Adam Weingrod is the director of Spots of Light, a VR documentary that premiered at Venice Immersive in 2023. Telling the story of Dan Layani, a young Israeli soldier who lost his sight in combat in 1982, it’s a piece that, despite tragedy, shares a vision of life and the world filled with patience, passion and hope.
Did you already know the story of Dan Layani, the protagonist of Spots of Light?
I met Danny through my mother, actually! I come from the world of traditional documentary filmmaking and this is my first work in VR. It often happens that a friend or a family member talks to me enthusiastically about someone they know and says “You absolutely must meet them! A documentary on this person would be fantastic!”. And I am convinced that it would, and that there are so many incredibly extraordinary people in the world. But when you do a job like mine, with its complications and the commitment it requires of you, you can’t just like a story. It has to be something that you feel intimately connected to, that you really want to share with your audience. It doesn’t mean that the person you’ll be talking about is necessarily more valuable than all the others, but you feel that’s the story you want to tell and only if you follow it, your production will really work.
But, you see, my mother knows me better than anyone. She knows how I look at things and when she met Dan’s wife, Sonia, she knew that their story could be the right one for me. She sent me an article about them published in a magazine a decade ago and reading it I immediately recognized the strong dynamic uniting them. I decided to meet Danny… and that’s where this journey began.
Making documentaries requires in-depth research work. How did you proceed in this case?
I usually spend a long time researching, but in this case the research was the meetings with Dan, this gradual process of getting to know each other that lasted about a year. After all, this project is Danny: the hero, the character, the person. The first time I met him, it was a profound and human experience. He speaks very honestly about the pain he has been through but is also aware that he is living a full and extraordinary life. That’s why we also made an actual film about his story. In fact, I’ll tell you more: at the beginning, we weren’t sure if we would be able to produce the virtual reality work as well. Fortunately, in the end, we managed to develop both. And both, I must say, are having a pretty successful run.
Why the idea of creating a virtual reality work on this story?
Although this is my first work using this technology, I had already experienced VR at the time, at festivals and in several exhibitions. To be honest, it is not a world I am naturally attracted to. I don’t come from a technology background, I’m not a big gamer. My interest in the tool was more about the understanding of its power and potential.
But then, in 2018, I came across an inspiring call, developed in collaboration between two Israeli and two Canadian film funds. The project was called New Identities and wanted to address the theme of identity, in its broadest sense. Eight Israeli and eight Canadian projects were chosen to represent it. They received some funding and visited each other’s countries for specific festivals. The teams from Israel went to Montreal for the Hub Montreal and visited the Phi Centre on that occasion. And there, for me, it was a moment of enlightenment: I suddenly realized what was out there in terms of immersive storytelling and what could be done with it. I fell in love with it.
It was in that context that I met Sean Thomas Evans from HCXR / Occupied VR, our Canadian producer with whom we are in contact and plan to develop further work. That period actually made for some really nice collaborations and since I was hanging out with Dan at the time, the idea of being able to talk about him using these technologies as well came quite quickly. I realized that his story was the ideal story for the VR format. Of course I had already seen the beautiful Notes on blindness, a powerful work that was a huge inspiration for us. Although different stories, it showed us the way and made it obvious that our story could work very well in this medium, too.
What challenges did you meet, being your first VR work?
A big challenge, beyond the pandemic and the novelty that this medium represented for me, was the budget. In Israel there is almost no budget for these things and only one film fund (Makor foundation) that funds XR works, so what we received was an acceptable budget, but at the same time it did not allow us to go as far as we would have liked. The original idea, for example, was to open with a live action war scene – which was not possible for obvious reasons. So, we had to think carefully about the concept and figure out how to achieve the aesthetic quality I was aiming for while still valuing the central narrative.
Actually, the visual element was what scared me the most because the VR works I had seen before visiting the Phi Centre didn’t have this particularly exciting graphical rendering, and for me it was absolutely essential that Spots of Light was visually satisfying by my standards.
