Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM - Immersive Hollywood: VR – AR - MR

Session I: Haas Conference Center, Room 171

The VR-AR-Immersive - Innovators & Disruptors - Entertainment, Technology & Brand Vision

Chris Young, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Entertainment Lab

Charlotte Stoudt, Writer, Cinematic VR - “Dinner Party,” Debuted at Sundance 2018

Peter Martin, Head of Studio, V.A.L.I.S

Chris Hewish, Executive Vice President, Interactive, Skydance Interactive

Evo Heyning, CEO, Light Lodges

Tim Dillon, Head of VR & Immersive Content, MPC

Elijah Allan-Blitz, VR Director, “VR/Ken Burns PBS documentary, Defying the Nazis”

Laura Hertzfeld, Director, Journalism 360, Moderator

Tim Dillon is Head of VR & Immersive Content at MPC, leading a group focused on the exploration of Original Content, Music, Arts, Causes, Advertising and Entertainment. Tim has been instrumental in the development and production of many notable projects including The last Goodbye (Tribeca Premiere, Venice), 'Heroes’ (Sundance 2017 Premiere), Legion Sessions (Comic-Con SD 2017), Night Night (Dark Corner Co-Production) Kygo 'Carry Me’ (Sony Music

Playstation launch), The Nature Conservancy ‘This is Our Future’, Google TiltBrush, The Martian VR and Goosebumps VR. This new era for MPC's immersive projects began back in 2015 with projects for Chris Milk's U2 'Song for someone' and the horror fan favorite ‘Catatonic’. Tim is a vocal advocate for the experiential and immersive power of VR and MR and has spoken at events such as Sundance, SXSW, AICP, NAB, CES, Digital Hollywood, VR on the lot and many more.

Chris Young is Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Entertainment Lab. In this position, Young manages the Burbank-based Lab, which spearheads long-range research and development efforts around new technologies for Nickelodeon and its audience.  In this new role, Young works to develop new entertainment experiences for kids by identifying and experimenting with new trends in technology and emerging platforms to create new creative capabilities and entertainment. Some of the areas Nickelodeon is currently working on include real-time rendering, virtual cinema, virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality and artificial intelligence. The Nickelodeon Entertainment Lab focuses on building prototypes to test new ideas, collaborating on innovation with show creators, and shapes strategy around production capabilities to fuel future content opportunities. Young previously served as Executive Creative Director, Nickelodeon Animation Lab, where he focused on exploring and engineering alternative animation pipelines. Prior to that role, he held the title of Producer at the Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank. Young began his entertainment industry career at age 15 when he starred as boy genius Bryce Lynch on the cult TV series Max Headroom. Before becoming a producer and director, Young starred in the feature films The Great Outdoors, Book of Love and PCU.  He produced Disney Channel’s animated movie The Proud Family, developed, produced and starred in the NBC movie Killing Mr. Griffin and served as executive producer and director on 26 half-hour episodes of Discovery Channel’s The Adventures of A.R.K.Young also founded and served as Chief Creative Officer of Animobile, a forerunner in the mobile gaming space, where he designed and oversaw the production of over two dozen original mobile games for multiple handheld devices. Nickelodeon, now in its 38th year, is the number-one entertainment brand for kids. It has built a diverse, global business by putting kids first in everything it does. The company includes television programming and production in the United States and around the world, plus consumer products, digital, recreation, books and feature films. Nickelodeon’s U.S. television network is seen in more than 90 million households and has been the number-one-rated kids’ basic cable network for 22 consecutive years. For more information or artwork, visit http://www.nickpress.com. Nickelodeon and all related titles, characters and logos are trademarks of Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIA, VIAB).

Elijah Allan-Blitz, VR Director, “VR/Ken Burns PBS documentary, Defying the Nazis”: Lumiere award winner Elijah Allan-Blitz is the first VR director for Time Magazine. His VR experience about the holocaust was created as a companion piece for the Ken Burns documentary, Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War. The VR experience was responsible for over 400 million media impressions for the film. Elijah has also directed VR experiences for Aloe Blacc, PBS, Laird Hamilton and HBO.

