American Documentary

Overview

To survive, know the past. Let It touch you. Then let The past Go.
- Octavia Butler

LEAD ARTISTS: Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster and Yasmin Elayat

KEY COLLABORATORS: James George, Alexander Porter, Rad Mora and Elliott Mitchell

A SCATTER AND RADA STUDIO CO-PRODUCTION

EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY POV SPARK AND THE FLEDGLING FUND

RT: 12min

USA | 2020 |English

@radastudionyc @scatterco @povdocs #ChangingSameVR

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage, is an episodic virtual reality experience on racial justice. This visceral magical realist adventure explores the critical role that U.S. history plays in forming a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the current social and cultural conditions that continue to shape the nation. Through elements of time-travel, participants are invited to traverse the 400-year history of racial inequality in the U.S. while projecting forward to a joyful, Afrofuturist world of possibilities. The project is a room scale virtual reality 6Dof experience that can be watched on Rift S, HTC Vive, Oculus Quest 2 with link cable. Tech specs required for viewing: 2080ti, 16GB RAM, Intel i7 or AMD Ryzen 7, Windows 10.

Episode 1: “The Dilemma” is the first installment of this magical real, time-travel series. It precedes an ambitious corpus that unveils our common history of racial terror, Black joy and resistance. The full experience will include performances, where actors are filmed with Depthkit volumetric capture and streamed to audiences as holograms in real time. The audience bears witness to how history is present today.

Resources

Trailer: TheChangingSameEpisode1Trailer

Teaser: https://vimeo.com/508585394

Clip: TheChangingSameEpisode1Clip

Photos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14iCPbB20pBPw-yVSvGg7S0RAJnU4fc96

Meet the Artists Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFmp3vcxGMI&feature=youtu.be

Website: http://bit.ly/ChangingSameVR

MEDIA CONTACT: Marlea Willis, marlea@mwilliscomm.com| 646.535.9056

Inspiration

The Cyclical Nature of Racial Injustice

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage seeks to historically contextualize the damaging effects of slavery, lynching, and other forms of racial violence and injustice on people of color and to recognize the ongoing impact of this history on the present.

There is widespread misunderstanding of the history of racial violence in the United States, and it is not broadly accepted that our past is directly linked to modern-day racial disparities in America. The cycles of oppression and violence, followed by the misinterpretation and obscuring of history, have led to a legacy of racial disparity that continues to exist today. The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage will shift the paradigm of how America’s stories need to be re-told in the context of confronting the past, healing the present and building towards the future.

We are working closely with academic scholars and seasoned VR experts to provide participants a one-of-a-kind virtual reality experience within the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and mass incarceration to better understand the United States’ history of racial violence, and to challenge participants to imagine how the cycle of violence can be transformed into an equitable future for all.

The experience engages with Afrofuturism as a theory and as an aesthetic. The participant embarks on a journey through history that presents a myriad of opportunities for critical self-reflection about our present social circumstances. Throughout the pilgrimage, we see familiar sites and faces: the Slave Warehouse that becomes a prison holding cell; enslaved people who become fleeing Marianna, Florida residents who then become prisoners. Later, these same sites and faces are re-imagined and presented again differently, this time more lively and inviting. We employ this Afrofuturist framework of nonlinear time to encourage participants to understand themselves as historical beings who are always and already engaging in history.

In doing so, participants are not only being transformed by the experience, but they are also given the opportunity to leave their imprint on the virtual world of The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage. At the offset of our common struggle towards equality and justice for all is a community that transcends time, space, and the physical limitations of the “real” world.

The Experience

Moving Between Past, Present and Future

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a non-linear time travel experience through 400 years of racial injustice. The Time Travel mechanic is a liminal space where fireflies and gravitational forces guide the user through significant historical events represented as deconstructed “sets”.

Time travel allows us to move through the past, present and future to contemplate the cycles of history and their strong influence on our lived experiences today. How much has really changed and how have experiences mutated? Also, how much have we internalized a refusal to question so as not to face the pain of the persistent terror today?

