Intrepid British photographer/filmmaker/climber Jonathan Griffith won Best VR story at Cannes XR last month for his latest project, Alex Honnold: The Soloist. It’s an astonishingly realistic film in which viewers wearing their VR headsets accompany Honnold as he clambers up the sheerest rock faces high up in the Alps.
If you suffer from vertigo, you will become very giddy watching footage shot in 360 degrees 3D. This is as close to real-life mountaineering you can get from the safety of your front room.
“When people thought about climbing, they thought about walking up Everest and planting a flag on the summit as a flock of bald eagles fly overhead. For me, climbing was really not like that at all. It was a very different experience,” the director, one of the pioneering figures in VR filmmaking, reflects. “I think the cutting edge of most adventure sports is very rarely well documented because, by its very nature, very few people manage to get to those situations.”
Griffith had a very successful career as a photographer before being bit by the VR bug. This happened six or seven years ago, when he was at a film festival where Google was demonstrating its “Cardboard” Virtual Reality headsets.
“It was a very basic, very simple, very cheap little unit where you slotted your mobile phone into it,” he remembers. He put it on, watched a video of a man walking across a glacier and instantly realised the new possibilities the VR format offered to him. “For someone whose motivation was to immerse people into their world, this seemed like the best tool to do it.”
Then, as now, VR was a niche pastime, “the reserve of the super geek” as Griffith jokes. “[But] I got into it because I could see it was the future. I just fell in love with it.”
Griffith lives in Chamonix and could have tested out VR filmmaking there but he realised that an expedition up the world’s highest mountain would be an easier sell to viewers. That’s why he decided to shoot a VR film of a Sherpa’s ascent of Everest without oxygen.
“I created a short form film of that and then spoke to Oculus [Meta’s VR arm]. They thought it was amazing and so commissioned me to make a long form piece.” The resulting documentary remains the “most watched” VR film yet made.
For Griffith, it quickly becomes inconceivable that he would work in anything other than virtual reality. “I find normal film and photography really hard to get your head around once you have done VR.” Not that there is anything easy about using the format. “Photo projects are really underwhelmingly easy compared to VR,” he underlines.
US rock climber Honnold is a superstar of the sport – and was the subject of the Oscar winning documentary Free Solo(2018). Griffith had known him “for quite a while” and jokes that he “seemed a low hanging fruit” for a VR doc. That’s how The Soloist came about.
As yet, VR films don’t have an economic model to match that of conventional films (although VR gaming is already profitable). They’re not licensed to distributors at film markets. Nor are they yet shown regularly in cinemas. Nonetheless, as Griffith points out, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “has pumped billions” into “creating the eco-system” for VR. That is what his plans for the Metaverse are all about. For his grand plan to work, it’s necessary for there to be content.
He has also been thinking hard about the aesthetic possibilities of the form. “The challenge was how to create a really good VR film,” Griffith says of The Soloist. He was determined not just to use the rhetoric of conventional filmmaking.
“In normal film media, we’re used to fast cuts and pacing, voice-overs, lots of music and moving
shots,” the director notes.”[But] VR is the opposite. We need to immerse someone into a location and let them absorb that location for as long as they can before we move them again.”
The Soloist is “bare bones” and streamlined filmmaking, “because that is what is reality is,” the filmmaker says. Griffith is trying to convince viewers that they are up there, with Alex Honnold high in the mountains, clinging to the cliff face. He doesn’t want to distract them with flashy narrative devices. That, though, has its own challenges. “The reality is that when you strip things down, it gets really boring. It is really hard to craft the story so the viewer doesn’t get bored. And it is really easy to get bored in VR, much more than in normal media. It’s a bit like as if I ask you, as a documentary filmmaker, to make an unscripted one hour film in just 50 clips which has no music and no voice-over.”
Interviews don’t work well either in VR because it often feels to viewers as if their personal space is being invaded. “It’s really tricky but that is why I really enjoyed this project. I spent about a year and a half just thinking about it obsessively, every single shot.”
The result is a film that feels raw and immediate – and that gives an adrenalin rush you won’t get from any conventional climbing doc. “Capturing reality and normality…is really bloody hard,” the director points out. “The viewer thinks you’ve done nothing at all clever.”
Now that he has successfully completed The Soloist, Griffith is looking further to refine and develop his approach to VR. He is contemplating making a film about a young Ukrainian refugee in the VR format.
“It’s very hard to do human stories in VR…a couple of years ago I would have said there is no way you can shoot this story in VR. It will be terrible. But now I’ve done The Soloist, I’ve become more open-minded. I think everything can be moulded into the VR narrative – you just have to really think about it.”
And, yes, Griffith will continue working with Oculus. He recently was part of a podcast with Andrew “Baz” Bosworth, CTO of [Oculus owner] Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man, whom he clearly sees as a kindred spirit.
“I love working with Oculus. I’ve worked with them on pretty much every project I have done. They’re a really smart bunch of people, very creative, very geeky and nerdy, which is unbelievably key to VR…you have to know how the cameras work really really well because they’re all different and that will affect how you can shoot and what you can shoot. And you have to know how the headsets work and the future of the headsets. You have to know how the software works…you have to know every little bit of the process. Otherwise, you’ll end up with tons of problems.”
On one level, Griffith’s version of VR is cinema verité documentary at its purest. “When you put the headset on, you feel you are following the story in a live sense,” he says. “If you have music or voice-over or something like that, your brain subconsciously knows that what you are watching has happened before…it doesn’t feel ‘live.’ The great thing about The Soloist is that because I have taken all of that out, and you’ve been so immersed in the story the whole way through, it does feel live. It feels like anything is going to happen…”
