A Taiwanese virtual reality (VR) film won an award at an extended reality art festival in Paris, the festival’s organizers announced on Friday, with jurors praising it as a breakthrough in VR filmmaking.
Taiwanese VR film Red Tail Ep.1 (紅尾巴Ep.1) won the jury’s Special Mention Award at the fifth annual NewImages Festival, which ran from Tuesday last week to yesterday.
Red Tail Ep.1 is the first VR project helmed by Taiwanese animator Fish Wang (王登鈺), best known for his 2018 animated short Gold Fish (金魚), which won significant recognition including the Golden Horse Award for best short animation in 2019.
Alongside a strong production team to help build the movie’s VR world, it took Wang two years to create the film, an adventure story about a youth chasing a floating red tail in the sky to a fantasy city.
Jurors said that not only were the artistic aesthetic and fantastical ambience of the film mesmerizing, the way it was made was also a major breakthrough in VR filmmaking.
Juror Priscila Guedes said the film was given the special mention award because the jury agreed that they all saw a lot of potential in the project.
While there are technical limitations and challenging artistic choices that come with VR filmmaking, the jurors saw more possibilities for the genre after being captivated by the artistry and story of Red Tail, she said.
Speaking from Taiwan, Wang said he was grateful for the efforts of his technical team, which helped him make his first VR film, and that the honor truly belonged to his whole crew.
He also revealed that the full version of Red Tail was completed last week, and that he looked forward to premiering the project at the upcoming 22nd Kaohsiung Film Festival in October, as well as potentially entering it in the Venice Film Festival in September.
Wang’s win marks the second time that a Taiwanese submission was recognized at the NewImages Festival, after Bodyless (失身記2.0), a film by Taiwanese new media artist Huang Hsin-chien (黃心健), won the Masque d’or (Golden Mask) Grand Prize in 2020.
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