The Voices of VR Podcast
Kent Bye:
Alright Hello My name is Kent Bye and I do the Voices of VR podcast. And I’m collaborating with DocLab to be able to do a series of Conversations both reflecting on the history of Doc Lab now it’s been 15 years but also just talking to some of the creators and their own journeys into this Realm of immersive storytelling. So we have Victoria Mabel back. Victoria, maybe you can just go ahead and introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive storytelling?
Victoria Mabel:
Sure! So I’ve been storytelling, I guess, for 30 years or more. I suppose I’ve worked across lots of different platforms and genres and technologies. I was a filmmaker, self-shooting director for a long time. I’ve switched to smartphone filmmaking and came to immersive, I suppose, quite late on. More is coming to it as a critic, actually. I used to love attending ITFA and seeing all the amazing doc lab projects. I’ve attended Venice for many years. And so I think I got really fascinated by what immersive storytelling could do. So I made my first VR piece about 3 years ago and then I’ve recently made an immersive sound piece, which was at IDFA dotLab – Core Testing Times.
Kent Bye:
Okay. Yeah. And so maybe you could give a bit more context as to your 30 years of filmmaking and storytelling and your journey into this space and where you really got started into this realm of storytelling?
Victoria Mabel:
Sure! So I kind of feel like I’ve had a career in two halves. But both have sort of very different backgrounds that have kind of informed each other. So I used to be in the nineties and the early 2000s a self-shooting director. I’ve always loved the kind of intimacy of just being a one-person crew. So I was self-shooting at a time in documentary when it was quite frowned upon and broadcasters didn’t like it and didn’t think that the tech was good enough. I fought lots of battles to get broadcast films that were self-shot. So I used to work on high 8. I suppose that shows my age. Would have been the camera of choice then for self-shooting. And I did that for many years. And then I, at 38, found myself single, pregnant, and broke. That’s quite a game changer for a woman in terms of career. I went into academia and had quite a long time out really because you very quickly lose your contacts. And then got back into filmmaking with the smartphone filmmaking.
And then a really brilliant turning point in terms of immersive filmmaking was that I received an academic grant, which was EPSRC. It’s one of those research council grants that University of Bristol and University of Bath had managed to get. And in that, Oscar Raby had one of the grants because one was for an experienced VR director and two others were for filmmakers that were passionate about immersive storytelling but hadn’t made a VR piece before. And so I got one of those, and Lisa Harewood got the other one. It was fantastic. I mean, it sort of shows you the power really of academic and arts funding and how life-changing it can be because I suddenly had a very big budget again, you know, a decent budget, £50,000. And I’m used to making works for nothing. I’m a sort of gorilla filmmaker, and I can make films for nothing or just a few thousand pounds. But I have to say it was probably the scariest commission I ever got.
And another thing I suppose I should say is that the second part of my career was me getting very interested in autobiographical documentary storytelling. And in a way turning the lens or the sort of storytelling lens upon my own life. And so the VR commission was called the Waiting Room VR, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017. And the commission was to make a virtual reality piece which would explore what that diagnosis and treatment, the sort of fallout of that diagnosis was like not only for myself, but for my son who at that time was only 14. And it also had an accompanying smartphone short as well.
So I throughout my cancer treatment, I was using my phone. You will see that in my immersive pieces, the phone features a lot. I think mobile phones and the audio and the photos and the videos that they store are kind of amazing, and I have used them a lot in my works. And I suppose, yeah, a defining feature of my work is how seduced I am by verité audio. I think it’s a term that Noni de la Pena coined for her VR pieces that use that kind of verité audio, sort of real-time audio. I think that’s the most powerful and hugely influential to me. And so I use that a lot, I suppose in my immersive works and in my films, but I use voice mails and I use Zoom audio conversations with my son. When I was going through cancer treatment, consultants were happy for me to just on voice recorder record the consultations. So I had a lovely oncologist called Mr. Garg, but he was a bit unreconstructed, I suppose, about how you talk about cancer.
