PenroseStudios
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Alicia Vikander turns 'Tide's Fall' into a VR masterpiece
Penrose Studios set a new standard for VR storytelling last year with Arden's Wake, a stunning short that introduced us to Meena, a young girl living in a post-apocalyptic, waterlogged world. But that was just the prologue. At the Tribeca Film Festival, the studio is back with the next chapter, Tide's Fall. And it's bringing some serious star power: Alicia Vikander (Tomb Raider) has taken on the voice of Meena, and she's also serving as an executive producer. Just like in Ex Machina, Vikander instantly makes the character someone you can't help but connect with.
Nonny de la Peña, Eugene Chung illuminate the Engadget Experience
Virtual reality captured the mainstream's imagination in the 1990s, but ultimately failed to deliver on the the medium's potential. Fast forward more than two decades and VR is once again the next big thing. With far more advanced hardware and billions in investment, virtual reality is on the cusp of upending storytelling but the future is still unclear. On November 14th, VR luminaries Eugene Chung and Nonny de la Peña will take the stage at the historic United Artists Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to help shed some light on how virtual reality and augmented reality are changing the way that we see the world.
'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.
At Tribeca, this little VR match girl put Penrose on the map
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, Allumette, the latest virtual reality short to come from Penrose Studios, isn't some Disney-fied experience for children. Though set in a whimsical, cloud-borne city and populated by charming and mute marionette-like denizens, the short -- named after the French word for "match" -- is actually a surprisingly mature allegory about love, loss and the sacrifices parents make for their children. It's but one piece of a greater interactive virtual world Penrose is creating.
