Missing Pictures: the film Catherine Hardwicke never shot

For every movie made, dozens of pictures remain missing forever. A VR series gives directors a chance to tell the story they were never able to bring to the screen. Here is one, with Catherine Hardwicke.

After Twilight Chapter 1’s huge box-office hit, American filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke tried to make an adaptation of The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, a cult book of the 70s American counterculture and a precursor of eco-activism. The project never got the support it needed, and the filmmaker accepted that she was never going to be able to tell the story. Then, Virtual Reality came to the rescue…

Missing Pictures: Catherine Hardwicke is one of a 5-part documentary that can be watched in any order. Although this is not the first documentary in the series but the third, I picked it because it was one of the first I watched and felt excited about. In fact, director Cahterine Hardwicke was also excited  when she was able to revisit the project, which became, because of the reluctance of the Hollywood studios, one of these umpteenth “ghosts of the garage”.

It’s not rare that film projects don’t make it to the screen, but it’s not always easy to make them appear using other media. One popular example is The Dig, which was a Steven Spielberg idea projected to be an episode of Amazing Stories and later a film but ended as a video game, published by LucasArts in 1995, because it was considered prohibitively expensive to film. Imagine if Virtual Reality existed as an option at the time, and what Spielberg and LucasArts could have done with their ideas and movies.

True immersion comes with a VR headset

Fortunately, we now have projects like Missing Pictures, which uses Virtual Reality to give directors a chance to tell their story, in a new media. The series is directed by Clément Deneux from an original idea by Joseph Beauregard and coproduced by Atlas V, ARTE France, BBC, PTS, Serendipity Films, Wild Fang Films and Giioii with the support from CNC, Pictanovo, Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Procirep-Angoa, TAICCA, Film Fund Luxembourg, RAPA and Ministry of Science and ICT (Republic of Korea).

The 11 minutes interactive movie to be experienced standing gives Catherine Hardwicke the chance to not only reveal how she dreamt of the project but also to interact with the characters of The Monkey Wrench Gang, as the story unfolds. Shot in volumetric capture, the VR experience allows us to listen as Catherine Hardwicke narrates some key points of the movie and why it was never made.

Missing Pictures: Catherine Hardwicke is a clear example of the potential that Virtual Reality has to tell stories, in this case stories that otherwise would not be shared. Although it’s available to watch on a flat screen, the true immersion comes with a VR headset, which allows for an immersive dive into the mind of some of the most interesting filmmakers of our time: Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming-Liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Lee Myung-Se and Naomi Kawase.

A unique documentary about the history of Cinema

The series, which represents a unique documentary about the history of Cinema, was produced by ATLAS V, the award-winning studio that brought Gloomy Eyes, Battlescar, Madrid Noir, Ayahuasca – Kosmik Journey to the world of VR. Missing Pictures series gives directors a chance to tell the story they were never able to bring to the screen.

With animations custom-designed for each artists’ universe, viewers can watch these visions come to life through a virtual reality experience. It makes the invisible visible by paying a tribute to these unborn works. The documentary, which has made it to a series of film festivals around the world, is free, a good reason, among many others, to buy a VR headset and discover this other way to explore the world of movies.

After a recent article published here at ProVideo Coalition trying to debunk the myth that you need a powerful computer to play VR experiences, Missing Pictures: Catherine Hardwicke is a good example, as are the other titles in the series, of what I wrote. The VR documentary, compatible with Steam VR, needs a Windows 10 computer with 8GB RAM and an Intel Core i5-7600K with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. It’s available to download, for free, from the Steam platform and Viveport.