Creative Tech Week

The most disruptive piece of technology in virtual reality right now is the blank piece of paper and the most radical innovators have an equally malleable state of mind. I come from thinking about film so I've brought VR headsets into production houses to give demos to seasoned cinematographers, editors, graders, sound designers. On all previous projects these people arrive with the professional baggage of the right way to do things. They have crew t-shirts from shoots in the 90s, have read all the books and taken all the classes. But once they get their heads around the idea of a 360 (3D?) all-encompassing orb, out comes the blank piece of paper. And a blank piece of paper is a very liberating thing. There's nothing on there to tell you what to do. There's no guidance but also no control. And that's new, very new. Because media is (and has always been) very tightly controlled. We're aware of state censorship and how only some stories that are vetted and approved get airtime or theatrical distribution. We're also aware of the need to raise substantial amounts of money to produce moving image works, which acts as a different kind of filter. But we are usually unaware of the self censorship that comes from trying to fit what we want to say about the world into the locked, linear, rectangular restrictions of a screen. The prison of the medium itself is not exposed until it is taken away.