Just as there’s a recipe for your tasty dish, there’s a recipe for using virtual reality effectively in filmmaking. Director and animator Eric Darnell, with Baobab Studios, spoke on a VR storytelling panel during the Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) where he shared the key ingredients to help filmmakers find success in their VR endeavors.

Reflecting on his experience creating the virtual reality film, Invasion!, Darnell took the audience on a whimsical journey through his team’s production process, highlighting their successes and failures throughout the duration of the project. One particular instance involved an attempt at taking a comedic approach to VR content and the important lesson learned from the experience.

“If no one laughs, please don’t think comedy doesn’t work in VR. Just think: ‘I did a bad job’.”

A few other gems shared by Darnell included:

  • Storytelling is a VR buzzword.
  • Don’t make your audience nauseous!
  • Animation is all about exaggeration.
  • Beware of the ‘gee whiz’ factor.
  • Think like a magician.

Darnell also spent a few minutes dispelling rumors of virtual reality merely being “an extension of cinema,” and warned the future VR developers in the room that as with all new innovations, there will be growing pains in terms of learning how to best deploy it effectively.

“There are almost as many manifestos on what you can and can’t do as there are actual use cases,” he explained. “We have very little experience with this medium and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes.”

If there was one message Darnell wanted those in attendance to walk away with it was the importance of experimentation. We haven’t yet scratched the surface of what virtual reality is capable of, and the only way to discover those possibilities is to throw different things against the virtual wall to see what sticks.