Cardboard, feathers, and street lights: a dreamlike 360-degree taxi ride from Australia's Film Camp
As part of Boca del Lupo’s VR Salon, stop-motion film Passenger speaks to the surreal experience of arriving in a new country at night
Don’t be surprised to find out your taxi driver is a feathered friend in the immersive video Passenger.
Boca del Lupo presents VR Salons as part of its LivePerformance360 Series at the Fishbowl on Granville Island from May 11 to 14 at times throughout the day
WHEN STIR REACHES innovative Australian stop-motion artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine in Melbourne it’s early morning, and a chorus of chattering birds, strange to these Canadian ears, is streaming in from an open window.
The soundtrack could not be more fitting for a conversation about their 360-degree short film Passenger, showing here at Boca del Lupo’s VR Salon this week. The animated video puts you into the back seat of a taxi in an unfamiliar new country. Your driver? An exotic bird—himself a migrant to Australia. He steers you past barren estates, down streetlit freeways, and past increasingly dreamlike flora and fauna.
Crafted out of simple cardboard and other low-tech materials, the high-tech virtual-reality experience perfectly conjures the sense of dislocation that happens when you arrive at night in a foreign land—one you will eventually make into a new home.
“We talked about how the headset transports you to a different world, and how that was a bit like stepping out of an airport into a different country,” Sowerwine relates. “My parents came to Australia in ’73 or ’74, and they talked a lot about the dislocation they felt, coming from the U.S. and France, about the different customs and so on. We thought about that: in Australia we are a land of migrants, and many of us have come by planes.”
Melbourne stop-motion artists Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles.
Bringing the piece to life was the first experiment in 360 film by the Film Camp artists, who have conjured everything from award-winning stop-motion films to interactive installations and outdoor audio-visual performances. However, it sounds like nothing could have prepared them for what became an intricate, yearlong effort to make the 10-minute film.
“It was a pretty intense process—we basically had to invent the process,” shares Sowerwine. “We had to shoot it all at night in a giant warehouse, from 8 pm to 2 am.”
“We made 60 metres of road and shot it five metres at a time,” explains Knowles. She says everything had to be mathematically scaled to its own tiny world, starting with rows of shape-shifting cardboard-box houses. The sets are so elaborate that they’re soon going to be exhibited with some of the duo’s other stop-motion creations in southern Australia. But those were only the beginning of the challenges: finding software to connect the camera to their computers was just one of the extended learning processes.
A strange, at-first-unwelcoming streetscape from Film Camp’s Passenger.
The handmadeness is what makes Passenger such a fascinating immersive experience—off-kilter yet familiar at the same time. Knowles points out that the set up is perfect for immersive VR: sitting in the back of the taxi (you can see your own fuzzy orange “arms”) allows the story to unfold all around you, with a one-sided conversation from the driver.
“It really is transforming the viewer into a character,” Sowerwine says. “There’s also that feeling of floating–it almost feels like we created a physical sensation that was really unique….You can see and feel a scale that is a little bit strange. It’s almost a bit like being shrunk into a doll house.”
Beyond that cool factor (just wait until your drive steers into the surreal), Passenger’s true magic may be that it actually has something deeper, and authentically moving, to say about what it’s like to be an outsider, and how one simple connection can make you feel at ease. That idea is especially meaningful in a world where migration is at an all-time high—and where a pandemic has prevented so much human interaction.
“At the end of the day we really wanted to tell a story that makes people reflect and really connect,” says Sowerwine.
You can watch Passenger as part of the S1 program at Boca del Lupo’s VR Salons, with the also highly recommended Travelling While Black, a short virtual reality documentary about the “Green Book” and the risks Black people faced travelling in mid-20th-century America.
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