Dev Blog
April, 2024
Announcing our Spring 2024 Sponsors, with interviews, articles and appearances by Jason Moore
The MetaMovie is proud to announce our sponsors for the Spring 2024 season: XR4Europe and XRMust Magazine. XR4Erope is a pan-European association dedicated to promoting the interests of the XR sector both within Europe and on the global stage, and XRMust.com is an all-encompassing media platform dedicated to the exploration of new media storytelling and immersive design. • Learn more about XR4Europe • Learn More about XRMust
To mark this new collaboration, XR4Europe and XRMust interviewed MetaMovie CEO Jason Moore, with subjects focusing on leveraging the power of immersive VR to rehearse, create and connect with audiences around the globe. • Watch here • Read here
Additionally, Moore was also featured on the podcast Dr. VR, where he shared his experience creating Alien Rescue, with a focus on managing agency in a scripted/unscripted narrative format with large audiences. • Listen here
January 9, 2024
The MetaMovie wishes everyone a very Happy New Year! Here is our Winter 2024 Update Video, with our new performance schedule and tons of exciting updates and news.
November 30, 2023
The MetaMovie wins Rising VR Company of the Year at the 7th Annual VR Awards! We are thrilled and thankful to AIXR and the VR Awards Jury for selecting us from a field of ten highly successful and innovative VR startups. Over the past year our company has incorporated, added more staff and new cast members, developed exciting new technologies, and have continued to experiment with cutting edge interactive story techniques, mechanics and approaches. Our goal is to help establish a legitimate metaverse based industry for live performances, and this win demonstrates that we are on our way!
November 16, 2023
In this update video, Jason announces the MetaMovie’s move to Resonite, new Eyebots with hands, new Eyebot ‘laser maze’ challenge, our new Furry Road action car chase, and our new experimental “Role Reversal” show.
August 30, 2023
We are excited to announce that the MetaMovie is nominated for Rising VR Company of the Year at the 7th Annual VR Awards!
May 12, 2023
Alien Rescue wins the Human Human Machine Award for Best Multiplayer Game/Experience at the 12th International Games and Playful Media Festival.
“Alien Rescue is a thrilling space adventure where the in-game characters are controlled and voiced in real time by actors, leading to a magical experience once you realise that the world you are exploring is responding to what you do and say. It wants to encourage and empower you to have a voice in your own story — all while sharing it with others. A curated but personal narrative. An old premise in a new form, with immense potential for the future.” Festival Juror Chris Wigley
April 1, 2023
The ‘spotlight’ insights series invites winners from the 6th International VR Awards to discuss their achievements and revisit the journeys that earned them the honour of raising one of our prestigious trophies aloft on stage at de Doelen, Rotterdam. This week we are joined by Jason Moore, director and creator of The MetaMovie: Alien Rescue, which scooped our 6th International VR Experience of the Year award.
December 9, 2022
Alien Rescue Wins Best VR Experience of the Year at the 6th VR Awards!
July 12, 2022
The Academy of International Extended Reality welcomes new member Jason Moore to the Academy and shares news about our latest update and summer performance schedule.
July 11, 2022
Nicole Rigo and Christopher Turk talk about our new 2 Hero option with PJ and Wookiee on the VR Verdict Podcast! PJ and Wookie are good friends of the MetaMovie project and recently tested out our new 2 Hero show, and it was a blast - literally! Get some behind the scenes info on how the cast manages 2 Heroes at once.
June 26, 2022
In this episode, Jason shares all the latest news from the MetaMovie Project as of June 2022. Celebrating 50th performance, 2 Hero shows, updated Eyebot experience, automated drones, multi-cam system, interactive twitch commands and new performance dates.
April 8th, 2022
Thank you to Alex and Skeeva for hosting me on their Between Realities VR Podcast! We talked about the future of entertainment, Alien Rescue, Neos, and all things ‘metaverse’!
February 4th, 2022
A quick recap of 2021 and some exciting news about what we have planned for the MetaMovie Project in 2022!
January 15th, 2022
Just released: VRTrend Magazine’s profile and review of Alien Rescue! “To the Cast and Crew, you have done something absolutely amazing and I can’t wait to see what you come up with next!”
January 10th, 2022
XRMust Magazine has awarded Alien Rescue “Best VR Experience of the Year”. Thank you XRMust magazine, the judges, and everyone who voted for us!
January 3rd, 2022
A huge thank you to Agnese Pietrobon and XRMust Magazine for publishing this deep dive into the MetaMovie, live production in VR, the Metaverse, and more! We are a very indie project and exposure like this helps us spread the word and connect with more audiences. What a nice way to start the year!
January 1st, 2022
Happy New Year from the MetaMovie Crew! 2021 was an amazing year for our project, and we have many exciting plans in store for this coming year. Thank you to everyone who has come to our shows, supported us, and shared our project with friends!
December 3rd, 2021
It's been a busy year for all of us here at The MetaMovie Project, and as we wind down I'm happy to have good news to share with everyone: after a successful one-month run of shows at the Raindance Immersive Festival, we won Best Multiplayer Experience and took Honorable Mention for Most Immersive Game! During our festival run we hosted audiences across the globe and invited top VR journalists, industry leaders and social influencers to come experience Alien Rescue, and the response has been terrific.
Leading VR journalist Kent Bye says "Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences that I've had in VR.... the overall sense of social presence has been some of the deepest that I've had in any immersive VR storytelling or immersive theater experience that I've had...I HIGHLY recommend checking it out." Kent featured our cast and crew on his Voices of VR Podcast on November 24th.
Alien Rescue was also featured as Pick of the Week from top immersive journal No Proscenium on their November 12th, 2021 Podcast.