And so when he diagnosed me, he sort of comes up with this crazy analogy that my cancer cells are like terrorists and they’ve crossed the border and they could be hiding out in Scotland. And I used that audio and he gave me permission to use it, which was extremely generous of him. I never wanted to take the piss out of him directly, but I’m sort of fascinated by the baggage we bring to illness and to chronic illness and to cancer. I think it scares the hell out of us all, people going through it and the people around it. And it brings out some craziness, I think, in the way people talk about illness. So the piece, I think, is very much from a patient’s point of view. I was sort of thinking actually the other day because I was also at it for this year pitching this smartphone feature documentary I’m making, which is sort of almost a documentary boyhood. It’s watching my son grow up on camera. And I was thinking so much of my work is about the baggage people have when you’re a misfit.
You’re either a misfit. I’m a misfit because I brought a child up on my own, not in a nuclear family. I’m kind of a misfit because a lot of people have understandably feel very private about their emotional life or the darker things that you go through. And I’m not. It’s quite, I’m quite unusually open. I’m quite happy to share it. I think it’s interesting to share it. And I suppose I really love filmmakers and artists who’ve done the same. But I was thinking, yeah, a lot of the work – something that defines my work is that it’s trying to challenge the baggage that people have when you are a bit of a misfit for whatever reason. Trying to look at me differently or challenging, like I say, the clichés or the baggage that people might bring to you.
Kent Bye:
Yeah, that’s a great summary of your journey and the work that you’ve been working on. And before we dive in, I have one logistical question, which is when you went back into your turn into academia, was that as a student or as a professor or teacher? And what was the area that you were going back to?
Victoria Mabel:
So as a teacher, a lecturer, I got a job for Royal Holloway, which is part of London University, and it was running a master’s in documentary filmmaking. I’m now a professor there.
Kent Bye:
Okay. Yeah. So you’re on the sort of academic side of looking at the theory of documentary as well?
Victoria Mabel:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kent Bye:
And when did you first come across the doc lab then? You know, this is the 15-year anniversary that the series is in help celebrating. So when was your first encounter with it?
Victoria Mabel:
It was quite a long time ago. So I think it would be about 2014 or 2015. And it was when I had a big multiplatform project called Text Me, which was at the beginning of me being fascinated by the stories inside phones. And it was linked to an autobiographical smartphone short, which is my first smartphone short called A 160 Characters. And A 160 Characters tells the story of the messages that were in my old Nokia. And I’d unwittingly over three years archived the text message thread between myself and my son’s dad, you know, from when we first met, a brief relationship ended, and then I found out I was pregnant. And then there was this obviously much bigger communication about whether he would be involved or not raising Jim. And I wrote it as my own story but was also really interested in other people’s stories – the kind of secrets and stories that are hidden in phones.
And so I developed a project with the support of Doc Lab that was thinking about how do you talk to people about stories in their phones, either regret texts, texts where somebody said something that you hate but you know, you know it’s always there, whether it’s a relationship breakdown, whether it’s a work fallout or family difficulty, but also the treasured texts. You know, people talk to me about being really moved by the final text that they received from a parent before they died or somebody that was lost in some way. And so it was a piece where you could have an appointment to watch your regret text burn live. Or you could submit to a sort of text message tree and then it would be sort of memorialized. And it was a good lesson to me, and it really was great. I developed it with Doc Lab, but it became a huge lesson to me about how you don’t need technology and high budgets to make projects happen.
And in fact, I went a whole pitching at IDFA Forum and raised €70,000 from Arte and then couldn’t get – it was an enormous budget. It was probably about £200,000. Couldn’t then raise the rest of the budget quickly enough, so I lost the Arte money. So I was back to square one after years of developing it. And instead, I took it to galleries and I did these workshops where people would come with a text message that they wanted to share. And we made little Nokia cardboard coffins where you could kind of lay the text to rest. And so there was a sort of physical ritual of that rather than a digital one, which was much cheaper. So I think that’s another defining feature of my work is that I don’t like technology for the sake of it, and I will very happily embrace low tech. And I don’t like barriers of entry to work.
And it was one of the things, again, I found very difficult about the Waiting Room VR was that it was inaccessible, that I almost needed to learn Unity, that I couldn’t get to grips with the storytelling. And the people I was working with were sort of encouraging me to do, I suppose, what feature drama scriptwriters do, which is almost write the piece, finish the story, and then hand it over to the sort of Unity developer to sort of bring it to life. And I think that probably works for a lot of people but it doesn’t work for an artist, because you’re used to much more organically, whether it’s with paper and notebook or smartphone, that to me the story unfolds with me actually making it. And I had to find a way of doing the making. And so that’s very much been sound for me.
