Announcing 'Breaking the 5th Wall'
My new eBook - A Filmmaker's Guide to Immersive XR Storytelling - is really for anyone who understands the visual language of film and wants to understand how XR Storytelling is different.
🎺 Ta-Daaaaaaa! 🥳
I am delighted to introduce to you my new baby, finally entering the world after about 18 months gestating in my brain and on my hard drive. Awwwww. Kind of freaky for a baby if you think about it, but to me it’s come out as a beautiful and groovy little thing nevertheless, and I’m proud to come here and show it off and invite you all to tickle it under the chin and make cooing noises.
This isn’t just a baby shower, though - it’s a book reading too. In this week’s post, I’m proud to present the opening chapter of the new book to give you all a taster, and let you see what it’s all about. If you know my writing then you probably know what to expect. If you’re new here, then… good luck I guess. Let me know in the comments whether you liked it, and what you think.
Stick around to the end if you want to see details about the release date - it’s coming soon! And if you hadn’t heard, the book will be very reasonable priced at FREE for my subscribers to download and keep, at least initially. Grab it when it launches and get groovy!
Anway, grab a drink and some snacks, make yourselves comfortable. The reading is about to begin. See you on the other side. Enjoy!
In 2017, while working as PlayStation’s resident Immersive Experience Specialist, I found myself unexpectedly called into a meeting to speak for the first time with Vince Gilligan (writer and creator of the amazing, multi-award winning shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as you probably know). I mean - wow! An unexpected surprise, right? But also a sudden shock too . I came over in a wave of sudden nervousness. This was the guy who created Gus Fring, and dreamed up all the deeply criminal details of the Salamanca dynasty. I couldn’t help but feel a little bit like I was meeting the puppet master behind the Capo. The guy who opened the door for the man who knocks.
Gulp.
We did introductions, chatted a little, he seemed a really nice and disarmingly open guy. Soft, South Virginia accent. A great storyteller’s voice. He enthused about the possibilities of VR and was excited to explore what it might mean for storytelling moving forward. Vince already had a story he wanted to tell, he told us, and had it mostly plotted out.
But there were some remaining pieces of the puzzle he needed answers to, and he gently steered the conversation through and around, seeking solutions to a couple of key problems (we call them ‘challenges’ in the biz, of course) that many established creatives will inevitably find themselves facing when they’re starting to think about using Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality to tell their stories.
Here’s what Vince was asking, more or less: -
“How would we tell this this story to our audience immersively, but still make it ‘feel’ like Breaking Bad does on the TV?”
“And how can we let the audience play an important part, but not let them change the intent of the story?”
These are good questions to ask. Vince was smart to have honed in on these as being important issues.
This was all much newer back then, and there had been a lot less exploration of immersive storytelling at that point. But both of these were questions that videogames had already been tackling for a long time, and so these were problems I’d already been thinking about for a while in terms of how they related to VR. I’d already formed a pretty confident prognosis of the causes, and so I said something right then, to Vince Gilligan, which I still believe was probably the coolest and most perceptive piece of advice I’ve ever managed to pull out of my bumhole brain at short notice and without skipping a beat;
“The problem isn’t the story, or the ideas. The challenge comes from the fact that we’re no longer telling stories to an audience. Instead, we’re giving stories to users.”
Granted, you might not be impressed, but trust me, I was. I quietly congratulated my brain and promised it a cookie later. That was pretty smart for me. And what’s more, it turned out to be a quite prescient observation, because in the years since then I’ve spent a lot of time discussing these same challenges with clients who are coming from traditional mediums and starting to work in the immersive space, and helping them find the right way to approach it. Years later, I still believe this is the truth of it and that my brain is smarter than I give it credit for. It’s a good brain, yesitis! 🦴
We all know that the best stories, in movies and TV, documentaries and novels operate like perfectly structured and impeccably performed symphonies, taking the audience on a curated, composed, rehearsed and refined journey. The audience’s only job is to chill, sit back, open their minds and receive the narrative that’s being delivered by the creators. It’s lean-back entertainment, not lean-in. This one-way delivery means creators are, in theory, able to deliver the final cut of their work directly downstream to their audience as they intend it to be experienced. And this relationship has always been strictly seen as with creators as giver, and the audience as receiver. There’s no two-way dialogue, no audience participation in the art - except for the ways in the ways your viewers might be engaging with it internally. Let’s be real, Cinema and Television where the audience genuinely play a role in the outcome of the story are about as common as Symphonies where the audience are encouraged to climb on stage and start improvising with the orchestra, rewriting the sheet music as they go.