Charlotte Stoudt, Writer, Cinematic VR - “Dinner Party,” Debuted at Sundance 2018: About "Dinner Party" - Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill’s widely known 1961 alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier film festival. Rather than using normal alien tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial affordances of VR to present a symbolic representation of each of their experiences to highlight how vastly different they were. Betty and Barney were an interracial couple in New Hampshire, and their purported encounter with aliens was a positive peak experience for Betty, but Barney had an opposite experience that Wexler & Stoudt attribute to his experience as a black man in the early 1960s. Inspired by passages of Barney’s hypnosis recordings posted online, Wexler & Stoudt expanded Hill’s story into an immersive narrative at the New Frontier Story Lab, and collaborated with director Angel Manuel Soto to bring this story to life in a 360 film. Dinner Party is the pilot episode of a larger series called The Incident, which explores the aftermath of how people deal with a variety of paranormal or taboo experiences. Wexler & Stoudt are using these stories to explore themes of truth and belief such as: Who is believed in America? Who isn’t? What’s it feel like to go through an extreme experience that no one believes happened to you? And can immersive media allow you to empathize with someone’s extreme subjective experience without being held back by an objective reality that you believe is impossible? Dinner Party is great use of immersive storytelling, and it was one of my favorite 360 experiences I saw at Sundance this year. It has a lot of depth and subtext that goes beyond what’s explicitly said, and I thought they were able to really use the affordances of immersive storytelling to explore a phenomenological experience in a symbolic way. It’s a really fascinating exploration of radical empathy using paranormal narrative themes that you might see in the The X-Files or The Twilight Zone, and I look forward to see what other themes are explored in future episodes.

Peter Martin, Head of Studio, V.A.L.I.S.: Peter Martin is an Academy Award nominated Producer. He is a Creative Futurist and a recognized thought leader in next generation entertainment. In 2000 Peter was hired by Lord David Puttnam as the Creative Director of CREATEC, where he pioneered new virtual technologies, making a CGI animated film starring a virtual Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, and a virtual fashion show with Nick Knight, Peter Saville and Alexander McQueen for ShowStudio. Peter became Creative Director at Ealing Film Studios in 2001. He formed the cross-platform content company Zeppotron ("Black Mirror') which was sold to Endemol. Set up the film division of Done & Dusted and Produced the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Co-created and wrote the TV show ‘Phoo Action’ with Jamie Hewlett (‘Tank Girl’, ‘Gorillaz’), for the BBC, winning a BAFTA for best drama in 2009. In 2010 Peter created and Produced 'Waste Land', the feature length documentary which won over 35 Festival awards including Sundance, Berlin, and a nomination for Best Documentary at the 2011 Academy Awards. 2014 he creatively directed the world’s first holographic duet between M.I.A. and Janelle Monae for the launch of the new Audi A3, where both artists simultaneously appeared in New York and Los Angeles in a specially constructed immersive environment.  Peter then joined SFX entertainment as Head of SFX Studios, where he specialized in Virtual, Experiential and Immersive content. Since 2015 Peter has specialized in VR, Directing a number of high-profile projects, including Run the Jewels "Crown" music video with WEVR, released on Transport and NYTVR, Ray Lamontagne's "Hey, No Pressure" for Jaunt VR, and the 2016 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue which was released by Time Inc on a bespoke Swim VR app sponsored by Lexus. Most recently Peter created his first room scale VR project virtualizing the museum experience for the Smithsonian, with Intel, Framestore, XRez and 8i.

Chris Hewish, Executive Vice President, Interactive, Skydance Interactive: As Executive Vice President of Interactive, Chris Hewish is responsible for helping to set and execute the overall strategy for Skydance Interactive, as well as oversee development, partnerships, and new business opportunities. Hewish is an award winning interactive executive, with decades of experience managing daily operations and long-term strategies for companies of various sizes. Over the years he’s been fortunate to work with highly motivated teams producing high quality games. His multi-decade career has been a journey from the mailroom to the C-suite. Along the way Chris been mentored by some of the industry’s best and won many awards; including an Annie Award for his creative work on the Kung Fu Panda  video game, and an Apple App Store Best of 2013 award for the Turbo Racing League  mobile game. He’s also been the production force behind a string of successful console and pc games at Activision, all of which were on time and on budget. Chris was most recently working with cutting edge VR company Survios as Head of Studio and Publishing; where he helped empower the next generation of visionary technologists. Under his direction, Survios released Raw Data,  the first VR game to generate over $1M in revenue in its first month and the first VR game to hit the #1 spot for all games on Steam (North America and Worldwide charts). Having directly designed or produced over 50 games generating more than $1B in sales, Chris displays a rare combination of creative and business acumen that continues to deliver results in an ever-changing industry.

Laura Hertzfeld is the director of Journalism 360, a joint initiative in immersive storytelling from the Knight Foundation, Google News Lab and the Online News Association. She is an Emmy-winning producer, writer and editor with over a decade of experience helping media brands develop their online content, engagement and distribution strategies. Recent projects beyond J360 include two daily digital shows for NBC’s 2016 Rio Olympics coverage, video strategy and content for YouTube beauty star Michelle Phan’s Ipsy community, and health and wellness coverage for Livestrong.com. Previously, Laura was senior producer at Ora.TV, working on Larry King Now and the network’s over a dozen unscripted shows. Prior to joining Ora, she led Entertainment Weekly/EW.com’s L.A.-based writers and editors. She managed PBS.org’s election coverage in 2008 and was an editor on the original Yahoo! News team.  Laura is active in several journalism communities; she runs programming for BinderCon and mentored students in VR/AR at Hack the Gender Gap at USC. She holds a degree in history from Barnard College, Columbia University.