And the Publisher of No Proscenium, Noah J. Nelson, wrote this about Alien Rescue (full review still to come): "The promise of the metaverse is that we'll all one day get to be part of elaborate, fully staged immersive game/movie hybrids that let us play out our fantasies. Oh. I'm sorry. I meant to write "reality" instead of "promise", because that's pretty much what I did this weekend during a run of The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue. Of all the live XR/performance hybrid work I've experienced so far, this has been the closest to what I've always imagined it would be like. Something akin to a digital LARP with an infinite FX budget. Yet, it's not just the large scale set pieces built on the NeosVR platform, it's the cast bringing it all to life that make this so delightful. I had a ball. I won't be content until there are a thousand more things just like Alien Rescue."
We have a lot of exciting plans for 2022 so stay tuned!
October 1st, 2021
After two years of hard work, I am thrilled to announce that Alien Rescue will make its World Premiere at Raindance Immersive 2021, where we are nominated for Best Multiplayer Experience!
The Raindance Film Festival has been a champion of independent film since 1992, featuring classic indie films like Pulp Fiction and Memento. Raindance Immersive, the VR section, follows that same philosophy and is a perfect fit for this very, very independent project.
Raindance Immersive will run from October 27th to November 21st and will be held entirely virtually, as is fitting for a VR festival! Parties, panels, and awards ceremonies will be held in VRChat, and tickets are free to the public.
Alien Rescue will perform 12 (or more) performances during the month-long festival, with shows on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 2:00pm ET.
August 9th, 2021
Hooray! The Alien Rescue map is finished! After two years of hard work, our incredible Dev Team has constructed the massive Blackhawk Space Ship and the enormous Kelosite Research Facility. Massive congratulations to the team!!
Production Design by: Zach Harris Art Direction: Michael Biszko Sound Design: Justin June Lead Programmer: Raul Anthony Ybarra Technical Artists: Ryuvi & Christopher Turk Programmer: Sharkmare Technical Consultant: Benjamin "Enverex" Hodgetts
The Kelosite portion features five enormous rooms complete with highly detailed features and textures, dynamic lighting, 3D images, holograms, interactive features, hidden rooms and terrifying surprises. The entire system is layered together with a highly progressive “instant travel” coding mechanic which allows for instantaneous switching from layer to layer, which in turn creates a highly immersive experience.
And our incredible Avatar Designer, Ultranique (Chris McBride), has wrapped up his work, having created twelve original and very unique avatars including: the Hero, Z, Baxter, Cello, Zib, Bob, Globby, Quaal Soldiers, Quaal Drone, Onai, Elbee, and of course, the Eyebots!! What a massive undertaking!
Congratulations to the entire team! We are now running full run throughs of the show and hope to launch the project in the next few months. Stay tuned!
January 27, 2021
We’re excited to share this wonderful article on our project from Agnese Pietrobon and XRMUST. In it, Agnese and I talk about the important relationship between audiences and Alien Rescue. With this form of shared storytelling, where the audience is not just watching, but actually contributing and adding to the story, there are many wonderful opportunities and also many difficult challenges. Agnese and I explore ideas of agency, improvisation and unexpected moments, “letting go” of control, role playing, and much more.
December 23, 2020
Happy Holidays everyone! It's been a rough year, putting things mildly, but thanks to friends and family and (insert your personal self-care routine here), we are starting to wind down 2020 with a quiet but hopefully relaxing holiday season.
Despite the chaos of these times, we have made great progress on Alien Rescue: we've constructed nearly 80% of our sets and avatars, we're deep into rehearsals, and we had a great test drive of 20 performances at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, where we learned a lot.
Now, we are nearing the end of pre-production and we hope to have Alien Rescue up and running weekly performances in Neos by March or April. In early 2021 we'll be reaching out to all of our Kickstarter Backers on the Ticket tier with voucher codes.
And finally, we are happy to share one last video update for 2020. We talk about what we learned from Venice, we show off our new 'fast map' system, new avatars, pocket dimension, weapons system, and much more! Click the link below to watch!
Be safe everyone, have a wonderful holiday, and here's to 2021!!!
June 11, 2020
This month marks the One Year Anniversary of our successful Kickstarter Campaign so THANK YOU again to all of our supporters! I promise all of you I am working hard every day to make something incredible.
In this update we welcome our composer, Moritz Sebastien, located in Germany, to the project. Moritz has a great deal of experience scoring both film and video games, and his musical sensibility lines up perfectly for the dark, moody, tense and thrilling score we need for Alien Rescue. So welcome aboard Moritz! We will share some of his work in a future update, so stay tuned. We are now beginning rehearsals, and of course, building out our sets. We have about twelve immersive and interactive environments to create, from the massive Blackhawk space ship to the computer labs, alien med bays, biomes, and other areas of the mysterious Kelosite Research Facility. Each set features giant spaces to explore, beautiful lighting, props that our audience can interact with, and even some easter eggs and surprises. And, of course, hiding in the corners are all number of terrifying alien creatures to keep you in high suspense. In this update, we share another Blackhawk update and also show off the ‘Cage Room’ where our VIP and Fireflies will encounter their first real alien encounter.
May 13, 2020
MetaMovie Minute: Magic Mushrooms in VR! Every time Nexulan (our lead designer and Neos team member) shows me some wild and trippy new thing that Neos can do, I go back to the script and write it into the storyline. So yes, Alien Rescue now features magic mushrooms!
April 20, 2020
Creating avatars for Alien Rescue, featuring avatar designer Ultranique!
April 11, 2020
New team members, building out the planet Palnetter and the Kelosite Research Facility!
March 4, 2020
The MetaCrew hard at work building out the Kelosite lab, using NeosVR.
November 27, 2019
the metamovie project announces phase II: Alien Rescue