Working in Visitor Services at the new museum means being part-concierge, part-docent, and part-guard; Director Scott Walker and actor Joel Edgerton were challenged in making the Bulger story, "Black Mass"; ABC News partners with the virtual reality company Jaunt to make VR more accessible.
Could Virtual Reality transform how we consume news?
Virtual Reality is becoming a more accessible reality.
ABC News is collaborating with a VR company called Jaunt to produce groundbreaking segments for the network’s news division. All you need is a smart phone or laptop, the custom app, and a simple cardboard viewing device that Google conveniently makes that you can buy for about 25 dollars. That's called Google cardboard.
ABC introduces the technology on tonight’s edition of “Nightline,” in a story about efforts to preserve antique treasures in war-torn Syria.
Jaunt's CEO Jens Christensen joined us today to talk about merging cinematic Virtual Reality with breaking news stories, plus the surprising ease with which one can use emerging VR technology.
Interview Highlights:
So, VR encompasses many different things, but what does Jaunt focus on?
We're focused on cinematic virtual reality, and that's the type of virtual reality where we record the world around you using a special purpose camera and audio equipment to deliver a realistic VR experience to the end user, one that's really the TV or movie-watching equivalent of VR.
And that would be something like your Paul McCartney concert?
Yeah, exactly, those are great examples of cinematic VR. For the Paul McCartney concert, we recorded at Candlestick Park — it was actually the last concert given at Candlestick Park — and we positioned VR cameras up on stage next to Paul McCartney, next to his piano, and in front of the stage, and you as the viewer can feel like you're actually right up on stage.
It's really a novel and interesting experience for people to feel this full immersion — you can look at Paul, you can look around and see the drummers, and you can see the audience as the whole concert is happening.
You're really taking that to the next level with your collaboration with ABC News to create a virtual reality application that augments some news stories. What will users get that they wouldn't typically get in watching an ABC News story?
We're very pleased to be collaborating with ABC News. They used our technology, our cameras and our end-to-end solutions, to record sites within Syria that are at risk. Obviously, Syria's going through a lot of political upheaval, and it was a great opportunity to record sites in Damascus that most people wouldn't have the opportunity to travel to and see, and by doing it in VR, ABC News was really able to bring a level of immersion that isn't possible when you're limited to a 16x9 rectangle.
In VR, you get the full, spherical view from a rooftop in Damascus, where you can look over and see a mosque, you can see the old part of the town, just by literally moving your head and looking around. You can be inside a temple and see the beautiful artistic work in the temple.
Do you think there's a way to use the technology for breaking news stories? We're in the middle of horrible wildfires in the northern part of California — could you take this camera into something like a wildfire and give viewers an experience of what it's like to actually be fighting a wildfire?
Yeah, that's a great example. If you watch a fire on TV, it's very hard to get a sense of scale. Even when people fly over them, you're still looking at it on a rectangle on the TV, whereas when you bring a VR camera to a fire, you actually feel like you're right there — you can look up and you can see the height of the flames, and you can get a feel for the imminent danger that people are facing.
Let me ask you a bit about how users will access the app. Do you need special equipment, like glasses or headsets?
There are various ways you can do that. Today, the majority of people using the app experience it on mobile, and the way to do that is to use a headset, something like Google Cardboard. Google Cardboard is essentially a headset, literally made out of cardboard, with some plastic lenses where you slot in your phone, and by using special software you can then get a VR experience that allows you to look all around.
You don't need to buy a high-end electronic VR headset and plug it into a computer — you can leverage the phone that most people have in their pockets today.
How The Broad trains its staff may change your experience of the art
Last May, The Broad (yes, that's what they're calling the museum) advertised for Visitor Services Associates: part-time staff who would greet and assist the public. The job listing asked applicants to upload videos of themselves saying why they’d want to work at the museum, and how they might approach a patron who was standing too close to a valuable artwork.
More than 500 people responded. Students, artists, actors, TV producers and retirees all recorded videos saying why they wanted to work at the new museum. And how they’d ask someone – very politely – to back off.
New Visitor Services Associates at The Broad. From L-R: Maggie Smith, Joseph De La Hay, Sabrina Gizzo and Trinity Singer (Credit: Gideon Brower)
Lauren Girard is Associate Director of Visitor Services at The Broad. She used the videos to winnow down the applicant pool, and then hired 85 people to serve as the front-line staff of the museum. The newly minted Visitor Services Associates will be on duty when the museum opens on Sept. 20. Alex Capriotti, The Broad’s Director of Marketing and Communications, says the group will handle several jobs at once.
