WorkAlice, the virtual reality play
Alice, the virtual reality play
A virtual reality play, performed live by actors in motion capture — twenty minutes where cinema, video games and the stage meet.
The context
In 2017, narrative virtual reality was still finding its feet: most works were 360° films you watched without being able to act. With Alice, Marie Jourdren and Mathias Chelebourg set out to do the opposite — a play loosely adapted from Lewis Carroll, in which actors perform live in front of the viewer, turned into virtual characters through motion capture. DVgroup was executive producer, with Synergy Cinema as co-producer. The constraint was real: making a technical chain designed for a film shoot — capture, real-time engine, spatial audio — hold up in front of an audience, show after show, without ever breaking the illusion.
My role
As head of production at DVgroup, I ran the production of the project: budget, schedule, building a team that brought together real-time developers, art directors and actors, and a constant trade-off between the ambition of the staging and what could run reliably in front of the public. A large part of the job was getting two cultures — the stage and video games — to understand each other before they had a shared vocabulary.
What it changed
Alice was selected in competition at the first edition of Venice VR, at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, then shown at the Dubai International Film Festival, the Phi Centre in Montreal and Future of Storytelling in New York. It won Best VR Experience at GIFF in Geneva. For DVgroup, the project changed what the studio was: from a company producing immersive content for brands, it became a house able to carry an original work all the way to major festivals. It was one of the projects behind the studio’s growth from 8 to 50 people in two years. Above all, it proved that a video game pipeline could serve live performance — a production method reused afterwards, notably on The Horrifically Real Virtuality.
What was delivered
A twenty-minute experience performed live: actors in motion capture suits, characters animated in real time, 3D sound, and a stage setup designed to be taken down and rebuilt from one festival to the next. Around it, the operating documentation and the preparation of the crews who ran it at every stop of the tour.
What remains
Live performance forgives nothing: a technical chain that works on a shoot but not every night is not a technical chain. Alice taught me to design for operation from day one — reliability as a creative stance, not a constraint. That is exactly what I argue for on AI projects today: what matters is not the demo, it is what holds up in front of an audience.