Earlier last month, we had an amazing opportunity to collaborate with Elevate - Toronto’s leading tech and innovation festival. If you were in Toronto this fall you saw the thousands of posters letting you know that Michele Obama was coming to town, giving yet another inspirational and warm talk, Guy Kawasaki was here evangelizing new MacIntosh 😉 and Canva, Chris Hadfield visited from his secret base behind the flat Moon. Spoiler alert: we all know that Earth is round! but there is still active debate on how flat the Moon actually is, just look at this picture and see for yourself...
Ok, ok, we know - Chris Hadfield actually lives near Toronto, so it is not a big deal 😎 Or is it? Well, for us it was a very big deal.
We not only had the amazing pleasure of meeting some of the amazing leaders and innovators in person, but we made sure that you will be able to meet and talk them too - even if you didn’t have the opportunity to be there.
And here is how:
We were thinking where our volumetric process can be truly useful, and while walking on Toronto streets and brainstorming, we had some epiphany: Elevate!! The signs were literally everywhere, so the answer was pretty obvious. We shared our idea of interviewing the speakers with Ana Serrano, Founder of the CFC Media Lab, and she offered her help and support both with producing and contacting the City of Toronto and Elevate so we could actually make it happen.
We've partnered with CFC Media Lab, City of Toronto and Elevate to record a series of XR interviews - for which we used our stereoscopic volumetric capture tech, that you all know so well already if you know our other documentary, The Choice. We’ve been thinking for a while how to use it outside of just that project - this capture tech is simply too awesome to keep it for ourselves and we want to use its amazing abilities and to invite you all into our world.
Our cozy volumetric studio at Elevate conference
As we were already thinking about this idea for couple of months, we also talked to FIVARS creator and founder, Keram Malicki-Sánchez, and we were already organizing the production of XR talks during his VR conference, so it all was coming together nicely. With FIVARS being 2 weeks earlier, we would have a chance to test the idea itself, and to record interviews with creators from our own field - much easier task to do, when you know people, when you know what questions to ask, and when you talk with people from the same community. The result was awesome!
You know the feeling when you are at the conference, all the speakers are amazing and you want to talk to each of them at least for a brief minute or five? We did this, and we also made sure that when you will watch it - you will have the same feeling of being there with them, and having them this one-on-one chat with you, sharing what’s the most important for them.
Kinda cool, don’t you think? 😎
We were in good hands of CFC’s staff: Ana Serrano, Nataly DeMonte and Joseph Ellsworth were there for us to support us with helping us with questions, acquiring the speakers and make them actually come to our small set, jumping on every last minute equipment request, and most of all: making us feel that if anything - they have our back. We also had huge help from the Elevate team, with Anne Morello doing an amazing job of introducing us to people, pitching the idea to speakers, and inviting them to our interviews.
We will film more interviews for this series, so follow us on social media (Twitter and Instagram: @tribeofpan) to keep up with the latest!
And here you can read CFC’c article about our collaboration:
Cheers,
Joanne & Tom