Making VR movies for groups of kids in an hour.
As part of the “Almost Screen-Free Week”, the town of Garges-lès-Gonesse offered critical thinking workshops on digital technology to all audiences, especially children.
At the suggestion of Alice Posiere, mediator of the Jacques Brel cinema, we co-constructed a one-hour workshop for children to discover, through creativity, the challenges of Virtual Reality:
- First of all, a short discussion on what RV cameras and helmets are. Most of the children were aware of them.
- Then each child filmed, by himself, a sequence shot with the VR camera, each one trying this or that shooting device.
- And finally, back to the workshop room, to watch the original binocular rushes in full size. These images are striking because they offer two points of view at the same time. Everyone is led to reflect on the point of view.
- Then we see the “stitching” technique, the transformation of these two images into a single “planisphere” image. The comparison with the globe and the planisphere means that the children immediately understand the technical device.
- Large view of the 360° image, in which one can move around with the mouse.
- Then individual viewing in the helmet of the same film.
Thus, in one hour and in a very playful and autonomous way, the children have gone, through practice, concretely through all the stages of the making of a Virtual Reality film. We noticed from their questions and remarks that creativity and play were wonderful ways to build their critical mind.
Moreover, the fact of filming a place with these new vision machines makes us rediscover it, makes us reinvest our relationship with space, in reality. We now see it differently, so we live it differently. This power of the image is deeply surprising.
