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Tribeca Film Festival will expand its games program next year
Hideo Kojima and Geoff Keighley have joined Tribeca Games' new advisory board.
Tribeca Film Festival is bringing its VR films to Oculus headsets
Just like pretty much every other event for the foreseeable future, the Tribeca Film Festival isn't taking place as it normally would after organizers postponed it from April. However, the festival is joining SXSW in making some of its programming available online. Tribeca is already streaming a new short film per day, and there's more on the way.
A virtual cave got me excited about the future of social VR
Inside the Future Reality Lab at New York University, there is a cart with 50 headsets on it. It sits by a 10-by-10-foot square that's sometimes used as a motion-capture stage for the lab's offshoot startup Parallux and its ambitious projects in VR and XR (cross reality). The team's latest effort is Cave, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival's Immersive Arcade, and uses what Parallux is calling "a new shared XR technology."
An AR film explores the worst tech companies could do with your face
I made a beeline for Stealing ur feelings when I entered the Tribeca Film Festival Immersive Arcade last week. Officially, I'll say that my reason for doing so was because it was the most relevant exhibit for Engadget's scope of coverage: This interactive AR short studies what companies like Snap, Facebook and Google are doing (or can do) with the data they have on your facial expressions. But let's be honest, I'm pretty sure I was drawn to it because of the big selfie camera perched over the display.
VR is a strangely fitting home for stop-motion animation
Strange, fantastical things are brewing in VR, and the Tribeca Film Festival's Immersive Arcade is a great place to find them. One of the most intriguing things I saw at the festival this year was a stop-motion experience that also uses CGI and 3D 360-degree video to craft a creepy gymnasium. Sure, stop-motion is relatively low-tech, but the combination of technologies produces something truly unique.
Amazon Prime lands futuristic love story ‘Zoe’
Sundance film festival darling Drake Doremus' futuristic love story, Zoe, is one of the more anticipated titles of the year. The director of Like Crazy, Douchebag and Breathe In will premier his eighth film on Saturday as the Tribeca Film Festival's headlining title. According to Deadline, Amazon has acquired the exclusive rights to the movie, and will bring it to Prime Video this summer.
Experience the horror of a Syrian air raid in 'Hero'
I've never seen a warzone, but I got a small virtual taste of what it might be like at the Tribeca Film Festival. Hero is a multisensory interactive experience that drops you into a city in Syria right before an air raid. You're a spectator (and subsequent participant) to the minutes before and after a bomb falls and destroys everything around you. I can't tell you too much about what happens without potentially ruining it for you, but suffice to say I became part of the community and through a simple act, briefly took on the titular role. It sounds self-aggrandizing, but that's the whole point of the experience -- to let the viewer know they have the ability to save lives and make a difference.
Tribeca Games returns with a dive into ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’
Last year's Tribeca Film Festival included a companion festival all about gaming and this year sees the return of Tribeca Games. During the 2018 festival, which runs from April 18th through 29th, Tribeca Games will give attendees behind-the-scenes looks at the upcoming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and God of War reboot as well as a League of Legends tournament.
VR, AR and immersive projects are a bigger part of Tribeca this year
Art museums aren't the only ones delving into virtual reality, with Sundance debuting a slate of Oculus projects back in January. While the Tribeca Film Festival has included both art and cinema VR projects before, this year's programming brings projects with film stars and screenings in a new VR theater. Around 30 pieces will be showcased in the festival's dedicated Immersive section, and the show will also screen 33 VR films and experiences starring a slew of Hollywood regulars including Terrence Malick, Laurie Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Lupita Nyong'o and Alicia Vikander, along with the band OK GO.
Amazon Prime members can stream 15 Sundance Film Festival titles
Today, Amazon announced that 15 Sundance Film Festival titles are now available for Prime members through Amazon Video Direct. The films include Manifesto, starring Cate Blanchett, and festival award winners Marjorie Prime and Free and Easy.
Apple Music’s Clive Davis documentary premieres October 3rd
The documentary film Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, which opened the Tribeca Film Festival in April and was picked up by Apple, will premiere on Apple Music on October 3rd. The film is based on Davis' autobiography and joins other Apple exclusives like 808: The Movie, Taylor Swift's 1989 world tour film and The Cash Money Story: Before Anythang.
