Jailbirds is a really well-told, three-part episodic animated VR piece that uses the spatial affordances of VR to tell a compelling metaphoric story about the escapist qualities of virtual reality. It’s a character-driven story set within a prison, and it explores themes of liberation in similar ways that virtually-mediated experiences in VR help transport us into another realm. The piece continues to evolve it’s cinematic storytelling style that encourages a 180-degree viewing experience of looking forward as there are many dolly shots and fast-past cut scenes that start to penalize the view if you look behind you too much. The series has been produced over a number of years, and it’s clear that this type of hyperstylized camera movements develop over the series as they received feedback from the audiences that they not only could handle the movement, but also quite enjoyed it. The end result is a delightful journey into this magical realistic realm of story that director Thomas Villepoux does an excellent job guiding.

I had a chance to catch up with him at SXSW where he unpacks many dimensions of the story and it’s development process (warning that this conversation contains a fair amount of spoilers), but also the process of working with voice actors who were also theatre performers and how they created a new hybrid workflow of embodied performance with voice acting that was used to create this style that has a unique blend of motion capture and performance capture, but with a distinct amount of stylization in the end result for how these 3-4 characters are able to carry the throughline of the story. Overall, this was the strongest immersive story in competition this year, and is a solid reference point that explores what a story like this is a lot more powerful when you’re immersed within the spatial context of these characters. I previously had a chance to chat with Villepoux at Venice for a piece called Mandala that he directed, and I will certainly be keeping an eye out for his future projects as he’s got a very distinct idea about how to use the affordances of virtual reality for immersive storytelling.