A VOCAL LANDSCAPE | 9 MIN 6 DOF VR | DIRECTED BY ANNE JEPPESEN & OMID ZAREI
Logline_
A Vocal Landscape is a hyperrealistic VR short film that explores the strange and familiar anatomy of a conversation. It explores the ephemerality of connection and the Sisyphus effort of reaching each other with words.
Synopsis_
A Vocal Landscape takes you on an intense, dreamlike journey through a snippet of a late night conversation between two people. The two start in a wordless moment of presence and connection. But when they try to grasp and extend the moment with words, the communication between them takes more complex forms. Ambiguous emotions occur, conflicting associations arise and the connection between them reveals its ephemerality.As a spectator you’re present with the two in an ever-changing room where hyperrealistic visuals highlight the imaginative journey each of them take as well as the unspoken communication between the two. The film opens up new ways of looking at communication, to grasp all the asynchronous subtilities and maybe get a sense of how difficult a task we give ourselves when we try to reach each other with words.
Concept_
With our work, we want to provide an experience that can give the viewer an enhance presence in the real-world conversations afterwards. The work was selected an developed at the Venice Biennale Cinema College VR in 2020. Since then, it ha received an Epic Megagrant, which is awarded by Epic Games. The work has also bee selected for the Vancouver Film Festival's Volumetric Market, where it won a Specia Award involving a production partnership with Microsoft XR Studios in San Francisco. The idea initiated from our fascination with the complex, ambiguous expression of the human voice. Through the sound, rhythm and intensity of the voice, personality, emotions, intentions and dynamics are expressed. We visualize these expressions with a magical-realism approach, depicting them as physical formations in the virtual space. Thereby, the subtle communication layer of the voice is experienced in an intensified and clear way for the spectator.The purpose of the project is to create focus on the importance of being physically present with the people we communicate with. We want to show how beautiful, rich and complex the communicative exchange between two people in the same room can be. It is a focus we want to create because we feel our online communications threaten this exchange.
Bio_
Omid Zarei is a French/Iranian XR producer & cinematographer on the quest to immerse inalternative ways of storytelling. He worked as a VFX artist early on and later studied film directin and production in Paris where he went on to work on fiction and documentary movies, Virtual Reality projects, art films, music videos and everything in-between. In 2016 with the comeback of the VR hype he got interested in experimenting with narrative ideas in VR and went on to develop a VR filmmaking workshop which lead to the creation of the “VR filmmaking workshop” in Helsinki with the support of Kone Foundation and Aalto University. In 2019 his VR project “Songs of futur past” was finalist in the “Opera Beyond: Memories of the Future" XR competition at The Finnish National Opera and Ballet.
Anne Jeppesen is a critically acclaimed Copenhagen producer with a focus on audio documentaries.She has produced audio documentaries for Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the journal Politiken, as well as immersive audio experiences for museums, art festivals and theater. In 2019 she did sound on the VR project “Songs of future past” was finalist in the “Opera Beyond:Memories of the Future" XR competition at The Finnish National Opera and Ballet.With a background in classical music and musicology, Anne is driven by a never fading fascination for the richness of the human voice and is constantly seeking out new ways to work with vocal expressions.