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VENICE 2018 Industry

David Kaskel • Founder and CEO, Breaking Fourth

“A lot of the funding is coming through the manufacturers”

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- VENICE 2018: We spoke to entrepreneur David Kaskel, who started his VR company Breaking Fourth in the UK three years ago, as he showcased Lucid, a new VR drama, at Venice

David Kaskel • Founder and CEO, Breaking Fourth

David Kaskel started his VR company Breaking Fourth in the UK three years ago. At the Venice Film Festival, the company is showcasing Lucid, a new scripted virtual-reality drama for Oculus Rift that sees a daughter enter the fantastical mind of her mother, who has been in a coma. Breaking Fourth is one of a small selection of VR producers that operate out of Europe, in a market led primarily by companies on the US West Coast.

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Cineuropa: How big is Breaking Fourth?
David Kaskel: There are five of us based in the UK, and one in Australia, so we are a small team. In terms of production pieces, we have done a fair amount by VR standards. In addition to Lucid for Samsung VR, we have made Ctrl, Utopia 6 and a four-part series called Bro Bots. It’s all computer-generated (CG), although in Ctrl, we do have some filmed aspects within the CG environment. It’s all original content, it’s all narrative-based, and it’s all fictional, which sets us apart from other people in the field.

Is there a big VR market in the UK, or Europe, given that it mostly seems to be American companies at Venice and at other festivals showcasing VR, such as Tribeca, Cannes and Sheffield?
It’s definitely not as developed or well funded as what you see in the USA. We debuted our Samsung piece at the Tribeca Film Festival, and that was the first time I went there, and there is a much stronger ecosystem in the USA. All of the big players on the technology side are basically on the US West Coast – Oculus, Google and Microsoft – and they are the ones putting in a lot of the funding at this point. Samsung is an exception because it’s not a US company, but they do most of their funding from the USA. In Europe, and especially the UK, there are a lot of special-effects companies that are commissioned by US companies to produce certain aspects of their VR product doing more sub-contracting, but you will get fewer originating studios here.

So why set up in the UK?
I think in some ways, the UK is an ideal market to do VR in because the acting and writing are so strong here, and to get the equivalent in the USA, you’d basically need people in Hollywood and TV. The costs are different because the opportunity they have is different, and so it’s a little harder. Say I need a great actor, or I need a writer and I want to make sure they are proven in some way: it’s likely that British writers will have done so many theatre productions, and I think a theatre background is very helpful. If you have seen VR stuff, it’s very different from traditional cinema in that there is no frame and there is no cutting, and so it becomes more like theatre because of that. When writers are thinking of longer scenes without cutting, people with a background in theatre are more used to that.

Is there actually a market for VR? Mostly it seems to be shown at festivals for free!
Right now, a lot of the funding is coming through the manufacturers themselves at some level, so again it’s Oculus and Google, and they are making sure that there is enough stuff for people to want to buy the headsets. Added to that are some of the larger studios and production companies that are essentially interested in testing the water and making sure they are there when VR gets to the point where there is mass production of it. There is not, so far, a particularly strong marketplace, particularly for more cinematic types of VR; it’s growing, but it’s still a relatively small number of headsets that are out there, maybe 10 or 15 million, which sounds OK, but compared to cinemas and mobile phones, it’s tiny. The one area that seems to be doing well is location-based VR. There are events, pop-ups and, increasingly, arcades. I’m not sure if you’ve been to The Void, which is the Star Wars piece, but those kinds of things are doing pretty well, and people line up to experience them and spend significant amounts of money.

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