Time Travel

In Episode 1: “The Dilemma,” the user is introduced to our main characters, the time travel mechanic and our time travel portal the Cracker House, the starting point of a pilgrimage through our collective history.

Present

The story begins in present day Montclair, New Jersey. The user experiences a police altercation in a quiet suburb and finds themselves in jail, witness to modern mass incarceration. In this world, The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage symbolically foreshadows elements of lynching and the Jim Crow Era.

Past

This chapter highlights the cyclical nature of history. The user finds themselves in a time warp of parallel eras: a modern jail and a slave warehouse. The juxtaposition of these two eras highlights how history has not changed, but only evolved. The user travels to the past in Episode 1: “The Dilemma” and experiences a foreshadowing of the upcoming Episode 2 and a future utopian era.

The Creative Team

Michèle Stephenson, Rada Studio Lead Artist, Director, Producer, Writer The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and international experience as a human rights attorney. She tells compelling, deeply personal stories that are created by, for and about communities of color and resonate beyond the margins. Her most recent film, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Capital artist. Twitter: @michele0608 Instagram: @michele_0608

Joe Brewster, Rada Studio Lead Artist, Director, Producer, Writer The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Producer and Director Joe Brewster is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who uses his psychological training as the foundation in approaching the social issues he tackles as an artist and filmmaker. Brewster has created stories using installation, narrative, documentary and print mediums that have garnered support from critics and audiences internationally, including Sundance- winning and 3-time Emmy nominee documentary, American Promise. He is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Twitter: @2joedigital Instagram: @brewsterjoe

Yasmin Elayat, Scatter Lead Artist, Director, Producer The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning immersive director, United States Artists 2020 Fellow, and Co-Founder at Scatter, an immersive company pioneering Volumetric Filmmaking. Yasmin directed Scatter’s Zero Days VR (Sundance 2017) a documentary about cyber warfare and the Stuxnet virus, which won the Emmy for Original Approaches: Documentary. Yasmin is the co-creator of 18DaysInEgypt, which was lauded as one the Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary. Yasmin’s work has won multiple awards and exhibited at various festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, SIGGRAPH, Festival de Cannes, and the World Economic Forum. Twitter: @yelayat Instagram: @yelayat

Rad Mora, Rad Mora, LLC Key Collaborator, Art Director The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Rad Mora is a New York-based Motion Designer/Art Director. Voted by The New York Times as one of the Top Multimedia Illustrator’s for 2020, Rad has worked with brands and artists such as Pat McGrath, MCM, KARA, The Webster, and Susan Alexandra to create deeply resonant poetic visuals. Rad believes that 3D animation holds a unique power of communicating through sensation. His generated visuals move beyond the eye and tap into our internal impulse to reach out and feel the images on our screens. Instagram: @rad.mora

James George Key Collaborator, Art Director The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

James George is CEO and Co-Founder of Scatter. Scatter is an Emmy-winning technology studio and creators of the accessible volumetric video software Depthkit. Prior to founding Scatter, James was a new media artist and technical director.He has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Barbican in London, Tokyo Photographic Museum, and screenings at Sundance and Tribeca Film Festival. He was the first artist in residence at Microsoft Research, where he worked alongside other pioneers in volumetric capture. Twitter: @obviousjim Instagram: @obviousjim

Alexander Porter Key Collaborator, Art Director The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Alexander Porter is an immersive director, digital artist and educator. He is a co-founder of Scatter, an Emmy-award winning immersive storytelling and software company. Scatter is recognized for defining the discipline of Volumetric Filmmaking through creating immersive productions, and virtual and augmented reality creativity tools. Scatter’s first product, Depthkit is the first and most widely used software for volumetric video production.Alexander’s most recent project is the feature film Truth or Consequences (Rotterdam, 2020), a ‘speculative documentary’ about the world’s first spaceport and the town nearby. It features a landscape of 3D reconstructions made from video footage, brought to life through VR cinematography. Twitter: @alexicon3000 Instagram: @alexicon3000

Elliott Mitchell Key Collaborator, Art Director The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

