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.

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Alien Rescue was also featured as Pick of the Week from top immersive journal No Proscenium on their November 12th, 2021 Podcast.

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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."

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We have a lot of exciting plans for 2022 so stay tuned!

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.

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!

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.

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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!!!

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.

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!

Creating avatars for Alien Rescue, featuring avatar designer Ultranique!

New team members, building out the planet Palnetter and the Kelosite Research Facility!

The MetaCrew hard at work building out the Kelosite lab, using NeosVR.

the metamovie project announces phase II: Alien Rescue