There’s sense behind this. As soon as you allow the audience to interact with the story in any way, you can expect things to go downhill pretty quickly. They stop being an audience, and become users. It’s an apt word, because they’ll try out every tool you give them, but like monkeys let loose in the workshop, they might not use them as intended. They’ll be just as interested to use those tools to mess up your storytelling and break the structure of your story.
And often those same meddlesome monkeys will also be performers in your story; untrained, unfamiliar with your material or your intended direction, with no impetus to read the script or stick to the outline — and who will often make choices that your characters, and their world views, would never entertain. Creators can never ensure the exact experience they might hope for. They’re too hard to control. It takes a lot of work to keep this rabble in time and playing the tune you want them to hear.
We want to enable and offer freedom, a degree of agency over the events, for our users. They want to interact with the story, that’s why they’re here. But we also have to keep that freedom within constraints if we want to retain any influence across the overall narrative structure that results. Users want the sense that they can make meaningful choices to the way the story plays out, but still expect a rewarding and satisfyingly structured narrative when taken as a whole. As you can imagine, it can be very tricky to keep that balance, and while there are plenty of approaches people have tried, successful solutions tend to be specific and individual, rather than generalist with broad application. And there are a larger number of examples where the solutions simply haven’t been as successful as the user would hope. Simply put, there’s no silver bullet solution.
And remember, that’s just talking about making a story interactive; once we immerse the player in that world as well through XR technologies like VR and MR, it suddenly adds a whole extra mega-tricky set of brand new challenges and considerations into the mix. Dependable best-practices and techniques are slow to emerge, existing solutions won’t fit, and while the audience for stories that are both interactive and immersive promises to be huge in time, it is currently limited in size, and skewed in favour of certain demographics.
So it’s not an easy thing to tackle. But the opportunities are intoxicating, the audience is growing year-on-year, the potential of virtual technologies grows ever broader and more fantastical, and the body of work from pioneering creatives who are bringing their unique skills and voices to the sector is blossoming impressively. It’s an amazing, vibrant creative space that offers unique aspects unlike any other art form. It’s a tool to put your audience directly into your stories. Directly into your imagination. The results can be unlike anything anyone has ever experienced. Never mind Roy Batty, I see things you people couldn’t imagine. Every day.
And XR means we don’t have to just imagine - we can all experience them for ourselves. It’s a hugely powerful medium.
In The Beginning, There Were Curtains.
And then Billy Blitzer said ‘Let there be a Fade-through-Black”
A quick recap of history, for perspective. Once upon a time, many movies were nothing more than recording of a stage play. Pioneering artists and technicians explored new ways of telling a story by creatively utilizing the constraints of the medium, and ‘cinema’ was born. They identified content that worked well in the medium, and techniques to warp time and space so they could tell stories more effectively. Cinema grew out of the traditions of theater, but it’s shape was defined by the strengths and weaknesses of the medium itself.
Cinema’s influence is everywhere, and there are plenty of lessons we’ve learned that have informed other mediums and forms. Every time you switch apps on your phone and you fade through black in the transition, make sure to give a little nod to Billy Blitzer who first introduced it as a way to communicate a scene change for moving pictures back in 1897, where he probably just borrowed the idea from Theater, where it was a practical necessity during scene changes. Thanks to the new technological advance of being able to record and a performance, then re-present it in a refined, best-case version, a cinematic scene change could happen in an instant, no curtains required.
It’s hard to imagine the impact of the early breakthroughs that film brought. We see impressive tech advancements frequently today, of course, but this must have been on a whole other level in terms of changing the game. It rewrote the DNA of presenting stories with actors. Theater could never offer an instant change to another story location in this way. And just consider what the technology unlocked in terms of enabling different viewpoints and framing to an audience used to seeing plays from a fixed distance and perspective. It was something altogether new, and it was so ripe with possibilities and appeal that it became the most dynamic, popular and commercially successful art form of the 20th Century.
100+ years later and the form has matured, pushed at its boundaries, and continued to grow in scope and possibility. And over time great solutions have become adopted as best practices, grown into unbreakable rules, been broken, been reformed in new and interesting ways, and birthed new forms and types of entertainment. Cinematic techniques and visual storytelling language are innately understood by audiences. If we see a fade through black, we all know what it means without thinking. We’ve seen that, and hundreds of other examples of cinematic language, used endlessly our entire lives since we were old enough to watch a screen. They’re a familiar language to us all, and even if we never get to speak it, it’s a language we understand and expect.
This means we’re at an interesting point with immersive storytelling. There are some things that translate well from existing media, Billy Blitzer-style. And there are some aspects that are out-and-out more versatile and impressive immersively than their 2D cinematic equivalents have ever managed, and suddenly take on an added ‘wow’ quality they didn’t possess in other mediums. But there are plenty of techniques and approaches that we rely on constantly in cinema and TV that simply don’t – and won’t – translate to XR mediums. In those cases we need new language, and new understanding.
