Walking in someone else’s shoes: creating empathy in the practice of immersive film

ABSTRACT

The rise and accessibility of virtual reality and 360-degree film has led to the assertion that it is an empathy generator (De La Peña, N., P. Well, J. Liobera, E. Giannopoulos, A. Pomés, B. Spanlang, D. Friedman, M. Sanchez- Vives, and M. Slater. 2010. “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19 (4): 291–301. http://hdl.handle.net/2445/52803; Milk 2015. How Virtual Reality can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine. Accessed February 9, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine) allowing for a greater level of immersion on the part of the ‘experiencer’ than traditional film enables (Jones, S. 2017. “Disrupting the Narrative: Immersive Journalism in Virtual Reality.” Journal of Media Practice 18 (2–3): 171–185). Films created for a user to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ have been used to explore ideas including mobility (StoryUp 2016), health conditions (Gauntlett 2015) and immigration (Milk 2015. How Virtual Reality can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine. Accessed February 9, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine) and are increasingly being used by third-sector organisations and the United Nations because of their power as a tool to help understanding of social issues.

This paper seeks to critically investigate the concept of empathy within film practice and explore how emerging technologies potentially enable a significant shift in the audience’s experience of a subject. Through a study of immersive films and interviews with leading creators, the notions of empathy-driven practice are interrogated and critiqued. The study provides conditions for future immersive filmic practice that, through using non-directed narratives, involves the creation of a space in which experiencers of immersive experiences can gain an increased awareness of space, place and social relations which can lead to positive societal change without requiring the need for empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• immersion
• virtual reality
• film
• presence
• 360-degree film

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Immersive experiences:

Clouds Over Sidra (2015), Within, Gabo Arora, Chris Milk.

https://with.in/watch/clouds-over-sidra/ [Last accessed 09.02.18]

Giant (2017), New Reality, Milica Zec, Winslow Porter.

https://with.in/watch/giant/, [Last accessed 09.02.18]

Confinement (2015), RYOT

https://www.ryot.org/blog/stories/confinement [Last accessed 09.02.18]

Creators:

Anrick Bregman, VR Director, UNIT9 & The Guardian

Jane Gauntlett, Immersive Creator

Sarah Hill, StoryUP, Inc.

Lakshmi Sarah, Tiny World Productions

Geri Migielicz, Stanford University

João Mota, O Repórter Imersivo

Interviews conducted between January and February 2018.

Filmography:

StoryUp Studios, Zambia: Gift of Mobility (2016)

Jane Gauntlett, In My Shoes (2015)

Matt Colishaw, Thresholds (2017)

Notes on contributors

Sarah Jones is an immersive storyteller, using 360 degree technology and virtual reality to bring together new forms of narrative. Sarah explores immersive experiential films as an art form to understand an environment and culture through being someone else in a virtual world. Sarah works towards creating film where the narrative is embedded in the experience, rather than directed by the creator and this is evident in films such as Contemplations in Chungking (2016), The Town that Blew Away (2017) and Shameful Conquest (2017). Sarah is listed in the Onalytica’s Global Influencers in virtual reality. Sarah is Head of the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University. Her academic research looks at multisensory VR, psychogeography and immersive journalistic practice.

Steve Dawkins is the Associate Head of the School of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. He previously managed the highly successful Media Production degree course for nine years. His practice revolves around documentary/experimental documentary, both still and moving image, exploring senses of place and space. He is increasingly moving into more immersive forms of production and is the co-producer and director, with Sarah Jones, of Contemplations in Chungking (2016) and Shameful Conquest (2017).

ORCID

Sarah Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9789-5087

Steve Dawkins http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6248-386X

Notes

1 By ‘fully directed narrative’, we are referring to a media text that, through its mode of construction, actively directs how an audience views that text. It is distinct from VR films which take a looser narrative approach. The conditions allow for different viewing experiences and although structures may be linear and attention cues can be used, these can experienced in multiple ways. In empathy-driven films, the audience is not inhabiting a totally constructed filmic world and instead is moving through an already existing one, often as a protagonist.

2 Within is a VR company, based in Los Angeles. It was founded in 2014 by Chris Milk and rebranded from VRSE in 2016, after raising more than twelve million dollars. The app houses a range of experiences and is the most downloaded and highest rated cinematic VR app for Google Cardboard.