Faoladh is a stereoscopic virtual reality film that follows the perilous journey of a 9th century Irish child who’s village is attacked by Viking raiders. In the film you take on role of a wolf like guardian spirit and protector of the children from the woods of ancient Ireland. Filmed at the Irish National Heritage Park, a three-act story was built around each of the parks main locations.
Declan Dowling directs, designs, and produces an array of content for international games and software publishers. The film was screened at The Ithaca Fantastik Festival and is available to watch on RTE 360, via YouTube VR, IFTN and Tile Films. Faoladh was shown on a 700 square meter hybrid cinema as part of the Beyond Festival held in Heilbronn, Germany. The screening took place in a giant 3D cinema theatre which was very special and contained a myriad of other interactive elements allowing the viewer to take part in an immersive experience without the need for VR goggles or other isolating hardware. The film was also nominated in two categories at the Venice TV Awards. One for “Best of Technology and Innovation” and one for “Children / Youth”. Faoladh was screened at the Future Imaging Art Week in collaboration with VRCORE in China. In March 2020, the film was positioned at the top of the official Best of VR playlist on YouTube. This resulted in an impressive increase in the view count by the thousands. This impressive showcase platform helped to extend the outreach to greater audience and recognition.
Tile Films are an established HD factual documentary production company, specialising in innovative, Irish and international documentaries and series about people, history, religion, art, culture and travel.
@inproceedings{Knorr2018,
title = {Director's Cut - A Combined Dataset for Visual Attention Analysis in Cinematic VR Content},
author = {Sebastian Knorr and Cagri Ozcinar and Colm O Fearghail and Aljosa Smolic },
url = {https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/research/3dof/directors-cut-research/
https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/CVMP2018_DirectorsCut_public-1.pdf
},
doi = {10.1145/3278471.3278472 },
year = {2018},
date = {2018-12-13},
booktitle = {The 15th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production},
abstract = {Methods of storytelling in cinema have well established conventions that have been built over the course of its history and the development of the format. In 360° film many of the techniques that have formed part of this cinematic language or visual narrative are not easily applied or are not applicable due to the nature of the format i.e. not contained the border of the screen. In this paper, we analyze how end-users view 360° video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360° films. We first let filmmakers create an intended scan-path, the so called director's cut, by setting position markers in the equirectangular representation of the omnidirectional content for eight short 360° films. Alongside this the filmmakers provided additional information regarding directional cues and plot points. Then, we performed a subjective test with 20 participants watching the films with a head-mounted display and recorded the center position of the viewports. The resulting scan-paths of the participants are then compared against the director's cut using different scan-path similarity measures. In order to better visualize the similarity between the scan-paths, we introduce a new metric which measures and visualizes the viewport overlap between the participants' scan-paths and the director's cut. Finally, the entire dataset, i.e. the director's cuts including the directional cues and plot points as well as the scan-paths of the test subjects, is publicly available with this paper.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Methods of storytelling in cinema have well established conventions that have been built over the course of its history and the development of the format. In 360° film many of the techniques that have formed part of this cinematic language or visual narrative are not easily applied or are not applicable due to the nature of the format i.e. not contained the border of the screen. In this paper, we analyze how end-users view 360° video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360° films. We first let filmmakers create an intended scan-path, the so called director's cut, by setting position markers in the equirectangular representation of the omnidirectional content for eight short 360° films. Alongside this the filmmakers provided additional information regarding directional cues and plot points. Then, we performed a subjective test with 20 participants watching the films with a head-mounted display and recorded the center position of the viewports. The resulting scan-paths of the participants are then compared against the director's cut using different scan-path similarity measures. In order to better visualize the similarity between the scan-paths, we introduce a new metric which measures and visualizes the viewport overlap between the participants' scan-paths and the director's cut. Finally, the entire dataset, i.e. the director's cuts including the directional cues and plot points as well as the scan-paths of the test subjects, is publicly available with this paper.
@inproceedings{dowling2018,
title = {Faoladh : A Case Study in Cinematic VR Storytelling and Production},
author = {Declan Dowling and Colm O Fearghail and Aljosa Smolic and Sebastian Knorr},
url = {https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Faoladh_A_Case_Study_in_Cinematic_VR_Storytelling_and_Production-1.pdf},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-12-05},
booktitle = {International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling},
abstract = {Portraying traditional cinematic narratives in virtual reality (VR) is an emerging practice where often the methods normally associated with cinematic storytelling need to be adapted to the 360° format. In this paper we investigates some proposed cinematic practices for narrative storytelling in a cinematic VR film set in late 9th century Ireland that follows the perilous journey young Celt as he evades being captured by Viking raiders. From this we will analyze the fidelity of those practices with results collected from YouTube Analytics.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Portraying traditional cinematic narratives in virtual reality (VR) is an emerging practice where often the methods normally associated with cinematic storytelling need to be adapted to the 360° format. In this paper we investigates some proposed cinematic practices for narrative storytelling in a cinematic VR film set in late 9th century Ireland that follows the perilous journey young Celt as he evades being captured by Viking raiders. From this we will analyze the fidelity of those practices with results collected from YouTube Analytics.
In: International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 2018
, Dublin, Ireland, 2018, (Received the runner up best full paper award).
@inproceedings{Fearghail2018,
title = {Director's Cut - Analysis of Aspects of Interactive Storytelling for VR Films},
author = {Colm O Fearghail and Cagri Ozcinar and Sebastian Knorr and Aljosa Smolic },
url = {https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/research/3dof/directors-cut-analysis-of-aspects-of-interactive-storytelling-for-vr-films/
https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie:443/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/storyTelling.pdf},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-12-05},
booktitle = {International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 2018
},
address = {Dublin, Ireland},
abstract = {To explore methods that are currently used by professional virtual reality (VR) filmlmmakers to tell their stories and guide users, we analyze how end-users view 360° video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360° films. In this context, we first collected data from five professional VR filmmakers. The data contains eight 360° videos, the directors cut, which is the intended viewing direction of the director, plot points and directional cues used for user guidance. Then, we performed a subjective experiment with 20 test subjects viewing the videos while their head orientation was recorded. Finally, we present and discuss the experimental results and show, among others, that visual discomfort and disorientation on part of the viewer not only lessen the immersive quality of the films but also cause difficulties in the viewer gaining a full understanding of the narrative that the director wished them to view.},
note = {Received the runner up best full paper award},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
To explore methods that are currently used by professional virtual reality (VR) filmlmmakers to tell their stories and guide users, we analyze how end-users view 360° video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360° films. In this context, we first collected data from five professional VR filmmakers. The data contains eight 360° videos, the directors cut, which is the intended viewing direction of the director, plot points and directional cues used for user guidance. Then, we performed a subjective experiment with 20 test subjects viewing the videos while their head orientation was recorded. Finally, we present and discuss the experimental results and show, among others, that visual discomfort and disorientation on part of the viewer not only lessen the immersive quality of the films but also cause difficulties in the viewer gaining a full understanding of the narrative that the director wished them to view.