“A lot of museums do have separate staffs in gallery security, in visitor education about artwork, and ticketing,” Capriotti says. “What we really wanted to do was have one body of staff that’s trained in everything.”
That means a Visitor Services Associate might start the day working outside as a greeter, then move to ticketing, and then take up a station in one of the galleries.
Lauren Girard designed the training program for the new staff.
Lauren Girard, Associate Director of Visitor Services at The Broad (L) and Alex Capriotti Director of Marketing and Communications (Credit: Gideon Brower)
“It’s really just being available,” Girard says. “You’d want to ask, Where are you visiting from? How can I help you?”
The staff will carry tablet computers to help them give driving directions or suggest restaurants. If that level of service sounds more suited to a hotel or a high-end boutique, that’s no accident. Girard worked for years in retail sales before coming to The Broad.
“Really, it’s not just being able to meet customer’s needs," she says, "but it’s really being able to anticipate them and to be able to deliver on things they didn’t even realize they needed."
If those things include a chat about the artwork, the trainees have that covered, too.
Sabrina Gizzo is one of the associates who’ve spent the past two months working their way through a self-guided survey of the 113 artists represented in the opening exhibition. She says there’s a separate study module for each artist.
“It’ll let you know what their ideas were behind their artwork,” Gizzo says. “Best of all, we have these videos that have interviews with the artist.”
And that original question? How do you handle someone standing too close to an artwork, or taking flash photos, or snacking? Girard puts her faith in something called “the authority of the resource.” It’s a rhetorical technique she says is popular with park rangers.
“Without making a value judgment, without saying you’re not allowed to do something, you just acknowledge what the person is doing: I noticed that you wanted to take a photo with the flash on— what you may not realize is that the flash can actually damage pigments in a photograph,” Girard says.
And if they don’t want to cooperate?
“I’ve actually never had anyone try to fight the technique,” Girard says.
One more thing that sets the Broad staff apart from the guards you usually see in museum galleries: no blue polyester blazers. Visitors Services Associates can wear whatever they want, as long as it’s all black.
New Visitor Services Associates at The Broad Antoine Girard (L) and Kim Orendor — dressed in all black of course. (Credit: Gideon Brower)
Talking 'Black Mass': Whitey Bulger, Johnny Depp and the benefits of being an actor turned director
The film “Black Mass” follows the rise and fall of one of the most notorious gangsters in U.S. history — Whitey Bulger, played by Johnny Depp.
The film follows Whitey Bulger's life in Boston to his eventual arrest in Santa Monica in 2011. This is only the third film made by Scott Cooper, who started off in Hollywood as an actor.
The Frame's John Horn spoke to Scott Cooper and actor Joel Edgerton, who plays FBI agent John Connolly in the movie, at the Telluride Film Festival about the challenges of turning Whitey Bulger's story into a two hour film, how acting has given Scott a better insight to directing and the pleasures of working with Johnny Depp:
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Whitey Bulger story is a very complicated one. Was it daunting to turn it into a feature film?
SC: Well it was daunting. Whitey Bulger and Billy Bulger and Connolly's story is easily worth an 8 hour long form series, but it was important to chronicle his rise and fall in South Boston from the mid 70's till he left in the 90's. His time in Santa Monica was very undramatic. He lived well below the radar, spent time in 99 cent stores, walking in Palisades Park, CVS pharmacies stocking up on cleaning supplies and socks. I mean it was bizarrely remarkable, but not dramatic. So I felt like we really focused on the fact that you can't outrun your past.
Scott, you started work as an actor. You probably worked with some directors who were pretty good and some who weren't so good. As an actor turned director, do you learn how you wanna direct by avoid the things that frustrated you as an actor or repeating the things that you found satisfying or encouraging by good filmmakers?
SC: Yes, indeed. Let's be clear, I had a very unremarkable career as an actor, but you do learn from certain directors and sometimes directors really have a very odd relationship to actors, almost adversarial at times as though they're only needed to move along the narrative or to really get across their larger themes of the film. I would say, honestly, the things that I've learned most about acting were my times spent with the actor, writer and director Robert Duvall -- whether doing hours of improv with him, several movies with him, how he is always searching for the truth emotionally and psychologically in a scene and will let an actor know that. Those are the sort of things that I have really learned from more than other directors I've worked with.
Can you have those conversations with an actor of a caliber of Johnny Depp? That it's not truthful?