Elliott Mitchell (Co-Founder Vermont Digital Arts & Boston Unity Group) has been working on games, films and interactive experiences in Unity since 2008. His current focus is development, technical art, and VFX for volumetric filmmaking and XR experiences. Elliott's indie game, Waggle Words, reached the number 3 spot for Paid Word Games on the App Store. Elliott has recently contributed to the following works: Queerskins: Ark (in production), Truth or Consequences (IFFR 2019), Still Here (Sundance 2019), The Last Supper (Rag and Bone & Thom Yorke - NYFW), Missions Interactive (American Museum of Natural History), Björk Digital (Vulnicura), The Hillman Project : Styles and Customs of the 2020s (Carnegie Museum of Art Hall of Architecture), and The Leviathan Project (Sundance & Vision Summit). Twitter: @Mrt3D Instagram: @Mrt3D

serpentwithfeet Composer, The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage

serpentwithfeet is a vocalist and performance artist whose growing body of work is rooted in dueling obsessions with the ephemeral and the everlasting – key components of his artistic journey from a childhood stint as a choirboy in Baltimore through his time at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied vocal performance before relocating to New York City. His last album soil is a return to the sensibilities and wide-eyed curiosity of his musical youth before symmetry and sterile soundscapes ruled the roost. The release of soil saw him rediscover and ultimately return to the unhinged version of himself he was sure he had outgrown. He is currently at work on the follow up to soil, due later this year. Twitter: @serpentwithfeet Instagram: @serpentwithfeet

Directors' Statements

Michèle Stephenson

I think Joan Didion encapsulated best that primal need for storytelling that we all hunger for, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I think I have been preparing for the current work I do today from the moment I was born. I have no choice but to tell stories, to get down and dirty with the process and the craft, because it is a lifeline for me. I recognize and honor the healing power that storytelling has for me personally as well as how it allows me to engage with my communities in a way that uplifts vulnerability and embraces complexity. That healing process has to also embrace our multifaceted identities and the history that has shaped them. For me, The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a culmination of working through the craft for many years and approaching it as a tool for internal racial healing for myself, as a child of the African diaspora in the Americas and having directly experienced within the bosom of my own family the personal impact of our racial caste system. That trauma literally runs through my veins. And my journey as a filmmaker and storyteller is defined by excavating those wounds and the resistance that comes with it, and healing intergenerational trauma in order to reimagine a different tomorrow for those who come after us.

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage has allowed me to excavate that common history we share through a lens where we engage in magical realist thinking, push the boundaries of technology and story to make connections that may not be that obvious. It’s ultimately an effort to create a lyrical space where what we’ve inherited is not what we perpetuate as we engage our inner selves to overcome our individual and communal traumas and reimagine a different present and future.

Joe Brewster

This is the one aspect of filmmaking that I fear the most, the writing of the director’s statement. To be sure, I’ve written a few, but every time I stare at my keyboard over a week or so, thinking of great excuses to leave my desk. I don’t know why this process is so painful. Maybe because the film (or immersive project in this case) is like a baby, a baby that I want you to love as much as I do. Maybe because this thing, this pronouncement, is expected to be a definitive statement of purpose and artistic vision. Unfortunately, I do not make media because of my artistic vision. I make films, documentaries and explore immersive narratives because my life and family's life require it. The thought of storytelling being a requirement for my survival; raises the stakes as it quickens my pulse. This time I will not leave this desk until I finish writing it.

