BREAKING
AT THE HEAD OF A LONG, WOODEN TABLE in a Hollywood conference room, an unusual chariot awaits me: a white wheelchair with gleaming spokes and wires trailing from its back. Once I’ m seated, a Samsung Gear VR headset and headphones are wrapped around my head like a medical apparatus. The chair’ s wheels never turn, but my head certainly does. Not to mention my stomach.
This experience is courtesy of a private viewing of the VR short film Catatonic, the brainchild of Guy Shelmerdine, a seasoned commercial and music video director who, like any filmmaker, studies viewers’ reactions to his work with vested interest. The difference here: instead of quizzing his audience after a screening, he can stare right at them as they watch, unnoticed.“ You’ re giving me five minutes of your time, you need to be fully engaged,” he stresses.
After strapping in, Catatonic viewers push play and immediately look down at hands that are not their own gripping the virtual wheelchair’ s armrests. As they gaze in all directions at their new surroundings— a mental asylum— things go from sterile to supernatural as an orderly pushes the chair deeper into the facility’ s murky depths.
GUY SHELMERDINE
OF DARK CORNER
BY ERIC STOLZE
BACKSTORY: A director whose 360-degree VR films put the“ POV” in provocative FROM: Kent, England; now residing in the virtual reality of Los Angeles
YOU MIGHT KNOW HIM FROM: TV commercials, music videos for Muse and Gnarls Barkley, and his VR short Catatonic, which toured festivals and conventions over the last two years accompanied by a VR headset and one very inhospitable-looking wheelchair
NOW: Premiering his newest work, Mule, at Fantastic Fest
14 FLOOD