Episode eight of the Tokyo Origami VR series, Through the Eyes of an Otaku, won Best Short at the 2023 BRNO Fulldome Festival. The jury wrote:
Despite being less than 9 minutes long, “Tokyo Origami: Through the Eyes of An Otaku” presents the audience with a wide gamut of emotions, beginning with amusement and veering sharply into heartbreak. At the same time, the medium through which the show is presented – an unmoving 360′ camera stuck in the middle of a small space, – seems particularly well suited to the story, adding to its trapped, claustrophobic feel and inviting even more sympathy for the main character. The result is an unexpectedly haunting experience.
Tokyo Origami is an eight-part series about life in Japan, commissioned by META for the Oculus Quest and produced by COSM studios. Robin Sip wrote and directed; I wrote the music. About an hour in total, free for Oculus users.
Otaku translates roughly as “at home” — enthusiasts absorbed in anime, manga, games, idols. The word started as an insult in the 1980s and has since been reclaimed by the people it was aimed at.
The episode was meant to be about that phenomenon. Then one interviewee turned out to have a backstory that swallowed the brief, and Sip rebuilt the film around him, hiring actors to play him as a child.
It opens in his apartment, so full of games he can barely move, sleep or eat. There’s nothing sinister in it — he has turned the obsession into a career — and the music plays along with the clutter, faintly amused.
Then the dramatisation arrives. He was abandoned as a small child, left alone in a house with money for games and takeaway food by an absent father, and it is the boy who finds his mother dead.
The score has to turn there, and it can’t turn too hard. Too much and you are instructing the audience how to feel about something they are still working out. The music goes quiet and serious and stays out of the way.
What the film is really about is a seven-year-old discovering he is good at something, and better at it than anyone around him, at the exact moment there is nobody left to tell. People look for somewhere to belong. That is not a small need, and it does not go away.
The series was shot spherical for the headset, but Sip framed it using techniques from fulldome, which is why it could screen in a planetarium dome at all. Deciding where the audience stands, and what they are meant to be looking at, is the whole problem in immersive — easy to get wrong in a room this small.
COSM’s interest is in building more of these theatres. Most immersive and giant screens still belong to museums and education rather than entertainment, and their argument is that a shared room does something a headset alone can’t.
Their Hollywood Park venue has since opened, next to SoFi Stadium, and it makes that case better than the argument does. Alongside an immersive extension of The Matrix, they sell pitch-side seating for football. Watching a game that way made American football exciting to me — a Brit who had never seen the point of it. No headset has managed that. The part that worked was the roomful of people it was working on too.