I've got a pretty common and androgynous name, so you can probably all fly under the radar if you aren't seen together. But you'll need to coordinate sharing a single Industry Pass, or help each other sneak past the gate. Which is very in character for me, so it's a good start!
Oh, and fun fact I forgot to mention; the film was funded as part of the
*cough* Brexit Festival, so we had to comply with their UK-History-Wanking demands to use archival footage of Britain's Glorious Past... but we still managed to work within the letter of the law (using footage of pride marches and riots, insightful interviews with trans folks, Thatcher et al. being indefensible fashy homophobes, etc), to criticize the absolutely dogshit state of trans rights in the UK. So like, even if I can't go to the festival, it feels nice to have gotten that out there, and taken the British government's money to do it, haha.
I'm interested though, how does VR films work? Are you like a fly on the wall in the room, able to move around inside scenes and stuff?
Some people differentiate "VR Film" from "VR Experience", to describe the level of audience agency involved... but the line can be blurry in either case! Some are just animated shorts that can be explored and interacted with, or respond to where your head is looking. Others (like ours was) are meant to be experienced more like a traditional movie; you're placed into a 3D environment you feel present in, and you might get moved around a bit, or have to turn your head to follow things, but generally it's a linear film you're in the middle of.
There was another one a date took me to a few years back called "Terrain", where it was set in sort of a shattered underground parking lot, with busted, glitched out cement bits exploding into a dark space. If you followed the glitchy debris into the void, you'd see these giant bubbles in the distance; you could step into them, and each one was a short video; a pivotal moment from a handful of people's lives, projected on the inside of the bubble. As you explored, you could get a sense for the lives of these people, how their paths crossed and affected one another for better or worse, and all that. So it was a sort of... series of short non-linear films that tell a larger story together, framed within a surreal environment you could explore? And props to my date for picking it, because it's really stuck with me!
If you have access to a VR headset (or can make one out of a smartphone), it's
*allegedly* possible to find La Biennale di Venezia's worlds on VR Chat still, or perhaps elsewhere online? If so, there's some really cool, experimental stuff there. I don't know if they'll be doing it again this fall, since everyone's pretending the Plague Times are over, but if they do, there's some very cool stuff there!