Impulse, a mixed reality project that explores the extreme side of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), earned the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The project examines the challenges of living with ADHD through a unique blend of sharp-witted gameplay and dramatic first-hand accounts. Director Barry Gene Murphy & May Abdalla used innovative mixed reality techniques to bring their stories to life.
AM: What creative methods did you use to prepare for this project?
BGM & MA: We started off with the subject research and held interviews with people around the country who were experts or lived experience experts on the subject. We absorbed a lot of material and perspectives. It was clear early on that this subject matter was vast and had many facets to it. ADHD is something a lot of people are talking about but we wanted to get behind the anecdotes to some of the deeper mysteries around its origins, how it can be identified, and what causes it. For many people who suspect they have it, they live with a sense that something is wrong but they are not sure what for a long time.
We tried to get people to describe to us exactly what happened when they had to do something, the kind of resistance they had, or the feeling they had in their legs and arms when they knew they needed to act and didn't want to think it through. With this material, we brought in the creative team. We held a very early sort of hackathon with everyone on the core team and broke up into groups to try different ideas out. Everything from how to represent boredom, overwhelm, fractal enquiry, the feeling of failure. We did find some interesting pathways in that early meet up, and learned a lot about the technology we were trying to work with. Mixed Reality can feel a bit gimmicky so we really tried to break the headset with some weird experiments for things we hadn't seen before. Some of these experiments ended up in the final experience. At the beginning you don't need to edit - you're just looking for the happy marriage of content and form.
AM: What were some of the key challenges or memorable moments you encountered during the execution of this project?
BGM & MA: With technical projects like this one that depend on technology that is very new and emergent, we often knew that there was something we really wanted to play with that hadn't been released by the developers who make the core the tools for the hardware. It's like making a film and also trying to build a machine that you can edit it on at the same time. I love that challenge and the potential to invent something completely new but at the same time you can end up in a few dead ends.
At one point we knew that the possibility to map the room precisely might come but we didn't
know when, so we invented a tactile and entertaining way to map out the person's space using
touch. It worked really well and was quite a beautiful way of introducing the experience but
then the official room mapping library was released and suddenly that scene and all that
experimentation and script became redundant.
AM: How does it feel working as a team of two on Impulse: playing with reality?
BGM & MA: We have worked together on a few projects now and the dynamic is settling that we splurge ideas between ourselves and the other hones it or scraps it or reshapes it if they can understand it. Exposing ideas is a delicate process. We both listen to all the material and remember it well and at ground level, we both really see eye to eye on the intention and reasons before going with an idea, a question, or a statement. I tend to see things visually whereas May seems to come in from the soundscape and editorial aspects, she has much more patience than I do when it comes to making multiple assemblies and we hammer through many configurations quite quickly. We are both referencing the audio and what we understand the people want to say so we are coming from the same place in the end. It does feel when you grow ideas together that there is a push and pull, but if you have time you can try things out and it is always a surprise when some things really work that the other person pushed through. It does help that we both know we really care about the message and that all the passion to make it good, is coming from the best place. There is a lot of trust in the other's perspective and I try hard to move towards what May thinks works. Making VR is a difficult process it gets personal as you want to protect the ideas and let them grow and be worth it and it can take a long time for it to present as such, as the initial idea is usually a starting point and being unwilling to let it change and move on isn't great for true collaboration. We both kill a lot of darlings in the process.
BGM & MA: There is something still quite awe-inspiring about how this medium can surprise you. It's quite remarkable that we can overlay these alternate stories and temporary realities over our everyday experiences. When trying to describe it to a friend they commented that it sounds like a waking dream. I think the cinema attempts to capture the entire inner experience faithfully but it really only does so poetically, it frames events in crystal clear detail and your position is more fly on the wall, or sitting in a cafe watching other people's lives, we relate to the stories and characters and try to understand them and their inner self. This medium centers your sense of self more as well as mixing up the senses together. If done well it widens or skews the suspension of disbelief and makes you more curious or less stationary as a bystander. in XR there is no real frame, as you yourself are the lens, so you can follow a path or inclination of your own choosing if the experience is designed with that in mind. This calls to a theatrical form rather than cinematic. A theatre for one. XR has its own set of restrictions and rules very different from cinema. One particular contrast with directing a film is that with XR you don't approach it as one singular vision and more a collective creation and translation of a journey. Many factors shape the end result as it has to appeal and be comfortable to a range of people. However, they are both still storytelling at the end of the day but both with very different languages to tell these stories and XR's language is still being written. If I were to say the real difference for me is that XR presents a way for us to present how we perceive moments and ideas closer to a real conscious experience, some cinema does achieve this but rarely.
AM: What was your reaction to receiving the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize?
BGM & MA: I was genuinely surprised. I dreamt we didn't get any recognition a few days earlier. After just settling with what we had made I was hungry for a positive reception for this piece, as always there are real people at the end of it. We wanted to do it justice. We learned from Goliath how some people can take a lot of value from these types of projects so it is real anxiety that it doesn't land or it doesn't quite work in ways we hadn't anticipated but getting this award from Venice and our extremely respected peers makes me a lot more confident that we made good calls and the hard push was worth it. We loved the unique platform Venice Island gave the piece and all the supportive feedback there made it really mean something special. Every piece that presents in Venice can potentially be a starting point for new expressions and it does feel people are collectively building a language and lexicon and it's great to be part of that and push that forward so better things can come.