When you see “We Met in Virtual Reality” director Joe Hunting’s avatar in the virtual reality platform VRChat, he’s holding a little camera that lets other avatars around him know he’s filming. And it’s a good thing, because he filmed a lot.
“We Met in Virtual Reality,” an XTR film that debuts via HBO Documentary Films on Wednesday night, is a cinema vérité documentary feature shot entirely in VR. It’s a film that explores the lives and relationships of a handful of people who spend much of their time within the world and many communities of VRChat.
And just when you think Hunting is about to pull back the curtain and finally introduce us to the avatar’s real-life counterparts, he never does. Because no matter how many of the film’s subjects resemble anime teens with wild pink hair and dragon tails, blocky and colorful robots, or monsters that look like Pokémon, Hunting was committed to showing that just because these characters are virtual, that doesn’t make them any less real.
“That wasn’t the idea I was interested in capturing. I I knew from the very beginning of making ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ that I wanted audiences to connect with their virtual personas in the same way that I did; the same truth that I saw them in in the very beginning. I wanted to celebrate that but also on that note, leaving the authentic, live, physical world to the imagination,” Hunting told TheWrap.
“That questioning is what leads your curiosity throughout the documentary,” he continued. “I think without that, their stories might be lost. It’s about their emotions. It’s about what they’re dealing with and the way that they’re finding support. Their physical selves don’t really matter, but it’s their story that does.”
Hunting first began using VR in 2018, and his first several short films were likewise filmed within the world of VRChat. In those films, he would eventually show the real life person behind the VR goggles. But when the pandemic arrived in 2020, it made him rethink that approach, dedicated to telling a feature length film entirely within the world, trying to capture the moment of people stuck in their homes and finding solace within virtual spaces. He wound up filming and editing the better part of a year, this after first spending eight months just becoming embedded in various online VRChat communities.
In all, he would capture roughly 200 hours of footage, following around those who are teachers, dancers or simply those whom had met their significant others virtually before meeting in real life, if they ever got that chance.
In the film, however, Hunting settles on following the stories of just a handful of individuals. One, named “Jenny,” is an instructor of American Sign Language at Helping Hands, a virtual classroom housed within VRChat. There’s also “Dust Bunny” and her partner “Toaster,” whom Hunting met at a VR dance battle and who is one of the only people teaches belly dancing classes virtually. Hunting even gets to sit in on the VR wedding of “IsYourBoi” and “Dragonheart,” whom we first meet at a burlesque show inside a virtual night club and who get engaged and married over the course of the film.
What’s so surprising about “We Met in Virtual Reality,” however, is how true to the documentary form it feels. Hunting strove for a cinema vérité style for the film and found VR to be the perfect medium.
“You’re using a mix of observational storytelling with more poetic language to create a world and create a space that people can really escape and find themselves in,” he said. “And when you’re filming in VR, that’s not too difficult to do because the visual language is escapism, and it is completely otherworldly.”
Hunting is just one person, one avatar, and he didn’t enlist any other cameramen to follow his subjects around. Yet he’s able to capture strikingly framed cinematic moments within VRChat in real time from multiple different angles. That’s because, since everything is virtual, his body and his virtual camera are not bound by gravity or the usual limitations. His avatar can zip across the room in an instant to get coverage from other locations, or he can even levitate his camera to hover like a drone camera flying overhead. He even took pains to edit his audio in such a way that it resembles the overlapping tracks and crackly sounds in the way one would normally experience it if you were using a VR headset.
“I think that’s the the material that really gives the film its authenticity, is the fact that we’re seeing this world as it is and as it should be. And we feel the weight of the voices in the same way that we would feel it if we were there,” Hunting said. “So it was about working with that and not limiting myself.”
Hunting used an app called VRC Lens, which gives him a separate display within his VR headset of what his camera is shooting and that feeds back to a display on his real life desktop monitors. To further that documentary feel, Hunting was able to choose to shoot as if his camera was handheld, and he could adjust the aperture, zoom, focus or exposure to get the intimate, fly-on-the-wall look he desired.
“I could very easily capture moments in an organic way that you would operate a camera in the physical world. So it was about training myself on this camera and understanding the visual language they wanted to use in the film and in the intimacy of the subjects faces,” he said. “When it comes to the observational scenes, really feeling my my presence as a camera operator and as a cinematographer, being very close to the subjects and moving and pulling focus and not being afraid to make mistakes and look at the imperfections of the space and that people feel like they’re in it as well as observing it.”
Perhaps the truly innovative aspect of “We Met in Virtual Reality” however is how earnest, positive and heartfelt the documentary can be. Hunting avoids any of the low-hanging fruit about probing the obvious toxic underbelly that can exist within these online communities, and he’s clearly not cynical about the concept of virtual reality or people spending so much of their time living out their lives in a video game.
“We see so much media and so much representation already out there about how there’s negative aspects to VR. And VRChat specifically is constantly being burdened with negative representation in the media. So I knew that those questions, they already have answers,” Hunting said. “My intention with ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ is to show where we could go if we see this world with the same positive outlook as the incredible people we see in the film and use it for good, make educational communities and help each other and support each other. It is not about ignoring the negative aspects, but embracing the positive ones.”
“We Met in Virtual Reality” debuts on HBO on Wednesday and is available on HBO Max.
