TLDR: Ugh – pass. Low budget, breaks a lot of VR film-making rules.
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has a debut VR film called The Limit – a 20-minute action short starring Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus. I’m not going to cover the plot, you can watch the trailer here. Unfortunately, while I had high hopes for Rodriguez to pull it off – he fails miserably by falling back on traditional techniques you’d see in 2D cinema – things that absolutely DO NOT work in VR. I fail to see why this was done in VR at all. I’ll ignore the sometimes cheesy acting, the abominable (with a few exception) SFX, and why-o-why do the computer screens have duplicated, non-animated images pasted on them. Even the plane cockpit has two identical, static images on the displays. Would it have killed you to hire a web or a XAML programmer for a week to knock them out? I will say the acting by Michelle Rodriguez is OK for the most part (Reedus’ part is ultra cheesy and he’s on screen for too short a time to form any opinion), and there are a two action scenes that are acceptable. I fail to see why groups of armed bad guys run up to you without shooting just to get punched out. OK OK, whats good –
The Good
- Michelle Rodriguez ‘s acting (mostly).
- It’s a 180º display that is mostly well used. (Thank God)
- It’s a VR film – we need more of these
The Bad
- It’s B-movie quality
- The 3D stereo is almost non-existent – there’s really NO depth effect visible
- Traditional Cinema Techniques:
- Abrupt cut scenes
- 1st-person viewpoint, till sometimes it’s not.
- Focusing the action in the center of the screen
- Controlling where I’m looking
- Head-bob? Really? Head-bob? Thankfully it gets dropped quickly.
- Why was this done in VR again?
OK – the 180º display was a good choice. But next time try to let the action unfold within that 180º arc. DO NOT move my head for me. If you need to do it, do it gradually – or better yet draw my attention and have me turn my head. HINT – you CAN rotate the video square in the HMD – it’s a computer program and (for most HMDs) you DO know how much my head is rotating. You can then gradually recenter it while I’m focusing on the action. If you are subtle about it, I probably won’t notice you’re doing it. Take some notes from Hardcore Henry on how to film in 1st person. And study up on redirected walking to figure out how to rotate the viewpoint without the user knowing about it.
oh and NEVER use head-bob in VR. NEVER EVER.
Re: the lack of stereo. This is IN FACT the entire reason to film this in “VR” (It’s NOT VR, but it’s a 180 (slightly) stereo video.) The folks at STXsurreal really need to do a better job in filming in stereo.
A still from the videoSo this is a left/right video frame (30fps, 2304×4096 H.264) – typical Unity video. Stare at the image – stare hard. You should be able to see some left-right separation between objects – especially the closer ones. I can’t see any, and I used to do this for a living. I would call BS on this but there were frames where I did see some separation – just not on the closer objects. Watching the film I never got the impression that Michelle Rodriguez was closer to me than the background. This is kinda the point of stereo guys. I could forgive all else if it made me feel like I was there and not just watching a flat video. Fail.
Not worth the discount $4.99 I paid, definitely not worth the $10 list price.