The No Proscenium Podcast

These days Leila Amirsadeghi is with a Senior Program Manager with the Mixed Reality Team at Microsoft for AltSpaceVR, which she joined after being part of the team for the PGA Award-winning BRCvr that brought Burning Man into AltSpace. She's also one of the creators of The Unreal Garden, a mixed reality experience that made its debut at OneDome in San Francisco during the Before Times, and that w...

A little over a year ago novelist Matt Ruff (Lovecraft Country) and journalist Blake Collier reached out to us. They were doing a podcast to promote Matt's new novel, 88 Names, which is set in a world where virtual reality is a lot further along than our own. They wanted to talk about the creative side of it all with us. It was a grand time. Now, after a most unexpected year and two seasons of the...

LA's Serial Killer Speed Dating , which put a little immersive horror twist on the speed dating format, has created not one but TWO online versions over the course of the pandemic. The first was the Zoom series, which adapted the live show to everyone's favorite video chat platform and the latest is a Clubhouse-based game show, which is now part of the Clubhouse CREATOR FIRST pilot program which w...

Javaad Alipoor is the co-director, writer, and one of the performers of Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran , an incredible multi-media theatre piece that links a constellation of Big Ideas into an incredibly human story. The docudrama starts with the real-life story of a doomed love affair between two of Iran's young rich elite, and then invites the audience to peel back the layers o...

Sherwood & Nottingham co-creator/director Nick Rheinwald-Jones and Supervising Creative Producer Shoshanna Green join host Noah Nelson to talk about the upcoming second season of the Robin Hood-themed alternate reality roleplaying experience. Show Notes SpyBrunch The Rundown The NoPro Discord Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the last session of this March's Spring Fling, we asked a few folks we knew had projects coming up to come give us a sneak peek, Comic-Con Hall H style. Here's the line-up: Paige Solomon of LA's Madcap Motel Actor & Creative Director Dasha Kittredge on OnBoard and more Stephen Butchko, Braden Roy and Danielle Levesque on    Welcome To Respite  VR Designer & Producer David Ruzicka of Hidden Wor...

Stand With Asians is a community call to action that kicked off with a day of protest and programming on March 26, 2021 as a direct response to the mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16th, which came after a year of rising violence and discrimination targeting the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities here in the United States. Carl Choi of GreatCo. reached out to us about putting togethe...

It's been a minute! Noah and Kathryn are joined by Patrick McLean (NoPro Chicago) and first time on the podcast Leah Davis (NoPro New England) to talk about what's been giving us hope of late. Show Notes The Window (Review) Into The Mist SXSW 2021 Diary Under The Freeways of Los Angeles The NoPro Discord Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: just a quick touch-base about the media created for the Spring Fling , our Discord , and all the various community projects that are ongoing including the work of Stand With Asians , LEIA , and Artizen's Black Realities Grant . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artizen is a community-powered grant platform that began as a project of Kaleidoscope, the immersive production studio that has navigated countless projects through the stormy seas of VR. René Pinnell, founder and designer of Artizen, talks with us about the new platform's plans – including becoming community-governed – and we get into some of the cutting-edge issues of creative technology to boot...

Courtney Nichols & Blakeshine are the co-founders of Of The Night , a new experiential party-in-a-box company that evolved out of Nichols' work in LA – the beloved Disco Dining Club – and Blakeshine's work on the music festival circuit creating large scale experiences.   Now they're taking a pandemic era project which delivered parties for two in LA and turning it into a nationwide service via the...

Working out of England, Lou Doye is an executive producer in the immersive field whose projects often mix immersive theatre and immersive tech. Projects where XR meets the boards. She's also one of my favorite people to talk to, having met while working on the board for the Artizen Transformations Grant. On this episode of the show, Lou and I talk the business of immersive and as always it's an ed...

Violeta Ayala's   Prison X   — Chapter 1: The Devil and The Sun , stunned us at Sundance this year. The Quechua film and theatre-maker blended lessons learned from those disciplines to put the audience inside a Neo-Andean myth via VR. ( Check out our enthusiastic review. ) This week's episode is a wide-ranging discussion with the creator about how she brought the work to life, and the powerful the...