The pioneers that are going to establish and shape this fresh ‘language of immersive’ for the longer term, those who are creatively pushing and prodding at the edges of the form to see what’s possible, are often those steeped in knowledge and understanding from existing media, looking how to apply their existing storytelling skills in this exciting new space. Pioneers like you, perhaps. And after running up against these problems and failing to solve them, they realise the fundamental differences of form bring significant challenges in translation of that story to the new medium. And at that point, they might seek help from someone like me. And they’ll ask a familiar question, one I’ve heard asked by at least one great storyteller before.
“Jed,” they ask, “how do we tell this this story interactively? Immersively? Can we even do that?”.
The short answer is Yes. You absolutely can. The first step in figuring out how to tell stories in these new immersive mediums is to understand all the key reasons why the mediums are different in the first place. That’s the long route you have to take before you can confidently embrace that short answer.
We, as XR creators, need to free ourselves from the trap of existing patterns of thinking that just aren’t going to work, and successfully unlearning those patterns only comes from a deeper contemplation of what’s going on under the covers. That’s hopefully what this eBook will provide over the next fifty or so pages. If that saves you months of wasted work and pulling your hair out, if it gets you to create stories and experiences that play to the strengths of these immersive mediums, if it gets you feeling that yes, you absolutely can, then I’m confident you will agree it will have been 45 minutes of your life well spent.
Why are we breaking the Fifth Wall with VR/MR Storytelling?
That’s the thing. Breaking the fourth wall is a phrase storytellers have long known, and one that viewers are becoming increasingly aware of these days - the familiar technique of a story’s character directly acknowledging the viewer from the other side of the screen. Think of Deadpool, Ferris Bueller, Wayne’s World or Daffy Duck. It’s perhaps an overused trope at this point, and perhaps something of a creative dead-end. It’s always a one-way conversation. Them-to-us. Eye contact. A nod-and-a-wink. A Ryan Reynolds performance. It pushes at the edge of a linear medium’s rules and conventions, but that’s as far as it can go. The audience has no way to actively respond, so it’s impossible to make it more than a fun parlor trick.
But interactive and immersive mediums like Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality and even Augmented Reality can just keep going beyond this. There’s no real concept of a screen plane anymore. The audience aren’t just watching a story, or being talked to by a character in that story. They’re in that story, they’re an active participant in it, and they share the space with our characters and events, interacting with them, experiencing everything first hand, and maybe even influencing the path of the story itself. That’s huge, and entirely disruptive to traditional storytelling.
So I hereby declare that a fifth wall was broken as we brought narrative into the immersive interactive mediums. And since that wall was a screen, I guess we’ve technically broken a window as well.
Ultimately, then, this eBook is aimed at helping those finding themselves drawn to the interactive arts from other mediums – be they storytellers, film-makers, artists, game makers or any other types of creative souls.
It’s here to make it clear what the differences are from the processes and rules you’re used to, how allowing your audience the freedom to make any choices can impact the experience, and to lay out the new limitations and boundaries that define this medium, and that your storytelling will need to conform to.
Essentially, it’s here for people who have been wondering about the same questions as Vince Gilligan, and didn’t know where to start.
So here’s a plan, man: Start with my free eBook. It’ll teach you the new rules of the game and get you ready to go out onto the field and start playing.
It’s arrival is imminent. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true! Unfortunately, client work won’t wait for my sideprojects, and with the 2025 Game Developers Conference less than 2 weeks away, I’ve been pretty busy. But it’s coming! And all my existing subscribers will get a link to download the whole eBook for FREE. Which is pretty good value if you think about it.
This here Realised Realities newsletter hopes to one day grow up to be a responsible reader-supported publication, but for now put your money back in your wallet / pocket / purse / sock / Swiss holdings account: it’s no good here.
If you’re not already subscribed, jump on board now, there’s still time. I’ll be sending out the links on launch day, which will be in the next two weeks 🤞, if the gods are willing and my current plate-spinning multitasking doesn’t all come crashing down in the meantime. Choose your very luckiest fingers you’re not using for anything else, and keep them crossed for me, then - because I’m super-excited to share it with you and see what you all think!
Until next time,
Jed
Jed Ashforth has been working in the games industry since 2002, and working with VR, MR and AR apps since 2010. He has too many headsets and not enough time. If you’re interested to find out more (or even bring him on board to help you) you can reach him, and check out more of his work and articles, at www.realisedrealities.com.
All of my illustrations and text - in fact everything in this newsletter - is achieved without the use of AI. I like writing, and I like doing graphic design. Call me human, but I like doing the fun bits myself.
