KALEIDOSCOPE VR FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS JURY PRIZE PRESENTED BY BROAD GREEN PICTURES TO TOMÁŠ MARIANČÍK FOR SIGHTLINE: THE CHAIR THE TRAVELING FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS FIRST-EVER JURY PRIZE FOR VIRTUAL FILMMAKING ARJAN VAN MEERTEN’S SURGE AWARDED THE 2015 AUDIENCE AWARD
Virtual reality agency Kaleidoscope in partnership with Broad Green Pictures, today unveiled the Jury Prize winner of the Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival (KVRFF). Presented by Vrideo, KVRFF is a multi-city tour showcasing some of the best in virtual reality (VR) filmmaking from around the world. Launched on August 22, 2015 in Portland, OR, the festival traveled to 10 different cities across North America. The Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival is a premiere event series exclusively featuring virtual reality films made by independent artists.
The Jury Prize was awarded to TOMÁŠ MARIANČÍK for his piece SIGHTLINE: THE CHAIR, a surreal experience that demonstrates VR’s ability to create new worlds.
Broad Green Pictures developed the festival’s jury prize to recognize creators in this innovative entertainment medium.
The jury featured six notable figures in the field of motion picture entertainment: Ramin Bahrani, (Filmmaker, 99 Homes), Victor Moyers (President, Production, Broad Green Pictures), Shari Frilot (Chief Curator, New Frontiers, Sundance Film Festival), Carolyn Giardina, (Contributing Editor, Tech, The Hollywood Reporter), and Lucy Walker, (Filmmaker, Buena Vista Social Club: Adios).
Arjan van Meerten’s SURGE received the 2015 Audience Award. In each city, attendees voted for their favorite film, which was tallied to this year’s overall winner.
“To bring virtual reality to new audiences across North America has been an incredible experience and we are thrilled with the success of our inaugural year,” said René Pinnell, co-founder of Kaleidoscope and KVRFF. “We were honored to include over 20 outstanding films in this year’s program. Sightline: The Chair and Surge exemplify the cinematic achievements possible in this new frontier of filmmaking. We thank Broad Green and all of the jury members for their support and partnership.”
Presented by Vrideo, the world’s most fully built out immersive video platform, each festival event involved talks and demos from top VR filmmakers and industry members. Audiences also had the opportunity to experience the full line-up of films on Gear VR equipment supplied by Samsung, as well as Oculus VR headsets. Many of the films featured at the festival can be experienced via the Kaleidoscope portal on Vrideo’s platform.
Kaleidoscope was founded in May 2015 by entrepreneur René Pinnell and former Industrial Light & Magic technical director Michael Breymann. As one of their first major initiatives, the Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival will highlight this rapidly developing sector of the film industry and the community of skilled and innovative filmmakers behind it.
The inaugural festival made stops in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, New York City & Austin. Films in the 2015 line-up were sourced from filmmakers all over the world, from the U.S. and Canada, to the Netherlands and Czech Republic, among others.
The 2015 Kaleidoscope Film Festival was presented by Vrideo. Major sponsors of the festival outside of the Jury Prize included Samsung, Altspace VR and Condition One.
For more information please visit the Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival website and the Kaleidoscope website.
For more information about the KVRFF jury, please visit kvrff.com/jury.
2015 KALEIDOSCOPE VR FILM FESTIVAL JURY PRIZE WINNER
SIGHTLINE: THE CHAIR
Dir. TOMÁŠ MARIANČÍK
Czech Republic| 10 Mins | Real-Time Experience
SIGHTLINE: THE CHAIR is a surreal experience that demonstrates virtual reality’s full potential both in creating a variety of worlds that feel real and creating realities that behave unlike anything you might know. In SightLine, the moment you shift your gaze the environment changes–a unique interaction that could point the way towards smooth scene transitions in cinematic virtual reality.
2015 KALEIDOSCOPE VR FILM FESTIVAL AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
SURGE
Dir. ARJAN VAN MEERTEN
Netherlands | 3:34 Mins | Real-Time Animation
Virtual reality music video SURGE is an abstract meditation on the evolutionary process and its relentless march towards complexity. Built with Unreal by artist Arjan van Meerten, Surge was produced over the course of a year with Arjan creating all of the music, animation and code himself. With thousands of downloads, Surge is currently the highest rated experience on Oculus Share.
###
ABOUT KALEIDOSCOPE
Founded in May 2015 by entrepreneur René Pinnell and former Industrial Light & Magic technical director Michael Breymann, Kaleidoscope is a VR agency that works with independent artists to produce virtual reality films for brands, entertainment companies, and the general public. Kaleidoscope’s mission is to empower independent VR artists by promoting their work, producing original content, fostering new talent and raising the visibility of VR as the new frontier of film and entertainment. For more information, please visit Kaleidoscope’s website and follow Kaleidoscope on Twitter.
ABOUT BROAD GREEN PICTURES
Broad Green Pictures is a feature film financing, production and distribution company founded by Gabriel and Daniel Hammond in 2014. The studio distributes both specialty and wide release films from in-house development and production as well as acquisitions and co-productions.
Broad Green is a fully-integrated movie studio providing filmmakers with unparalleled development support, production infrastructure, and marketing resources to execute their vision from script to screen. Through collaborative partnerships with both rising talent and established filmmakers, Broad Green shares incredible stories with the widest possible audiences, pushing boundaries and taking creative risks. The studio’s upcoming slate includes The Infiltrator, Brain on Fire and The Dark Horse, as well as Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Voyage of Time and his untitled project starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara and Michael Fassbender. Previously released films include the critically acclaimed 99 Homes, I Smile Back, A Walk in the Woods, Learning to Drive and Samba.
ABOUT VRIDEO
Vrideo is the world’s most fully built out immersive video platform, offering a suite of products that allows consumers to discover and stream immersive video across the web, mobile devices, and VR headsets. Vrideo is hardware-agnostic, enabling content creators to upload once and have their videos instantly available across the universe of VR and non-VR devices. The company, based in Los Angeles, was founded in 2014 by Alex Rosenfeld and Kuangwei Hwang.