Marlee Delia and Anna Mavromati are the co-founders of Shine On Collective , the LA immersive theatre company that made its name creating intimate horror experiences with a strong audio signature. Like so many others in the pandemic, Shine On had to pivot if they wanted to keep producing, and what that landed on came as a surprise. Their first quarantine experience was Welcome Home , a boxed myste...

This week we talk with VRChat worldbuilders CyanLaser and Fionna , who are both part of the team that created the award-winning The Devouring VRChat experience and are admins of the VRC Prefabs Community: a collective of creators doing innovative work in the user-generated virtual worlds of VRChat. This episode also marks the opening up to listings of Virtual Worlds on the Everything Immersive sit...

Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development for The Royal Shakespeare Company joins us to talk about ' Dream ' the upcoming experimental live-streamed performance that merges live actors, the Unreal Engine, and an audience feedback loop to create a first-of-its-kind interactive performance delivered to desktops and mobile devices. Show Notes The RSC's 'Dream' 'Dream' Press Release at NoPro Unreal...

Glen Neath and David Rosenberg, the co-directors of Darkfield Radio join us for an in-depth discussion of the art of spatial audio and audience-centered design. Darkfield creates some of the most amazing immersive work, and the delivery method is a pair of headphones.  This is a can't-miss episode of the podcast. Plus: Noah's notes on the Sundance New Frontier and the Apple VR headset rumors. Show...

Continuing our three-part series focusing on the emerging art form of VR Theatre.  Three panels of VR Theatre all-stars join us to talk about acting in, directing, designing, and producing live theatrical production in virtual reality. No Proscenium hosts Noah Nelson & Kathryn Yu are joined by special guest host Stephanie Riggs, with each running one of the panels as they tackle the core questions...

Continuing our three-part series focusing on the emerging art form of VR Theatre.  Three panels of VR Theatre all-stars join us to talk about acting in, directing, designing, and producing live theatrical production in virtual reality. No Proscenium hosts Noah Nelson & Kathryn Yu are joined by special guest host Stephanie Riggs, with each running one of the panels as they tackle the core questions...

This week we kick off a three-part series focusing on the emerging art form of VR Theatre.  Three panels of VR Theatre all-stars join us to talk about acting in, directing, designing, and producing live theatrical production in virtual reality. No Proscenium hosts Noah Nelson & Kathryn Yu are joined by special guest host Stephanie Riggs, with each running one of the panels as they tackle the core...

It's 2021 and the Sundance Film Festival is going where it hasn't gone before: ONLINE. Helping them get there is the collective wisdom of the New Frontier branch of the Festival, led by Senior Programmer Shari Frilot, which helped launch the VR Renaissance back in 2012 and now is helping shape the online social spaces that will bring festival goers from around the world together on a platform buil...

Welcome to "The Immies." The first-ever No Proscenium awards for Outstanding Achievements in Immersive & Experiential Production are hereby unleashed upon the world.  This episode features both our juried awards and the Audience Choice Awards, as presented by members of the NoPro editorial board and staff: Kevin Gossett, Laura Hess, Patrick McLean, Blake Weil, Executive Editor Kathryn Yu, and Publ...

This week Noah and Kathryn are joined by: Kent Bye of the Voices of VR Podcast; Todd Martens of The Los Angeles Times; Alexis Soloski , contributor to The New York Times; and Scott Stein , Editor-At-Large of CNET to talk about their encounters in the immersive world in 2020. SHOW NOTES Todd's Games of the Year list for 2020 The NoPro Audience Awards Nominees & Ballot LEIA's Draft Bylaws LEIA Offic...

This week we're honored to have Pete Billington, writer & director of Wolves in the Walls , the VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean's beloved story as our guest. Pete is one of the co-founders of Fable , which not only created Wolves , but are now pioneering in the realm of virtual beings. We'll get into how immersive theatre helped him break a creative stalemate, and the exciting experimen...

Creative technologist and author Stephanie Riggs (“ The End of Storytelling: The Future of Narrative in the Storyplex ”) joins hosts Noah Nelson and Kathryn Yu to talk about the upcoming 5th Wall Forum , which will bring immersive technologists and theatre-makers together on December 4th & 5th. Learn more in this week's episode, or cut to the chase and get your application in for the Forum's free...