In BGM with oriental flute sounds and western hip-hop rhythms, we officially ushered in SIF 2021 (2021 Sand Box Immersive Video Exhibition).
As a unique large-scale event in the immersive imaging field, SIF has received a lot of attention since its inception in 2018 in the fields of film, art, music, and VR/AR.
Last year, due to force majeure factors such as the epidemic, the SIF could not be held smoothly, and this goodbye has quietly passed 2 years.
In the past 2 years, the technology industry has changed with each passing day, the RTX 30 series graphics card has soared to sky-high prices, the "meta-universe" has brought a new round of capital boom, and the VR/AR industry has regained more consumer attention in the continuous change.
So as our old friends, how has SIF or immersive images changed? This time, I decided to start with Cai Mingliang.
Cai Liangliang's "Childhood Rhapsody"
Cai Liangming is one of the few famous directors in the field of immersive imaging, with its own unique style. Compared with the current commercialization tendency, Cai Liangliang shows a kind of "rebellion" towards the audience in VR works and traditional film works.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="8" > ▲ Li Kangsheng's "Home in Lanruo Temple" stills</h1>
Audiences who like to immerse themselves in images are somewhat aware that one of Cai Liangming's most famous works, "Home in Lanruo Temple", the first shot is 7 minutes long, and the total length reaches 50 minutes beyond the human body's ability to bear (generally works are 5-20 minutes). And the protagonist is also his consistent "royal" male protagonist - Li Kangsheng, whose appearance, height, and even acting skills may not be outstanding. This is his rebellion in the work.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="10" >▲Cai Mingliang</h1>
Not only that, he has said in several interviews with the media that he welcomes audiences to watch his films "seeing and falling asleep", that he is one of the few directors who are still selling tickets to "face reality" by himself, that he hopes that the audience understands that the creator's views are not exactly the same as the audience, and so on.
In this SIF, we did not run into Cai Liang's rebellion again, but instead saw his soft side.
SIF's 2021 exhibition of "Rhapsody of the Masters: Cai Mingliang" is from the French director Clermont. Deno's "Masters Rhapsody" series – invited dozens of directors to shoot on the theme of "Missing Picture", also known as "disappearing film". And "Rhapsody of the Master: Cai Mingliang" is Clermont. Deno and Taiwanese director Lai Guanyuan, who specializes in immersive video, co-produced it, starring Tsai Mingliang himself.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > ▲ "Master Rhapsody: Cai Liangming" poster</h1>
"Master Rhapsody: Cai Liangming" changed cai liang's live-action shooting and became an animation work with an impressionist style. The structure of the film is narrated by Cai Mingliang, telling the audience the story of his childhood in Kuching City, Malaysia, living with his grandparents and watching movies.
The surprising thing is that the essence of the story is how Cai Liangming is related to the movie, so the virtual environment told is set in the movie theater, where the audience and Cai Liang's animated image face to face, while the story he tells is played on the screen. In the story, there is also a cinema screen, this form of "matryoshka doll" on the one hand continues the theme of the film, and on the other hand, in the feeling, it also creates a wonderful feeling of unlimited space and space.
Furthermore, the film is different from the linear narrative core of the traditional film "beginning-process-ending", and the impressionist art style with vague edges and fragmentary narrative methods combine to make it more like the fusion of dreams and memories.
Personally, my most prominent feeling after watching it is: mutual achievement. In "Master Rhapsody: Cai Liangming", because it tells personal fragmentary memories, the story does not have a strong integrity and continuity, but it uses vr to perfectly reproduce every specific object, scene, spatial location, and character action in Cai Liangliang's narrative, and it is unfolded little by little with the progress of the narration.
For example, when Cai Liangming was a child, after waking up in the morning, secretly observed whether her grandmother woke up at the bedside of the bunk bed, and then went to the wardrobe at the head of the bed to get some money to buy candy to eat, which was full of childlike fun. In actual shooting, it is not an easy task to find a suitable bunk bed, the exact same wardrobe, the small actor who can be hidden under the bed and the flexible action, but in VR, not only can it be done, but even restore the feeling of Cai Liangming's "telling story" in the narration.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > ▲ "Master Rhapsody: Cai Liangming"</h1>
For immersive video works, narrative methods have always been the topic of heated discussion and research, such as "The Executioner at Home" and "Becoming a Woman of Homo sapiens" to change perspectives to create an atmosphere, there are also traditional narrative methods such as "Flower Room Girl" and "Paper Crane", or "Goliath: Playing with Reality" and "Reincarnation", which emphasize feelings and visual effects. But there are few works like Rhapsody of the Masters: Cai Liangming, which combines maturity and innovative narratives.