All I could say bringing the technology down. So you know, in the Waiting Room VR, we shot it with two cameras, one a much more high-end 360 camera which is probably technically the better shot, which I just thought was completely boring. And then a little GoPro Fusion sat on my head, which I’m sure a lot of people would say is a sort of messy amateur looking shot. But I loved it straight away, and I also felt that it could work as a durational take. And that was also quite interesting at the beginning, the resistance that I had that no, you couldn’t put people in a durational real-time take, that you needed to be more cinematic – that it needed to dissolve to a Unity sequence. And I was convinced that you could, and that in fact, you could do it even more successfully in a split in a 3D space than a 2D space. And I remember making the point that the pieces that I’d really been inspired with were fiction films that were shot in one take, like Russian Ark.
And I feel that if you’re in actually in a 3D sense and you’re really in the space, you can actually do real-time much more effectively. And I was sort of thinking actually about, yeah, I’ve got a student of mine who did the MA that I run, and she’s got an opportunity to be involved in some immersive story funding that we’ve got at the university called StoryFutures. And she was saying, what do you think? And she’d be perfect because as a documentary filmmaker she does really beautiful observational filmmaking which is very real-time. And I think it appeals to 2D filmmakers who eventually, in their previous careers, have been very interested in getting the viewer into a kind of real-time space. So, okay, it was a 2-dimensional real-time space. But you know, I love Agnes Varda. I’m a huge fan of Agnes Varda, and Cleo 5 to 7 was one of the very inspirational films for the Waiting Room VR. That is a 2D film, but it has an enormous sense of real-time. You know? It is literally trying to convey the two hours from when a woman is diagnosed with cancer and then she’s waiting for biopsy results, and you see this sort of weird journey and people that she meets as she’s sort of killing time to find out her final results.
It just does that real-time space so well, but it does it in a completely two-dimensional way. So that’s why I think immersive sort of suited me because I’ve always loved that sense of not dictating a story to people but trying to bring them into your – what you’re literally bringing them into your world – which is obviously what VR did so well. And I remember being very influenced by Noni de la Pena’s early writing about you’ve got to think about its presence design as like you’re putting people in the space. It’s you’re not telling a story in a more traditional way. So I think that’s probably why it appeals to me. The other thing I think a reason it appeals to me is that I definitely over the years, especially in a sort of British broadcasting context, British broadcasters don’t particularly like female stories, which they see as small. They don’t like domestic stories, and they don’t like emotion. They accept it in the fine art context, but they do not accept it in documentary. Documentary is meant to be the world out there. It’s not meant to be subjective in the traditional viewpoint of it.
You know? And I was thinking that what I’ve loved about sort of community of people working in immersive storytelling is that that doesn’t seem to be the case. And that it’s much more rooted in fine art and that it can take much more challenging stories or concepts, much darker, much more emotional. It’s not fearful of emotion. And I remember being in Venice in the VR Island, I think it was 2017, and it was when I did Jordan Tannehill’s Draw Me Close. And probably because it definitely had a lot of resonance for me – this was before I was diagnosed with cancer because it’s got a cancer narrative. But Jordan Tannehill was brought up by a single mom. And this amazing experience that you become the child, and you’re literally being put into bed by a sort of virtual mother. And I was really, I suppose, it triggered all sorts of memories of me being brought up by a single mom as well. But I remember coming out of that, and it was quite a short iteration of the piece at that point. I think it was maybe about 11 minutes perhaps, maybe 15.
And I came out and I was just sobbing, like sobbing to the core of me. And then it was a bit embarrassing because there was no sort of decompression place. I’m sort of thrown out into a room, you know, just quite distraught and embarrassed that I’ve had that effect. And I couldn’t imagine perhaps a sort of 2-dimensional film experience getting to me so quickly and so profoundly. And I very much thought it was something about the genre or something about being in a headset, something about feeling that you were in this space that fast-tracks you to something very powerful. And like I said, because I’m not scared of that, and I’m very intrigued by that, that’s probably also why it’s appealed to me as a form as well.
