Virtual Haven Minidoc
September 2024 (407 Words, 3 Minutes)
Virtual Haven is a mini-documentary about the Trans Academy, a non-profit focussed on providing a safe community and various resources for trans people to learn, interact and help each other. The Trans Academy is located on the internet, mainly on Discord and in VRChat. Virtual reality and VRChat is certainly no stranger to trans people, even people who identify as cisgender still often use avatars of the opposite gender. This documentary interviews various people to learn about their stories and why they feel attracted to the virtual world.
This video was my final project for a course on making documentaries and is the first sizable video project I’ve worked on. It gave me experience with interviewing people and forced me to become less nervous about approaching people. It tested the experience with Davinci Resolve I’d gathered thoughout random smaller projects and let me use my countless hours watching YouTube as inspiration. It was beautiful learning about the various people I met and I enjoyed trying to compress their stories into a shorter video while hopefully conveying the weight of their stories.
Shooting video in the virtual world is an interesting experience. I had a lot of help from my partner Komino with the cinematography, especially with recording interviews and drone shots. VRChat provides a camera which can be used for recording separate from the player’s own view, but it is limited in its potential. It cannot really be controlled smoothly, and its drone mode has a limited range from the player. As such he created a special avatar with a third-party system called VRCLens which could be controlled using a bluetooth controller and a software to forward inputs via OSC. Recording audio was also less than ideal due to the performance of VRChat’s VOIP, therefore I asked interviewees to record their own microphone on their computer and then send the file to me.
I had to leave out multiple interviews for time and pacing reasons which made me feel sad as I didn’t want to discard their stories and effort, but there was a strict 15 minute limit on the video length and my first rough edit went way over it. Aside from that I’m happy with the result. There are some improvements I’d make in the choice of music and some transitions, and extra experience with recording in VR would hopefully allow me to record better video clips to use.
The course that I made this documentary for was a tough but fun one. Time was tight and coming up with plans and executing them in time often drove me to procrastination as I really did not know how to approach things. Not necessarily the fault of the professors, I knew ahead of time that I would struggle to do anything involving making decisions with my anxiety around social interaction pushing me to overthink every part. These struggles were part of the reason I chose to do the course, at it became a good chance to practice and become better in these areas.
Special thanks to everyone involved, especially Komino, my teachers Arthur Bueno and André Schreuders, the Trans Academy staff and everyone who allowed me to interview them even if they did not end up in the final cut. It was a lovely time.
Visit the Trans Academy!