After watching the work "Rhapsody of the Master: Cai Liangming", the audience is more likely to feel that in the past two years, the works selected by SIF 2021 have a deeper sense of VR, and the immersive image has undergone obvious changes in narrative skills. This is also the theme of SIF 2021 that I personally understand – the "Superimposed Universe".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" >2021, the beginning of a "new revolution" in immersive imagery</h1>
In addition to the screening unit, SIF 2021 also has a more important summit session, inviting elites from all walks of life involved in VR/AR, AI, art, music, and movies to discuss and share. In addition to the drummer of the Bandarin (An Yu), who is personally favorite, what left a deep impression was the discussion on the theme of "New Paradigm Shift" hosted by SIF founder Lou Yanxin.
"Paradigm" itself is a scientific philosophy word, refers to the theoretical system, according to Baidu Encyclopedia's interpretation, the so-called "paradigm shift", refers to the emergence of new academic achievements in a field, breaking the original assumptions or laws, thereby forcing people to make fundamental corrections to many basic theories of the discipline.
Here is an equally vivid example for easy understanding, before Magellan confirmed that "the earth is round", Chinese believed that the heavens were round, the earth was the body of Pangu, the ancient Babylonians believed that the earth was a hollow mountain, and the ancient Indians believed that the earth was a bowl that was buckled. After Magellan's voyage, we thought that the earth was round, and that moving in one direction would eventually return to the starting point, and that the moon was missing because of rotation and rotation. Before and after this, the paradigm shifted.
This conclusion is also applied to the theoretical research of social disciplines and art disciplines, just as science triggered the industrial revolution, the paradigm shift in the field of art also means an artistic revolution, which will fundamentally change the purpose, form and so on of artistic expression. The result of the discussion at the SIF 2021 Summit is that in the field of VR and immersive imaging, a "new revolution" from the core of the industry has also begun.
VR is still essentially an emerging technology technology, which is highly dependent on the layout and development of 5G technology. From the perspective of new infrastructure, Yan Xing, vice president of industrial development of Huawei, said that on the one hand, 5G technology can greatly reduce the latency of VR, and even control it within 15ms; on the other hand, by August this year, the domestic 5G network has covered all cities above the prefecture and municipal level in the country, more than 97% of counties and more than 40% of townships, and 176 global 5G networks have been deployed in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, etc., and the number of 5G users in the world has exceeded 500 million.
Wen Junlei, the managing partner of the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund of Qingyan, said from the perspective of technology that the research and development innovation of cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, IoT, artificial intelligence and so on has also shown a more integrated trend. The convergence of technologies has also prepared for the innovation of art and the development of various industries.
From the perspective of immersive images and even VR creators, as mentioned above, the narrative method has begun to change with the understanding of VR, and the future will gradually form a film and television language exclusive to VR, and similarly, such changes will have a more positive impact on consumers' understanding of VR and the use of VR.
Through the observations and feelings at SIF 2021, it is not difficult to draw such a conclusion: whether from the perspective of infrastructure, technology, or content, immersive images have begun to change and progress, and this progress is even the subversion and reshaping of traditional image expression, which also represents a new revolution slowly opening.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > belongs to the future "big thousand" world of SIF</h1>
After talking about SIF, let's talk about the team behind SIF.
From some immersive video works to holding a grand event of the scale of SIF, so that more people can feel the charm of immersive images, let creators survive better, and let the industry develop better year after year, Lou Yanxin and the sand box team behind him can be said to work together to make immersive images the ultimate.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="35" >▲SIF 2021 live</h1>
This year, when the concept of "metaverse" is popular, they have a new idea - "big thousand".
For "Daqian", Lou Yanxin said: "I am glad that this era is living at this critical time node where technology and art can change history together, because technology and art can change history together. I want us not just to be an observer, an evangelist, but to be a creator. Therefore, we have made a new virtual social platform called VAST (Daqian), and we will give this platform a fully virtualized, global-oriented sand box film festival in the future. Not only that, but we will also present large-scale virtual events with large-scale, global festivals such as South by Southwest, Venice, and Burning Man. Therefore, the sand box SIF will become a real combination of virtual and real MetaFestival in the future. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="38" >▲SIF founder Lou Yanxin</h1>
"William Gibson, author of cyberpunk science fiction neuromania, said, 'The future has come, but it's unevenly distributed', and we hope to redistribute the future in this newly constructed field of superimposed universes, so that everyone can enter a high-dimensional space to explore it, and hope that everything that happens here can inspire more creators, who can fly with us and go to the beautiful new world in front of us."
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