Kent Bye:
Yeah. And I remember seeing your piece “The Waiting Room VR” at Venice. And at Venice that year, there are actually a number of pieces that were in the genre of the durational take, which allows you to really be immersed in a place and have the patience to see whatever is unfolding. And the conceit of narrative that we usually have is that you need to have something that is unfolding and that it’s quick cuts and quick edits. But in an immersive space, it kind of mirrors those similar experiences that we have in life where you can’t edit; it’s just you have to go through the whole experience. And so I can see that that through line both in that piece that you did with the Waiting Room VR. But after watching the short film of “Missed Call” from 2018 which won a BAFTA, and then the trailer for “Motherboard,” I also saw that you had been recording all of this self-shot footage and audio since you said since 2000. And so since the beginning of you interfacing with a lot of these mobile phones and just mobile technologies to be able to capture this incredible archive of raising your son as a single mother and this next project that you’re working on.
But I see this through line between these moments of real vulnerability where you’re not only showing this story of your son who wants to reconnect to his father who has basically left when he was 1 or 2 years old and that you’re out of touch with him. And he’s kind of moved on and there’s this moment where you just sort of have this phone call and you pause, and you just kind of break down in a way that – and just hearing you talk about how emotion is not really taken seriously within the context of the British media that you’re growing up in. And so it was a powerful moment as I was watching it. And what I thought was also this how we have social media where people may be doing this in a way that is in a performative sense to get attention or for clicks or whatnot, but this is you’re doing this in the context of a story where it really is embedded within the arc of the story. But it’s also kind of the first time that you’re revealing how you really feel about or how intense it is that interaction. I just thought was such a striking moment and really quite powerful.
And there seems to be this thread that you’re gonna be elaborating on this larger story. It feels like both the “Missed Call” and the “Waiting Room VR” were kind of like snippets of these little moments that were at least turning points in your life and that perhaps you’re gonna sort of draw a larger narrative that of the full arc of your son’s life or your personal reaction. But I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you deal with the ethics of being vulnerable. And is it exploiting yourself or is it making you too vulnerable versus something that’s authentic and real and that is really in the context of a larger story that you’re trying to tell?
Victoria Mabel:
I was really pleased recently when I was pitching the feature doc at the forum. And I think it was somebody from Catalyst Film Fund, I forget her name, but a really great woman. And she made this point about how sometimes in documentary, if people are taking you into like a very, very emotional vulnerable space, that it can be really uncomfortable for the audience and that you have to kind of be aware of that. And she felt that I took people into that space, but with some sort of boundaries, with some sort of critical distance. Even though it’s very intense, that I’m somehow aware of that. And I think it’s what makes my work quite different to the world of social media, which I think is some amazing fascinating storytelling. But it’s often just a naked sort of visceral display of emotion without that critical distance.
And if I think about one of my favorite artists is Sophie Calle, and I think she does that balance just so beautifully. It’s incredibly exposing and yet, there’s just some – like I say – it’s that sort of critical director’s gaze that sort of makes it okay. And maybe it’s also about also embracing irony and a kind of gallows humor. Tone is everything. I remember when I first made the piece, “A 160 Characters,” and I just started working with this amazing editor that I work with a lot called Lisa Forrest. And I remember saying to her, I don’t want us to make this film like I’ve been abandoned by some sort of Victorian cad, and I’ve been left with babe in arms and that my life is a tragedy. It isn’t, you know, it’s been informed by loss, but I don’t want it to seem that. So I think I’m aware of how I represent myself in terms of that vulnerability. Again, teaching helps. And again, you know, sometimes students will just be too exposing. And I have to talk to them about how can we do it where it’s got some kind of boundaries as well.
And I think you also have to be aware of how the audience might experience that if you’re gonna take them into an area that could be quite dark and difficult, that you have to be respectful of that. And so I think a big part of my work in the edit is exactly that. And I found a really brilliant Atlantic piece today, which was talking about responding to the culture of toxic positivity that you get enormously around cancer. That you must see your cancer as the gift that keeps on giving and that it somehow transforms you and you become a better person and all of this, you know? And he said that, a better – he was a Holocaust survivor, I forget his name. I really wish I could remember his name. But he comes up with a term which is so much stronger, which is tragic optimism. And I thought, oh my god, you could put that over all of my work, that it embraces a sort of tragic optimism that does not disguise the absolute awfulness of loss and tragedy and illness and aging and separation in terms of family, love, and loss. But I also hope that it’s really life-affirming. And that I think it does. And I think I use humor a lot. You know, I was just listening to Testing Times again, and actually, I played it to my mom for the first time.
So obviously, Jim’s heard it, but my mom couldn’t come to Amsterdam because of the COVID difficulties. So she just heard it now, actually, and she really likes it.
