How will filmmakers tell stories in this emerging medium?

As an educator, I’m inspired by WIRED magazine’s “One Concept Explained in 5 Levels of Difficulty” series. I often teach groups of people with varying levels of experience or who come from different backgrounds. Within the same group, each person responds uniquely – to different ideas, to how those ideas are communicated – and I often find myself switching between ways of explaining concepts, demonstrating activities, and prompting action, like shifting gears from moment to moment, just to keep everyone engaged.

As a video educator specifically, I’ve just begun my first semester teaching a new course on VFX and VR. I’m navigating both the content and how best to explore it with my group of students – and this instalment of WIRED‘s series, “Virtual Reality Engineer Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty”, has just become my jumping-off point.

Most interesting for me: when discussing creative ways of working around the current limitations of the technology, the grad student mentions the use of world-building through sound design, as opposed to visual rendering (7:29). She also mentions being interested in seeing how filmmakers will tell stories in this emerging medium – and the two concerns are not mutually exclusive.

I’ve written previously about Kubrick’s use of sound. Further to that, here’s Jacob T. Swinney’s wonderful supercut of the sounds from Tarantino’s world (warning: it gets a bit gruesome, as is his wont).