Everyone has a different approach and a different response to what they like and need, but coming from documentary filmmaking the visual result was an extremely important element for me. The problem I had with this production was that I didn’t have complete control over the end result: I normally have the possibility to play with the edit of my projects myself, try to play with them, see the effects. In this case the only thing I could really control was the voice-over editing, which allowed me to dictate the pace of the work. For the rest, we could have all the discussion we wanted and identify specific visual references, but in the end the developer and designer were autonomous and had to create something hoping I would like it, and me hoping it combined with my creative vision. I have to say I’m really happy that we succeeded. I had fantastic collaborators, both from Jerusalem: lead developer Jumana Saad and art director and lead designer Oury Atlan. It was extraordinary to be able to work with people like that, who I could rely on and who gave me amazing results. It was really an extraordinary team. On a personal level, which is always the most important thing for me, but also because they are all very talented people.
What’s the visual identity of this work, for you?
We started to understand the language of VR as we went along. In terms of budget for Spots of Light I feel we never had the opportunity to really maximize the style, nor the time to develop it as much as I wanted. But that’s ok because it was what allowed us to find the right form of expression, which is minimalist, but also expressive. After all, at the end of the day, the biggest asset of this project is Dan telling his story, a story that is obviously very strong and impactful, dramatic, and does not need much else to work.
Designer Allison Crank said in a recent interview how sometimes no interaction is better than many interactions, because what really matters is the core of a story: if you can strip the story of everything but keep its core, then you have done a good job. What do you think?
It’s a true statement. I realized this myself when I compared the documentary we were creating about the same story with the virtual experience. The documentary is longer, it contains so much more information! To make the VR more effective, on the other hand, I kept taking things out and out and out, because the tool is already overwhelming in itself and I did not want it to take away from Danny’s experience and story.
In the beginning there was a lot of pressure to add more interactivity and agency to the piece, because as much as Spots of Light wasn’t a game, the interactivity would have made the piece more marketable. However, I never really imagined it as anything other than a meditative piece where Dan’s voice takes you by the hand and accompanies you. So we tried to add interactions here and there but they were useless, they didn’t add anything, they didn’t serve any purpose, so we decided to remove them completely.
The documentary you created and the immersive experience are profoundly different in both content and construction. Was it complicated for you to switch to this new medium?
The reality is that unfamiliarity with this kind of technology made me more insecure than usual. I am used to having a hands-on approach in my work. Not because I don’t trust collaborators but to optimize production time – sometimes months pass from when you could start work on something to when you actually receive the funds to do it. To avoid this motionless period, over the years I’ve learnt some very practical abilities (e.g. editing scenes) that allow me to speed up the schedule but also give me more control over the work.
With Spots of Light, not only was there less room for error but I couldn’t even fully control the output and understand its effectiveness. Even when Venice accepted the project for the Venice Immersive 2023, I was surprised. It was there that I realized this piece really worked.
Now that I have immersed myself in this world I have learnt a few things, however. One is what we were discussing, which is the importance of minimizing to really bring out the content, the experience, the emotion. In a way it’s true for documentaries and regular films as well, because at the end of the day you try to convey an emotion and make your viewer feel something by telling a story that has an effective narrative structure. But in VR the thing is incremental, and I think that was the most difficult aspect for me to imagine: the tools offer so many possibilities and you want to grasp them all. Making the conscious decision to leave some of them behind can be complicated.
It’s normal not to know for sure what works and what does not, in this field, especially because the immersive language is, in many respects, still being defined.
My initial perception of this world was of a place dominated by technology… military tech, medical tech. But then, I started noticing the many artistic and narrative projects and their enormous impact. I remember at the Phi Centre we found works by immense artists like Laurie Anderson… Artists who did not necessarily come from the VR field, but for that very reason allowed me to understand its potential in a different way.