SC: You can but probably not in the way that Robert Duvall would say that. Robert Duvall has earned that as an national treasure, but I revere actors and I really respect that they all have different processes. When you have a guy like Joel Edgerton, who's not only a remarkable actor but extremely bright and understands so much more than just his character, it makes my job much easier. With a guy like Johnny Depp, who has probably been in 40 films I'm guessing, he's seen a lot of different directors and you deal with him differently. Then you deal with Benedict [Cumberbatch] differently.
You deal with Juno Temple, who's an English actress, like Benedict, who is extremely well trained. Then you work with actors who are much more emotional and intuitive. So you really have to understand how they really approach material, but the most important thing, I think, is to make them feel safe, don't over direct them, only give them a little bit of advice when you feel like you weren't accomplishing what you need and just continue to revere them like I do.
JE: I think, also, Scott's at a point where -- certainly I know after seeing his first two films -- that there's this general excitement to go work for a guy like Scott and I think even back then and certainly much more now, this magnified idea, there's probably a ton of actors out there who would be excited to get a phone call to say, "Come and work." The pleasure for Scott, I assume, is that whole kind of A-team of actors that is the lineup of "Black Mass" is, as a director, there's not so much in need to teach anybody how to act. I think that great actors become better owners of their character than a writer ever would at certain point. The great job is just to guide them and I think that Scott was incredible at that.
Scott, you talked about that there were different kinds of actors that you have to work with. Joel, how would you describe your approach to acting?
JE: I'm some part head and some part heart. I like to get to a place very early into a shoot where I'm operating more on instinct. I think the lead up and the anticipation and the preparation is somewhat more of a cerebral experience than what happens later in the shoot.
One of the things that everyone will notice about this film and Johnny Depp's performance is the constant threat of menace. How important was it to thinking about keeping that constant sense of menace till the very end?
SC: Critical. Johnny Depp, as we know, is beloved by most people who see his films. So you bring a little bit of that to almost every film. I knew that Johnny would make this physical transformation. We had a lot of surveillance footage to look at. That really was not the thing that I was most impressed by, but it really Johnny's interior and phycological transformation because he's extremely thoughtful and kind. So to see him play this sociopath the way that he did was a remarkable transformation.
One of the things that I said to Johnny from the very beginning is, "I hadn't see a great deal of danger in his work and we need to see danger in every moment, but not the type of danger that feels forced, but that feels earned and that it comes from a very central place." Because he's very economical and very measured in his movements. It's a man who doesn't blink a lot in a scene. It's a man who's very comfortable in his own skin, who understands the distance between himself and another actor that perhaps those 18 inches that we all give one another, maybe he'll give them 12. All those sort of things are things we talked about.
I said to him, "I remember that Al Pacino once told me that when he was ascending to the status of the head of the Corleone family, that he would wear 20 pound weights on either ankle so that he would move with gravitas." And I said, "Johnny, you may not have to do that, but that's how we need to move."
Joel, you're acting as John Connolly, opposite of Johnny Depp's character, Whitey Bulger. Is there a specific day or scene that you remember that exemplified what you were trying to accomplish in "Black Mass?"
JE: On one hand, as the actor playing opposite of Johnny, I had a certain admiration for him growing up. Which conveniently, I could just carry into the film because my character had a certain pedestal relationship with Whitey, so that was sort of a convenient thing for him. I get excited when someone calls me and says I get to work with someone that I admire. I don't get scared about it, but there's definitely an exciting anticipating of being at the starting blocks.
So sometimes the first couple of scenes can be a little bit jittery and interesting, but I found that the scenes on the docks really interesting because it took on this weird relationship that sort of had a bit of a bromance to it in John's mind. I don't think in Jimmy's mind, but it felt like, Hey, we're pals and we're gonna make this thing happen together! Especially John [Connolly] as a character, who's such a chameleon with whatever he needs to be with whoever he's with, and had a real kind of frenetic energy at times and playing off of a very snake-like stillness and menace. And Johnny [Depp] was a good contrast of energy for me.
SC: One time, I invited Fred Wyshak to come by the set to see Corey Stoll portray him. He loved what Corey was doing, he thought it was fantastic. This is a man who's playing the federal prosecutor who brought down the Winter Hill gang and John Connolly. And he says to me, "Corey's amazing, but who's that guy playing John Connolly? Is he from South Boston?" And I said, "No, that's Joel Edgerton and he's from Australia." He said, "Scott, it's uncanny. He has captured the way he moves, the way he talks, the way he looks." He said, "I just can't believe how remarkable it is."
"Black Mass" opens nationwide this Friday, September 18.