Dreamworks and Pixar veterans, among others -- is intent on building "persistent worlds" that viewers can revisit to eavesdrop on the drama of inhabitants. It's a way for Penrose to successively build out a story's larger narrative in VR. It's also a clever content play.
The little prince of Penrose Studios' first VR project, The Rose and I.
"We definitely have other projects in the pipeline that [are] not living in Allumette's world," says Chung. "But we definitely think ofAllumette's world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more."
While the Tribeca Film Festival in New York serves as Allumette's official long-form premiere -- prior to this, it'd been demo-ed in preview form -- work on the project is still underway. Chung was able to demo only a portion of its planned interactivity, which puts the "matchstick" (via the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive controllers), in the viewer's hand as a sort of torchlight with which to explore the town and light up nearby clouds.
That said, a preview version, Allumette - Chapter 1, will be released "in coming days" to Steam VR and the Oculus storefront as a free limited-time preview. Its final 20-minute festival form, however, won't be made available until later this year. A version for PlayStation VR is also on deck.
"We definitely think of Allumette's world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more."
Eugene Chung, Penrose Studios
WIth its Tribeca debut barely under Penrose's belt, already the studio is considering ways to expand upon Allumette's world of "Wake," a codename that pays homage to James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
"The way we categorize our projects internally is by worlds, [rather] than by stories within those worlds," says Chung. The idea behind this thinking is that it'll allow Penrose to get VR viewers familiar with its characters and worlds, and then invite them back to experience new installments featuring characters old and new.
The floating world of Allumette's cloud city.
It also doesn't hurt that this approach builds upon existing assets -- much of which were created within VR -- and dispenses with the time-intensive effort of creating entirely new worlds and engines from scratch each time. Of the five planned "worlds" on Penrose's slate, Allumette's world of Wake counts as the third. The studio's next project will focus on world five, the details of which Chung wouldn't reveal except to say it'd stray from the classic short story format.
It's not by accident that Penrose parallels Oculus VR's own animated VR storytelling studio. Chung, who previously worked in venture capital, and as a producer at Pixar before that, most recently hails from Oculus VR. In 2014, after an enthusiastic visit to the company's headquarters for a VR demo, Chung was asked to join in the newly created role of head of film and media. That role led to the creation of Story Studio, the company's in-house animation department. There, with a cherry-picked group of eager animators, artists, programmers and developers, Chung set the vision for Story Studio and executive produced its first VR short,Lost, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The Oculus stint, however, was short-lived, as Chung departed a year later to form Penrose.
Despite the studio's current public focus on VR, Chung's ambitions for Penrose extend beyond the medium. Its recent round ofseed funding, totaling $8.5 million, is proof. He prefers to describe the studio as more of a "tech company" than VR animation house. And rightly so, as augmented reality is listed as one of the studio's main areas of focus. It's still early days for those in-development holographic projects, and Chung isn't willing to discuss specifics, but he does highlight proprietary VR creation tools similar to the ones used to create Allumette, and extensions of existing VR projects as possibilities.
"Some of the next things you're going to see from us are going to be quite a bit different," he says.Image credits: Penrose Studios
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