You see, I love traditional cinema, and I don’t think this industry will ever completely overlap with it. However, to really appreciate the potential for storytelling of virtual reality you need great artists and great storytellers. Great creative minds that move the technology and push it where they want the story to go.
So, working on Spots of Light really opened up new perspectives for me, giving me a taste of something different that I was still able to understand because of the contained size of our project. It made it much more comprehensible than a larger project would have done.
Can you tell us more about Dan? What did he say about this work?
Dan is an extraordinary person. I wanted him to experience Spots of Light, especially after the Biennale selected it, so I tried to think of the best way for him to try it. I ended up recording the playthrough of the experience on the editing software and then I added my voice explaining what I was seeing. I sent the file and literally 20 minutes later, he called me and said “Adam! This is incredible!”, all the while commenting on the different parts and all the single aspects…
This is Danny. This kind of person he is. Maybe not all his nuances can be expressed in a VR piece, but my personal experience of meeting him really opened my eyes to how he sees and lives the world. He is a person who is always doing something. A lot of sports, for example. He has climbed the Annapurna in Nepal, done triathlons, and joined the Iron Man. He’s a very inspiring man and a very centered one.
How did you convey his personality in Spots of Light?
I didn’t want Spots of Light to be a piece about a spotless, fearless war hero, able to take on anything. I wanted something more human, more real. To show how, despite everything, Dan is at peace with his life and loves his family so much.
Our country and region has gone through so many horrible tragedies, bloodshed and wars, that there are so many films about these stories that create heroes. And I understand, I really do, the need to look at things this way, but what I really hope is that we will come to a point when we will no longer have these war stories to make films out of, because we won’t have all those horrible sacrifices anymore…
It’s a complicated, dramatic period for many countries. How do you manage this time of conflict as an artist?
It is difficult to approach the current situation as an artist. I am happily surprised that Spots of Light is still accepted at international events, because there is undoubtedly a silenced boycotting attitude towards works produced by Israel. I understand we are currently unpopular but it’s sad to see festivals who once “hugged” Israeli filmmakers now are afraid to have connection with them because it might be the “wrong” thing to do.
I never wanted to make a work about war, but ultimately Dan’s story is a result of war and therefore this piece has a lot to do with these wars and conflicts. So, in a way, Spots of Light and the attitude of Dan might give some hope to people and I’m happy that venues that accept it and recognise peace, see it as a work that maybe isn’t specifically about the conflict, but still looks at a brighter side of life, despite these horrible wars.
What has your familiarity with documentary distribution made you notice about the distribution of immersive works?
There are two main directions for distribution that I can think of in regard to immersive experiences: distribution in the festival circuit and platform distribution.
I find the festival world similar for both sectors, and easier for Spots of Light, perhaps also because of the experience I have gained over the years and my collaboration with Kobi Mizrahi of KM Productions. Kobi is our Israeli producer and he is definitely a festival person, he frequents them a lot. This has allowed us to develop a precise strategy regarding the distribution of Spots of Light, which, starting with Venice – a very good start, if I might say – has certainly worked. I would now like to turn to the museum/exhibition sector, but I still know little about it, so we are considering how best to proceed in this regard.
The difficult thing about VR, however, is that usually at festivals or exhibitions you can have one person at a time experiencing your work. However, looking at the online platforms, such as the Oculus Store, they have a different problem: there is no privileged channel for narrative works like ours. All these experiences that come from the festival world tend to get a bit lost. It would be nice if there was a more popular channel, exclusively dedicated to these kinds of works, to offer them to a wider audience. I am sure one day it will happen.
The wider audience is, I think, one of my priorities for the future. I would like to find a way for more people to experience my pieces at the same time. I’m wondering what kind of productions would work better in this regard: should I create a multi-user experience? Or maybe just be looking at different venues such as exhibition galleries that accommodate multiple people in the same room? I want to achieve a more collective experience and time will tell what’s the best way for me to go.