AD 2016 Q3

“The first time I met a sperm whale, it just blew my mind. But I was not able to adequately
describe the experience to my wife and my children. You have to live it. Since virtual reality
is always point-of-view, you are in the middle of the action. You are the actor.”
— Fabrice Schnöller, researcher/diver, The Click Effect
FRED BUYLE/NEKTOS.NET
SHOOTING THE CLICK EFFECT
By Sandy Smolan
Over the past 25 years I have made
films in just about every imaginable
environment: the Sahara desert,
the mountains of Peru, Nepal’s
hinterland, remote villages in East
Africa and others. But until recently
I had never directed a film underwater.
Last year I was invited to the Virtual Human
Interaction Lab at Stanford University for an
introduction to virtual reality (VR). The demonstration,
in which viewers put on a headset to see a fully rendered
360-degree film image, made me completely believe
I was suspended 30 feet in the air when I was still
standing on solid ground. Being in VR felt exactly like
being in the real world, and I was stunned by what
I had experienced. I immediately realized that this
technology had the potential to become a powerful form
of storytelling, and I couldn’t wait to make a film in this
new medium.
Around the same time, I read James Nestor’s book
Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean
Tells Us About Ourselves and realized that the story
of two freediving researchers studying the language of
whales and dolphins would be perfectly suited to VR.
Shortly after reading Deep, I partnered with Nestor,
the Los Angeles-based VR startup company Vrse (now
called Within), freedivers and researchers Fabrice
Schnöller and Fred Buyle, and the Sundance Institute
to produce The Click Effect, a VR film that allows
viewers to make a deeper connection to the beauty of
the world and to some of the world’s most intelligent
creatures: dolphins and whales.
The film follows Buyle and Schnöller as they freedive
deep beneath the ocean’s surface to record the “click”
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