Kent Bye:
Yeah, so “Testing Times,” this is your new immersive sound installation that just premiered at IDFA Doc Lab. I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, and I think you mentioned it briefly, but maybe you could set the context for how this kind of fits into your overarching body of work of doing the self-shot, recording all these different experiences, and what was the “Testing Times?” I think I saw a trailer that had some audio clips, but could you send the context for what you were trying to do with this piece of “Testing Times?”
Victoria Mabel:
Sure! So it’s a piece that I began at the very first lockdown that we had in the UK. And I’d already begun to get very interested in voice in terms of the phone. So I think I’ve gone from being very interested by how we put really emotional dialogues into one-sentence text messages, but actually how voice, you know, whether it’s voicemails, voice calls, voice notes that my son uses all the time with his friends. And I noticed that I felt in the pandemic, at the beginning, there was more time at home and less of the sort of usual work distractions and commitments. And I couldn’t see my mom. We’re very close to my mom, so obviously, I’ve raised my son on my own, and but I couldn’t have done it without her help. So she’s very, very close to both of us, and she lives nearby. And like many people, we hadn’t seen her at the beginning of the first lockdown. Before vaccines, it wasn’t safe. We felt that it would be putting her at risk. And so I don’t think we saw her for about four or five months. So we phoned instead. My mom, she’s of a generation that’s really fine. I mean, landline now just seems such a weird dated term, doesn’t it? But the landline calls, you know, she’s of a generation that’s easy with those. And so I could easily talk to my mom for like an hour. And so I was doing an hour a day. And also, I’ve got three brothers and my dad. And I just recorded with a little earpiece into a Zoom recorder, I recorded really a lot of the phone calls. And that actually became quite difficult because it was a huge archive. It was about 60 hours of phone conversations plus the voicemails. I think voicemails are so beautiful because they’re kind of like a little micronarrative with the tone of the person that’s actually leaving the message, whether they sound stressed or worried or jokey, you know, you can hear all of that because that’s what’s fantastic about a human voice.
And this piece actually was the piece that I think has been the most collaborative with Jim and also the most exposing of Jim. So then it also had a lot more ethical questions and explorations than even my previous work because this piece was about Gemini in a tiny two-bedroom flat, really feeling the frustrations of being housebound. You know, you’ve got raging hormones in the teenage bedroom and a sort of distinct lack of them in the living room. And I felt like Jim and I were living in completely separate bubbles. And at one point in the piece, I talk about a dream that I had, which I think is an amazing metaphor, which is COVID and that lockdowns hit my anxieties, but also this very important part where Jim becomes an adult and separates from me. And obviously, we’ve been very close because I’ve brought him up on my own, that’s a very difficult experience. And I think it’s been happening really since I was diagnosed with cancer when he was about 14. But then all of poor Jim, you know, can you imagine what teenage life? You’ve been used to being out there in the world and then suddenly your world shrinks, and you’re with your middle-aged mom. And we just led completely separate lives. And then occasionally, we had some really terrible rows. And in the past he’s been able to go to my mom’s if we’ve ever had a row, but he couldn’t do that. And so the piece really doesn’t disguise how awful some of those rows were. And then in the summer, actually, when I was in Venice this year, I thought he was just about old enough to be home alone; he’s coming up for 18, and my mom lives around the corner. And I thought, you know, what could go wrong? Like everything went wrong that could go wrong in that he decided to dabble with every class A drug known to man within about a three-day period and then had a terrible comedown. And so it’s a piece where we talk about in retrospect all the voicemails of that crisis point when I was in Venice and he was in a really bad way, and my mom was trying to get hold of him. But it’s Jim’s favorite piece actually out of all of them. And I think one thing we’ve both really got in common, two things we’ve really got in common because I think we’re very different in lots of ways, but we’ve got the same kind of gallows sense of humor. And I think we’ve also got the same ability, you know, I remember saying to him, look Jim, we don’t have to use the rows because it’s very visceral. And he just said, I don’t know how you’re gonna make a piece that really tells it how it was in this last year and a half if you don’t. And he’s always been very good about that. And so, like I say, he has a co-directing credit because he was very much a part of which would be the key storylines. And he also we paid him actually for a bit of content providing, and then he went through his own phone and just sent me the stuff that he was alright with me using. So I mean, it was a really enjoyable piece actually. And it was, I suppose, it was the first piece we’ve made where it’s like working with another adult, you know, because he is now, whereas the previous pieces he’s obviously on the cusp, but he’s been more like he’s a child.