Tribeca’s TV Festival aims to be a curator for television’s ‘golden age’
A lot has changed since the Tribeca Film Festival debuted in 2002. Netflix and Amazon, for instance, hadn't even launched their video-streaming services -- and now they're both two of the biggest players in the TV and movies industries. The event, founded by Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal, welcomed 153,000 attendees to 530 screenings and celebrity-filled panels to its most recent event, in April. Now, inspired by its past successes, Tribeca is launching a new TV Festival that promises to highlight the best projects from the world of television.
VR is telling deeper, more important stories
At the Tribeca Film Festival this year, filmmakers displayed a mastery of virtual reality with a series of emotional, meaningful stories. It's an encouraging sign, considering previous efforts to produce coherent, non-game VR experiences have floundered, mostly due to the medium's infancy and a lack of widely available technology. Finally, though, we seem to have moved beyond the novelty of virtual reality and are starting to see it used to tackle various important issues.
I sat in on a virtual support group for sexual-assault survivors
Thanks to its ability to give you a first-person point of view, virtual reality has become a common vehicle for empathetic storytelling. Testimony, a VR project that premiered at Tribeca 2017, does so by putting you in a virtual support group, showing the effectiveness of simply watching people tell their stories, especially when the subject is as disturbing as sexual assault.
I smelled and hugged a tree in VR, because art
At the Tribeca VR arcade this year, there were displays ranging from the harrowing to the distracting, but few were as eye-catching as Treehugger:Wawona. It's an interactive art installation that had headset-wearing participants hugging and caressing a giant foam sculpture with cutouts (oblivious to how silly they looked). Naturally, I had to check it out, and came away intrigued by its implications for art and museums.
'Arden's Wake' paves the way for never-ending VR stories
Making movies in virtual reality is easy. Making good animated movies in virtual reality is hard. There's no "mise en scène" to play with, and even the basic 180-degree rule is washed away with a head turn. The limitations of a cinema screen make storytelling easier, linear, comfortable. Penrose Studios doesn't care much for comfort, it seems. The same studio that gave us the haunting Allumette and infantile captivation of The Rose and I is back at the Tribeca Film Festival this year with its third VR story -- Arden's Wake -- and it promises to be bigger, more detailed and more technically improbable than anything we've seen from the studio so far.
Tribeca announces art-focused Games Festival with Hideo Kojima
Tribeca was the first film festival to embrace video games as a storytelling medium, showcasing the world premiere of detective game L.A. Noire nearly six years ago. Now, the organization is teaming up with publication Kill Screen to launch the inaugural Tribeca Games Festival. Running April 28-29 during the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, it will feature some prominent members of the gaming industry, including legendary Metal Gear developer Hideo Kojima.
VR will vie for awards at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival organizers have revealed that they will accept submissions from virtual reality producers In 2017. It's the first major festival that will allow the category (which includes VR, AR and 360 videos) to compete against mainstream films for awards. "As the technology and tools proliferate ... we feel it is the right time to expand and support artists on these growing platforms in a broader way," festival Director Genna Terranova said.
The director of 'Madagascar' takes on the Wild West of VR
As the writer/director of DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar, a blockbuster that spawned five sequels and one TV show, Eric Darnell could've easily hung up his hat and basked in his Hollywood legacy. But, instead, Darnell departed the studio he made famous last year to explore the "Wild West" of virtual reality with Baobab, an animation studio he co-founded alongside Maureen Fan, the former VP of games at Zynga. At this year's Tribeca Film Festival, the two debuted their first effort, Invasion!, a VR short featuring a lovable, alien-thwarting bunny rabbit and a prologue narrated by Ethan Hawke. "He's a big fan of VR, it turns out," says Darnell of Hawke's involvement.
A virtual reality game that's good for you and scientist-approved
It's fitting that the morning I first experienced Deep VR at the Tribeca Film Festival, billed by its creators as a meditative virtual-reality experience, I was already approaching peak anxiety levels. At 9:30 a.m., I was behind schedule (for reasons beyond my control) and huddled in a claustrophobic installation space made all the more overwhelming by various camera crews and the booming soundtrack of a heartbeat from the far corner. So when I first strapped the HTC Vive onto my head and a snug-fitting sensor around my diaphragm, I braced for the worst, assuming I'd be hit with a wicked bout of VR sickness. How wrong I was.