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a virtual reality experience that follows Lamar, a guardian of the Afrofuturist space. You know this space; Heaven, Valhalla, Kingdom-Come are several of many descriptors, but in this story, the future-space is where Black thought and values exist, which speaks to black resilience. Lamar requires the game USER to connect the past and present, entering a magical future space that allows time-travel and alteration in the laws of nature. This journey is not unlike the journey George Bailey played by James Stewart takes in the 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. George learns to appreciate himself and his deeds over the course of two hours. In The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage, a visually stunning and technological groundbreaking experience, I struggle with White supremacy and anti-blackness. Hopefully, like George Bailey, I learn better to appreciate myself and my deeds after the immersion. Some will say this goal is hubris. Others might describe my goal as ambitious. But I am my first audience, and I have experienced the benefits of connecting a slave warehouse in 1820 and mass incarceration in 2020. I’m buoyed by exploring Black resistance to White supremacy in 1934 and the resistance of the Black Lives Matter movement of today. I would also add that the aesthetics and technological innovations required to bring this project to life exist, in part, because our 20 plus collaborators similarly share the notion of narrative as necessary for their survival. Some of you will be frightened by the experience, and you are welcome to pass the headset to another viewer.

Most cultures have embraced storytellers’ role; from the Persian Dastangoi to the Celtic bard and the West African griot, they embellish and inspire with purpose. Complex stories of resistance, love, terror and joy must be passed to the next generation for these cultures to grow. The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage attempts to pass the complexity of Black life to our family to inspire and forge connections among people and between people and ideas. Why did I choose to tell this story? I had no other choice.

Yasmin Elayat

I see the power and value of reclaiming history. Change requires exposing denied experiences. I’ve dedicated my practice to unearthing these types of stories using emerging technology. And in the US there is a need and urgency to uncover these buried histories - our history.

My artistic practice is centred in volumetric filmmaking, an artistic practice where the crafts of film and gaming converge in a new narrative medium. I am passionate about using technology to break conventional narrative constructs, to blur the lines between audiences and directors and to invite audiences inside immersive storyworlds. The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is the most ambitious volumetric film to date.

Over the years developing this project, the true historical events underlying The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage have been living with me. The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is not just a timely story. It is an unveiling of the very nature of American society: an ever-present and ongoing chronicle spanning centuries. This story is the true world that we live in. My mission as a storyteller is to make this visible.

I introduce new approaches to the telling and experiencing of these events, recontextualizing and re-imagining them. The techniques used to tell the story of The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage did not exist, so we had to create them. My team at Scatter designed new capabilities for our volumetric capture software, Depthkit, for this experience that had never been possible before.

The advanced algorithms of a solution we call Depthkit Studio calibrate data from multiple depth sensors. This enabled us to record real actors as full-body holograms. Then, our specialized integration with Unity game engine made it possible to fill rich scenes with crowds of real people.

Our protagonists, Lamar and Harriet, act as otherworldly guides. Capturing the essence of their humanity is critical to have the audience see themselves reflected in these characters. We invented a hybrid avatar system that integrates real performance capture with 3D modelling and motion capture techniques to create the larger-than-life, ethereal character, Harriet. She is simultaneously magical and genuine.

My intention is to create more inclusive work that immerses audiences on a deeper level, solving for diversity of voices and experiences by either inviting the audience as collaborators, or crafting space in the work to allow them to connect their own dots.

As a storyteller and toolmaker, it's an integral part of my practice to ensure that these technologies are accessible and oriented towards collaboration. And as a woman of color in the engineering world, it's of personal importance that this emphasis takes priority. Now these techniques with Depthkit volumetric capture can become part of the collective palette that creators all over the world can take up in their own pursuits at the boundaries of storytelling possibilities.

Credits

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a Scatter and Rada Studio co-production. Executive Producers are POV Spark and The Fledgling Fund.

Year: 2021

Country: U.S.

