laura-wexler
Laura Wexler

Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill’s widely known 1961 alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier film festival. Rather than using normal alien tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial affordances of VR to present a symbolic representation of each of their experiences to highlight how vastly different they were.

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charlotte-stoudt
Charlotte Stoudt

Betty and Barney were an interracial couple in New Hampshire, and their purported encounter with aliens was a positive peak experience for Betty, but Barney had an opposite experience that Wexler & Stoudt attribute to his experience as a black man in the early 1960s. Inspired by passages of Barney’s hypnosis recordings posted online, Wexler & Stoudt expanded Hill’s story into an immersive narrative at the New Frontier Story Lab, and collaborated with director Angel Manuel Soto to bring this story to life in a 360 film.

Dinner Party is the pilot episode of a larger series called The Incident, which explores the aftermath of how people deal with a variety of paranormal or taboo experiences. Wexler & Stoudt are using these stories to explore themes of truth and belief such as: Who is believed in America? Who isn’t? What’s it feel like to go through an extreme experience that no one believes happened to you? And can immersive media allow you to empathize with someone’s extreme subjective experience without being held back by an objective reality that you believe is impossible?

Dinner Party is great use of immersive storytelling, and it was one of my favorite 360 experiences I saw at Sundance this year. It has a lot of depth and subtext that goes beyond what’s explicitly said, and I thought they were able to really use the affordances of immersive storytelling to explore a phenomenological experience in a symbolic way. It’s a really fascinating exploration of radical empathy using paranormal narrative themes that you might see in the The X-Files or The Twilight Zone, and I look forward to see what other themes are explored in future episodes.

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Here’s a teaser for Dinner Party

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Kent Bye

  • Seems very interesting to me.

  • Get Schwifty!

    Do you want to believe?

    • Arielle

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  • arielwollinger

    Too bad aliens have not yet visited us. This is all bullshit.

  • Warscent

    “Race in America” says it all.
    More false narratives forcefully injected in to VR media no doubt.
    VR media experiences are almost entirely catered to far left ideology.

    • Blaine Miller

      Why aren’t you trying to get a hobby instead of mouthing off on an entertainment forum? In fact, why don’t you just go cram something up your ass?

      • Warscent

        “why don’t you just go cram something up your ass?”
        LOL, typical leftist child-like response, but I digress.
        My comment is in correct context to the article and is in no way”mouthing off”.
        Do you disagree with my statement?
        Lets chat about it over a hot cup of tea. On me.

        • Tom Ross

          My goodness are you saying America has no problem with race???? I’m British and we see it on American news everyday (Britain has it too – so I don’t mean this as an insult, I’m white by the way) but you have to be in denial to think racism doesn’t exist – or a scary person that has no concept of reality