Unframed Collection is a partner of Numix Lab, a touring event in Europe that each year takes professionals and experts in immersive creation to meet the cultural centres of the host countries. In 2024, Germany welcomed 250 people, with an intense week of exchanges and discoveries between Munich, Leipzig and Berlin! To mark the occasion, we met with Max Solomon, director and producer for the production company Black Dot Film.
Max Salomon is a multiple Emmy award-winning executive producer, writer and director of high-profile non-fiction programming, including for National Geographic or Meta. He has directed and produced over 40 VR films.
Producing VR documentaries for National Geographic
Max Solomon – My name is Max Solomon and I’m a director and producer. And I have a small company called Black Dot Films. And, before that, I was at National Geographic, running their long format documentary series, Explorer. So I spent five years, sort of at the nexus of National Geographic peak storytelling, science, archeology, politics, all the things that come out of the National Geographic brand.
M. S. – In 2014, I started a project of trying to bring immersive formats and VR into National Geographic. At that time it was very early. That wasn’t large enough or interesting enough for National Geographic to do on its own. And, then came Meta (then Facebook), which created a partnership that resulted with us creating the content that would launch 360’ imagery and what eventually would become the metaverse for National Geographic.
M. S. – I’m no longer a part of National Geographic, but as a part and as an outsider in that equation. Working for those two partners, the way that the funding work does, a lot of the rights retained on certain projects remain with us. There are some projects that are fully theirs, others that are fully ours. And then, of course, we developed further in other directions.
Immersive storytelling and non-fiction
M. S. – Back in the early days of immersive formats, people were obsessed with making immersive films, but nobody was telling a story. I come from a background of documentary filmmaking, and I’m looking for sense. If you do beautiful imagery, it has to mean something. If you’re flying around over Iceland and you can turn around, what do you tell?
M. S. – And that question has persisted. How do we tell a story? What is VR good at? I’m quite sure that it’s hidden in the name of virtual reality itself. It has to be virtual, and it has to be real, for it to work in virtual reality.
M. S. – What is it good at? It’s good at taking you someplace where you cannot go. In other words, some place it’s real. But I can’t go there, therefore it’s virtual. My experience of that place can only be virtual. When we started developing content as to what stories we wanted to tell, we started looking at what are those experiences that I am afraid to do or can’t do, but I want to do. There’s a barrier, and it can be enabled through virtual reality.
M. S. – Our first experience at National Geographic was with a wingwalker, a woman who strapped herself on to a red plane and went off into the sky. And we wanted to not just go on that experience of that ride visually with her, which would have been spectacular enough at the time. But we want to know who she is and why she does that. Who she is and what goes through her head, as she transforms herself from a woman who has a day job, running a grocery store.
M. S. – Then something happens, and she goes in front of thousands of people up on a plane and stands on the top of the plane, and flies upside down in the sky. What does it take as a person to do that? It was portraiture that we wanted to do through this technology, and it enabled us to sort of learn about the format at the same time, what works, what doesn’t work, how eye contact works, etc.
Further, higher, immersiv-er?
M. S. – From that, we then went further. We went higher. We went to the International Space Station, the first people to send a 3D camera with National Geographic to the International Space Station. We kept pushing the sort of challenges of things that we knew that we could do in traditional formats, but that nobody was yet doing in any immersive formats.
M. S. – We were the first people to attempt to film in an immersive format in 360 degrees at a 1000 frames a second, and we filmed with an eagle who you see exactly the biomechanics of flight. How it is that he pulls himself into the air as though it’s water, or as though it’s something denser that we can’t ever see, something that happens so fast. We were able to look around in this moment, faster than what your eye can otherwise see.
M. S. – The eagle sees exactly how he flies, comes towards you, and grabs a fish out of the water as he flies over your head. Those are things that I can’t experience in reality, but I can experience them virtually. That’s the secret of when we were looking for subject matters that align, what is it that I want to be able to see as a person? But I can’t then want experience. And what’s the story that’s tied to it?
Visiting the Numix Lab 2024
M. S. – The Numix Lab is such a different festival. I can’t even count the number of venues or the number of places we’ve been in, the number of days that we’ve been here. We were in all these institutions and my thought was “that next time I have to have roller skates just to get from one place to the other”!
M. S. – I hope that it can be preserved, because it makes it so dynamic and so energetic and so stimulating to run through museums and studios all week long. I want to see this, I want to come back. Rather than seeing people with slides talking about what it is, that they’ve achieved – which, you know, is interesting to a point – you’re actually seeing it not even just in a decontextualized place, but somebody brings a VR headset of an example of something that they’ve installed somewhere. You’re actually going there.