Running Time: 10min

Language: English

Directed by

Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster, Yasmin Elayat

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Written by

Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson

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Executive Producers

Opeyemi Olukemi, Diana Barrett, Sheila Leddy

Co-Executive Producers

James George, Alexander Porter

Producers

Yasmin Elayat, Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster

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Art Direction

Rad Mora

Technical Direction

Elliott Mitchell

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Original Music

Serpentwithfeet

Brandon Juhans

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ART

Environment Artist

Lily Fang

Environment Lighting*

Nkosi Dianzinga

Depthkit Design and Graphics*

Michele Graffieti

Design Discovery

Anne-Michelle Gallero

Costume Consultant

Cheyney McKnight

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DEPTHKIT VOLUMETRIC CAPTURE

Depthkit & Production Advisor*

Alexander Porter

Depthkit Cinematographer and Post-Production Supervisor

Cory Allen

Depthkit Product and Production Advisor*

Jillian Morrow

Reality Capture

Pat Goodwin

Gui Rambelli

Video Post-Production

Tim Scaffidi

Jonathan Sims

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ENGINEERING

Technical Advisor

James George

Graphics Programming

Michael Allison

Depthkit Development

Tim Scaffidi

Maria Barot

Michael Allison

Additional Graphics Programming

Nate Turley

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SOUND

Sound Artist

Matt McCorckle

Sound Supervisor

Reese Donohue

Sound Recordist

Daniel Selby

Mike Silvestri

Fred Helm

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Marketing and PR

Caitlin Robinson

Bedatri Choudhury

Production Manager

Steven Reneau

Associate Producer

Ayana Enomoto-Hurst

Assistant Producer

Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo

Research Assistants

Allana de Guzman

Dinayuri Rodriguez

Gisela Zuniga

Grant Writer

Anne Palermo

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CAST

Lamar

Daniel Rios Jr.

Attorney Lopez

Bianca Sanchez

Officer Lake, Officer Marvin Jackson

Carl Garrison

Officer Schultz, Officer Keith, Bystander

Hunter Thore

Harriet

DeAnna S. Wright

Backlot Male, Prisoner, Enslaved Person

Robert Vail

Soloman Youngman, Prisoner

Morgan McLeod

Casting Director

Chastity Thomas

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Funded by

POV Spark

The Fledgling Fund

Creative Capital

Chicken & Egg Pictures

Color of Change

OSF

With support from (logos)

Sundance Institute

Skoll Foundation

MIT Open Documentary Lab

MIT Co-Creation Studio

Black Public Media

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The production would like to thank

Sundance New Frontier Lab

Richard Pérez

Tabitha Jackson

Sandy Herz

Equal Justice Initiative

Bryan Stevenson

Sia Sanneh

Sonia Kapadia

Diana Barrett

Sheila Leddy

Katerina Cizek

Melinda Weekes

Sara Wolozin

Shariffa Ali

Rori Bergman Casting

Kamal Sinclair

Shari Frilot

Ashley Lin

Amilca Palmer

Idris Brewster

Jason Booth

Kat Sullivan

James Goodwin

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Made with

Depthkit

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A Rada Studio and Scatter Co-production

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THE CHANGING SAME

Episode 1

About

About Rada Studio

Rada Studio began as a partnership between husband and wife team Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson with a mission: To create compelling visual stories that provoke thought about our multicultural world. The couple won a special jury prize for documentary filmmaking in 2013 for the groundbreaking story, American Promise.

The Changing Same, Rada Studio’s third project invited to the Sundance Festival is clearly in line with their mission. “Our work is an expression of our own personal mission to use visual storytelling to better understand our experiences as Black people navigating American society.” Trying to balance family life with their artistic passions during the intervening years leading up to the creation of Rada Studio, Michèle and Joe created narrative films, documentaries, emerging media, and have authored books that challenge and inspire audiences across the world to think critically about their own place and roles in society. “We use the art form to explore our agency and ambivalence about the internalized nature of systemic oppression and question our own and our subjects’ relationship to that world. It is in those gray areas that art is created and where change can be affected for us as individuals as well as for the constantly shifting communities we reside in.”

The Brewster/Stephenson family process is obviously working. Sundance 2021 will also premiere another project, Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler co-directed by their son, idris brewster.

About Scatter

Scatter is the Emmy award-winning technology studio behind volumetric titles including Zero Days VR, Blackout and CLOUDS. Scatter invented the term "volumetric filmmaking", and has led the boom of independent and artistic interactive 3D content. Scatter's groundbreaking software, Depthkit, is the world's most widely used tool for capturing real people in volumetric video. Depthkit Studio, Scatter's new full body, multi-sensor volumetric capture solution, is now being used by creative companies worldwide, setting the bar for the most important step forward in video technology of our times.

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