Kent Bye:
Wow. Yeah. And just going back and looking at some of your previous experiences and having seen the waiting room and then getting more context of this larger body of work that you’re working towards. I’m really looking forward to the motherboard and where that ends up because that seems like that’s going to tie a lot of these different pieces, moments together. But as we start to wrap up here, this is the 15th year anniversary of Doc Lab. You know, obviously, it’s been a big part of pushing the frontiers of what’s coming next when it comes to integrating new immersive technologies and new forms of storytelling. And I’m just curious to hear from you what you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies and new forms of documentary and what they might be able to enable.
Victoria Mabel:
I think it would be more – I’m more interested in how more people can get access to them and start using them for telling stories. And that’s like, you know, we’ve talked about my liking the more kind of low-tech versions of that. So I kind of I’m never that interested in the sort of industry speculating, you know, how long will VR last and where will it all go and what will we all be doing. I think they’re just tools for artists and storytellers to be able to create new wonderful spaces and experiences. And like I say, I think that’s the one challenge, I think Doc Lab has met it brilliantly actually because I think they’ve been so good at facilitating so many diverse people and storytelling, you know, to come in to have their work seen and commissioned. But that would be my thing really is that I think that’s the frustrating thing, I’d like that to change in the future is that more people are able to use it, that the cost becomes less prohibitive, that that’s what would be nice. And everybody gets to experiment with these new technologies as they come along.
Kent Bye:
Yeah. As I’ve seen the technology disperse, there’s the new technology itself and its affordances, but then the artists are exploring those affordances and using the tools to make stuff. And then it gets into the hands of the audience, and then the audience is able to see it, and it creates this loop. But that process between the capturing of the source material and forming it and editing it, as you were saying, is a key part, but also getting it into the hands of the audience for them to see it, to then be inspired by what’s even possible and to learn how to even watch these pieces. So, yeah, I feel like we’re at the very beginnings of all that. And yeah, as we wrap up, is there anything else that’s left unsaid that you’d like to say to the broader immersive community and the doc lab community?
Victoria Mabel:
Just like I say, how fantastic it was to actually be at IDFA Doc Lab this time, you know, after this sort of two-year break. Even though it was a hybrid festival, I thought it worked really beautifully. And it is such a community, and I kind of thank everyone that’s part of it actually because the meeting and talking to people about their works, it was great to see Amy and May from Anagram just as I came in. But I think it’s an amazing close-knit community that’s very interested in supporting one another. So, yeah, here’s to more of that!
Kent Bye:
Awesome! And are any of your other pieces as “Waiting Room VR” available anywhere for people to see?
Victoria Mabel:
Yeah. It’s on, you know, MIT Doc Lab. I think there’s ten of the key pieces, and you can go on their website. And I think “Step to the Line” was one and “Waiting Room VR” was another one. But basically, yes, you can watch it, I think online as a 3D experience rather than needing a VR headset. So, yeah, MIT.docbase – you might have to correct me on that, but you can watch it there.
Kent Bye:
Yeah, I think if folks Google it, they’ll be able to track it down. So awesome! Well, thanks so much for dropping by and sharing a little bit more about your own body of work and your journey and all the other projects that you have and your relationship to Doc Lab over the years. And yeah, I look forward to seeing “Motherboard” as you continue to work on it and potentially see these other pieces that you’re working on as well. But there seems to be this self-shot, first-person, personal phone roll stories that really appreciate how you’re able to capture all that stuff and then digest down these moments to be able to share the story of your life and kind of push the edge of where documentaries are going in this particular form, especially with the durational takes in VR as well. I think that’s another realm that’s still at the very early – we haven’t seen as many takes, but I think there’s something there that I think is quite intriguing. So, yeah, thanks for stopping by and being able to share a little more of your stories.
Victoria Mabel:
Thank you! Good luck with it all!
Kent Bye:
Thanks a lot!
So that was Victoria Mabel. She’s been storytelling for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She’s a self-shooting director and shifted into smartphone filmmaking, immersive 3D video creator, and now immersive sound creation as well. This conversation was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021, as a part of a series with IDFA Doc Lab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you’d like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com/voicesofvr. Thanks for listening!