Blackout

Intimacy among strangers in a darkened subway car

A generative volumetric documentary that places the viewer among real New Yorkers whose inner monologues surface during a subway blackout.

Period: 2017
Status: Complete / Archived
Form: Room-scale volumetric VR documentary

Blackout — official trailer

The project

You enter a full-scale subway car, put on a VR headset, and find its metal poles in the same place inside the virtual train. More than forty New Yorkers appear around you as volumetric recordings. Proximity and gaze open their interviews, while a Story Engine recombines the cast for each viewing. New recordings were added live during Blackout’s 2017 Tribeca Storyscapes presentation.

Documentary field notes

We recorded multi-hour interviews with more than forty New Yorkers, looking for the places their minds go between destinations. During Tribeca, we kept capturing people and adding them to the piece. Each visitor entered a different temporary group of straphangers and chose where to place their attention. The custom capture and live-production problems kept pushing the tool forward. That software became part of Depthkit’s lineage.

What others saw

“I saw the metal pole in VR and I grabbed it in real life. It was so natural, and so simple a gesture, but it put me right in that car mentally.”— Kelly Ohannessian, UploadVR

“Blackout was one of the most unique encounters I had at the Tribeca Film Festival.”— Devindra Hardawar, Engadget

Process study

A visitor wearing a VR headset stands inside a bright white exhibition installation. — Headset installation view

01 / 03

Alexander Porter — Director / Project Creator · Matt Wilson — 3D Generalist / Virtual Train Environment · Full installation team credited on the project page.

01 / Starting point
We needed physical landmarks to make the virtual subway car trustworthy.
02 / How it worked
We registered the virtual train to a minimalist full-scale installation so the structural cues, including the floor, seating, walls, and pole, occupied the same positions in both spaces. Room-scale tracking let viewers move through the car while volumetric passengers and spatial audio supplied its changing social world.
03 / What it opened
The real pole gave viewers one reliable point of contact with the virtual car. From that landmark, the floor, seats, walls, volumetric passengers, and spatial audio could occupy a shared scale around them.

Experience logic

Presence and attention organize the room

Presence

Volumetric recordings of New Yorkers occupy the room at human scale.

Attention

The viewer’s gaze determines whose private story becomes audible.

Variation

A generative Story Engine assembles a different temporary community for each encounter.

Films and exhibition documentation

The official trailer, a forty-second production film, and an exhibition walkthrough show the finished work, the live capture setup, and the physical installation.

Live capture at Tribeca

This short production film records the capture setup used to add new participants during the 2017 presentation.

Exhibition walkthrough

Engadget follows a visitor through the full-scale subway-car installation and speaks with the team at Tribeca.

Encounter inside the train

01 / 06

My role

Director / Project Creator

Scatter

Co-Founder / Immersive Director

I directed Blackout and helped shape the relationship among volumetric cinematography, physical installation, and its generative documentary structure. I wanted the captured people to feel present and the limits of the simulation to stay visible. The viewer shares space with strangers and carries the responsibility of choosing where to place attention.

Supported by

Funder
Supported by Cinereach
2014
Funder
Supported by the Tribeca Film Institute

Selected credits

Alexander Porter: Director / Project Creator
Yasmin Elayat: Co-Director
James George: Technical Director / Project Creator
Mei-Ling Wong: Scatter Co-Founder / Producer / Project Creator
Bil Thompson: Team
Charlotte Kaufman: Interviewer / Development Collaborator / Kickstarter Content
Cory Allen: Team
Cyndee Readdean: Story Producer
Giacomo Francia: Team
Hannah Jayanti: Co-Producer / Key Collaborator / Lead Interviewer and Editor
Jeremiah Joseph: Executive Producer
Jillian Morrow: Team / Designer
Kate Collings: Team
Kevin Watters: Developer
Kyle Kukshtel: Developer
Malcolm Pepin: Designer
Mark Fingerhut: Developer
Matt Shilts: Team
Matt Wilson: 3D Generalist / Virtual Train Environment
Neil Purvey: Developer
Nik Hill: Designer
Pat Goodwin: Designer
Stacey Holman: Story Producer
Tim Scaffidi: Developer
Zara Hayden: Team