Home portrays a very universal experience of what intergenerational family relationships are like and how they feel, particularly when people get old. How did you come up with this narrative idea and why did you decide to create it in virtual reality?

Chih-Yen Hsu – When I received the invitation from the Kaohsiung Film Festival for this project, I had just wrapped my previous film, and it had been a year since my grandmother passed away. With her gone, the family drifted apart — the tradition of everyone regularly coming back to the old house to gather had faded away. 

At the same time, I felt lost about what my next film should be. Then one day I learned that, since the old house was government-owned, the government would be reclaiming it now that my grandmother had passed. That’s when I decided to film in the old house, pretend that Grandma was still there, and bring the whole family together one more time to recreate what it used to be like when we all came home together. 

The audience impersonates the grandmother of a big Taiwanese family, who is in a wheelchair and has some hearing and health problems. During the experience we witness family life and also how the rest of the family members treat this older member. Why did you decide to place the viewers in this position? Which emotions or thoughts did you hope to inspire?

CYH –As Grandma entered the final years of her life, the scenes that often played out among the elders in my family weren’t the inheritance battles or neglect you see on TV. Instead, they argued over what was best for her — from her diet, to home care, to choosing a foreign caregiver. Each of them had their own idea of what a healthy life for her should look like. Every time one of these arguments started, I would look at Grandma, who could no longer speak, and wonder how she felt, what she was thinking, and what she truly needed. So I decided to let both myself and the audience become Grandma, to experience what it feels like to be surrounded by so many family members who love you.

In Home, we experience a family gathering in the typical Taiwanese household. The physical space acts almost as an active character, portraying memory and tradition. How did you choose and design the environment to evoke such intimacy and nostalgia?

CYH – The setting is my family’s real home in Xinying, Tainan — a decades-old Japanese-style dormitory built during the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan. My grandfather worked for the government, and my grandmother was a homemaker. My father was born there and grew up in the old house with his two older brothers and younger sister. Later, as the third and fourth generations came along, the whole family would always return to the old house to gather during holidays and festivals.

So the approach to the set design was the same as with the casting: to restore things exactly as they were. My eldest uncle and aunt, who were deeply devoted to my grandmother, had stayed in Xinying all along to take care of her. After she passed, my uncle kept all of her belongings — her wheelchair, her medicine bags, her blood pressure monitor, and even every piece of furniture in the house. So everything you see in the film is exactly as the old house used to be.

We experience a lot of virtual reality artworks that use animation, a technique that seems to have a privileged place as the creative choice for most immersive experiences. However, you decided to do a 360° film for Home. How do you think being immersed in a filmed virtual environment particularly influences the audience?

CYH – “Who am I?” — that’s the question I always find myself asking after experiencing an animated VR work. Because 360° surrounds you and you can decide which angle and direction to look in, the sense of subjectivity is incredibly strong. So I instinctively designed the piece around a first-person experience. I began studying how editing, camera movement, and visual effects affect the audience in VR, and I wanted to hand the power of the experience back to the viewer by minimizing every element that might interfere with how they watch. That’s how the conditions of shooting in a real location and in a single continuous take came about.

There’s a feeling I really love: when the audience’s subjective experience, the character’s subjective experience, and the subjective experience the director wants to convey all intertwine, they create a viewing experience that is truly one of a kind.

The artwork features a big group of actors that take part in the story. Could you let us know about the casting and the filming process? What were the main challenges and how did you manage to face them?

CYH – Almost all of the cast are my real family members. Only a few couldn’t make it because of scheduling, so we cast actors in their place, and we chose actors who looked as close to my relatives as possible. Since my goal was to bring the whole family back to the old house and recreate exactly how our gatherings used to be, everyone already knew instinctively how they carried themselves, where they sat, and how they talked. I appear in the film myself as well. I remember checking the playback of one take — even though the image in the headset was very blurry, I burst into tears, because everything felt so real. 

Because of this, directing the performances and blocking wasn’t actually difficult. The real challenges were technical. The equipment back then wasn’t very advanced yet, and with a 17-minute single continuous take, the camera would easily overheat and crash. We also had to hide all the lighting, and figure out how to record sound for such a large cast. Those were the things that took the most time to work out with the team. 

Which XR artworks have inspired your work ? Which experiences and tips could you recommend to new artists willing to create using immersive technology?

CYH – To be honest, I’m actually an outsider to this field. Home was my first VR work. Later I made another VR piece called Where Is Noddy, a 3D character animation about a group of kids playing hide-and-seek, in which the audience takes turns experiencing the point of view of each child. What I want to say is that I haven’t actually seen that many works in this field. What matters most to me is whether I’ve found a life experience that I absolutely have to share. Once I find it, the form and the medium will gradually reveal themselves.