Visions de Réel Review: Normal Planet finds the intersection of the mundane and absurd in a virtual art museum
I love the subgenre of documentaries that are filmed within video games and virtual worlds. Last year, Grand Theft Hamlet was a definite highlight, and a couple years before that, I loved Knit's Island , in which a group of filmmakers embedded themselves in the post-apocalyptic game DayZ . Filming within these virtual spaces are often just as illuminating (or even more so) in the way they explore and reveal human nature. Maybe there's nothing more telling about us than the masks we put on to move through the world, real or online. The filmmakers behind Knit's Island - - Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse & Quentin L'helgoualc'h -- are back with a shorter piece, the 30-minute documentary Normal Planet, which premiered today at Visions de Réel. Animated using VRChat (itself the setting of another good doc, We Met in Virtual Reality), the film is a thought-provoking intersection of the mundane and the absurd, or "high" and "low" art, of reality and ...
