Series Mania Forum Unveils VR Initiative

The Series Mania Forum is set to hold an all-new Virtual Reality (VR) Co-Production Initiative at the festival at Lille Grand Palais later this month.

This professional VR program will feature VR Pitching Sessions that will allow the presentation of eight international VR series projects. Creators will get the chance to take to the stage to show their work in front of potential financiers and broadcasters on March 26. The projects for the initiative were chosen by VR advisors Voyelle Acker (ex-Nouvelles Écritures at France Télévisions, immersive experience producer) and Michel Reilhac (VR program advisor for the Venice Film Festival).

The selected VR projects are as follows: Breathe (created by Diego Galafassi, Denmark/Sweden/U.S.); Gloomy Eyes (created by Jorge Tereso and Fernando Maldonado, Argentina/France); Into the Mind (created by Jessica Brillhart, U.S.); Mechanical Souls (created by L.P.Lee and Gaëlle Mourre, France/Taiwan); Pagan Peak (created by Max Sacker and Ioulia Isserlis, Germany); The Queen of the Forest (created by Priscila Guedes, Brasil); Tinder is the night (created by Oriane Hurard, France); and VoyeuR (created by Simon Buisson, France).

In addition to the pitching sessions, the initiative will include conferences and panels on the next trends in VR content production. There will be a conversation with Ioulia Isserlis, CEO and creative producer at Germany’s AnotherWorld, as well as a dialogue between Vrai Pictures’ founder Jessica Brillhart and pain neuroscience expert Louis Derungs on VR’s potential for therapeutic and experimental storytelling.

Laurence Herszberg, founder and general director of Series Mania, said: “With the growing impact of immersive media in the audiovisual sector, the serial format is now spreading into all forms of narrative. At Series Mania, we believe AR, VR and Mixed Reality are part of the present of the series industry—thus, we are proud to extend our co-production initiatives to VR and immersive media.”

Reilhac added: “Series are arguably the best way to experience VR. In part because current VR headsets are best-suited for short-term sessions, but mostly because immersive media has this specificity of being a very intense watching experience. We are only starting to discover the immense possibilities offered by these new sensory interfaces: this is about learning to manipulate space, in the same way cinema learned to manipulate time.”