Today's guest is a true pioneer in the burgeoning field of virtual reality theater: Deirdre V. Lyons.  She'll share her groundbreaking work in VR at the Ferryman Collective, such as her innovative productions like "Welcome to Respite" and "Gumball Dreams," and discuss the intricacies of producing entertainment ranging from films to webisodes.  Deirdre shares the challenges of onboarding audiences to VR experiences and the quest for viable business models in the VR space. 

Deirdre also delves into her collaborative efforts with universities to demonstrate the potential of VR in theater and discusses her participation in festival circuits.

Guest: Deidre V. Lyons, Co-Founder, Producer, Director, Writer, Performer, Ferryman Collective

Deirdre Lyons has been in over 75 Film and Theatrical productions throughout the West Coast. In L.A., she formed T.H. Espian Productions with her partner Stephen Butchko. Their first production was the Los Angeles premiere of Escher's Hands, a dramatic work by Dawson Nichols that played for a six-week run at the Lillian Theater. The two went on to produce and perform in the award-winning short film Katrina; a web series called The Fantasy State; a documentary; and the critically acclaimed short film Good Behavior, which won Best Short Film at the Temecula Film Festival.

In 2016 she began working with immersive theater productions, she was part of the original cast of JFI Productions’ The Willows, which enjoyed three remounts due to its popularity. Other immersive projects include the JFI Productions’ Creep LA shows Entry, Lore, Awake, Haus of Creep, and Creep (2021). She was the “Lost Princess” in the final chapter of Speakeasy Societies Kansas Collection, and with a Spy Brunch weekend event entitled Cold War Lounge: the asset. Deirdre has participated in multiple activations, including one-night launch events for the movies Ma, Birds of Prey, and The Conjuring 3. She appeared at Comic-Con promoting Sacred Lies and AHS 1984. And was cast in Tyra Banks’ immersive world Model Land.  

Her Virtual Reality work began when The Willows was filmed and released as a 180 VR film on the Amaze app available through Steam, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Samsung Gear VR, Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), Viveport, and Google Daydream. She also appeared in Freakin’ Weekend, another 180 VR film from Amaze Productions. In 2019 she joined the ensemble cast of The Under Presents, a time and mind-bending immersive theater experience in VR that was selected as a finalist for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media, and won the VR Awards Experience of the Year. She was Prospera in a Shakespearean production from the same studio, Tender Claws, called The Under Presents: Tempest, a theatrical and technological first: a live, part scripted/part improvised, immersive theatrical experience that audiences attend from home, using a virtual reality headset that is experienced as a one-person show to small intimate audiences.

She then started producing live VR immersive theater experiences with a group of creatives that formed Ferryman Collective, including her husband Stephen Butchko, starting PARA and Krampusnacht, the latter a finalist for the PGA Innovation Award, and The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite which premiered at Tribeca, went on to be an Official Selection of the 78th Venice International Film Festival, the Kaohsiung Film Festival, Anny Fest, Church of VR and is the winner of ‘Best Narrative Experience’ at London’s Raindance Film Festival, winner of XR Must ‘Best Live Experience,’ winner of 'Best ixi Experience' from Giioii as well as an ‘Immie’ for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Live Virtual Reality Production’ and a finalist for the 2022 PGA Innovation Award. It is currently in production for shows in Korea with Korean actors.

She is a teaching artist, speaker, and occasional lecturer at Chapman University. Gumball Dreams is Ferryman Collective’s fourth production, winning the audience award at SXSW for XR Exhibition Competition, it will have its international premiere at the 79th International Venice Film Festival and is her directorial debut.

Links of Note:

Deirdre: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deirdrevlyons and https://www.deirdrevlyons.com

Ferryman Collective: https://www.ferrymancollective.com

Instagram - ferrymanvr

Facebook - @FerrymanVR

Twitter - @Ferryman_VR

Am catless. I have to enjoy them virtually. And we're kind

of talking about virtual adventures today. So, Deirdre, thanks for joining us

today. And we've been talking about doing

this for a bit that I've been a fangirl of what you

guys are doing. Can you maybe start us out and talk

about what the company is doing and then what you're

doing? Yeah. Yeah. Woof. So

this has been kind of a

long and short three years, right? So we sort

of started out in 2020, and all of a sudden, we went

from not doing much, it's a pandemic

to creating some of the top VR

experiences in live VR theater and showing

them at some of the top festivals in the world. And we're like, wow, how

did we get here? So right now, mostly,

I put a lot of time into that, as well

as meeting and hanging out and

talking to different XR people, either in real

life or over

a video call of some sort, talking to people

who are interested in it, who are either in education

or wanting to produce themselves or just

wanting to learn how to do it. So I end up talking to a lot

of people about that kind of stuff, which I really enjoy. Tonight I'm going to

the west side digital mixer, and I usually go to XR women,

which is a really great group, on Wednesday mornings. And I just try to stay

involved in the community and chat because it's such a great collaborative community.

So that's what I'm doing personally and the company, while we're working

on so many things. So

we just finished doing PXR, which is a great conference in

Canada, because Canada pays artists to do things, which is

lovely. And so they have this beautiful conference that they started in, I

think, 2020 about performance in XR. It's held in virtual

reality. Yeah, all of it's in virtual reality. But this

year, they brought in a couple of places where people could put headsets on

and experience it that way. And we did two things.

We brought our show, find Willie, to that, which was directed by Witten Frank

and I helped produce it and assisted her with that.

But it's actually kind of a cool show because it came from

Korea. It was a Korean show developed by the

Gyoi Immersive Studio. They had this VR show

that they wanted to take to south by Southwest, and they're like, we need an

English version. So we ended up doing that for them

and taking it to south by Southwest. And so we were doing performances

of Find Wheelie with some Canadian actors. So it

was this really great collaboration of the US, Canada and

Korea. And then we were also doing a navigating the

festival circuit. So if you have a project and you wanted to

know how to navigate that. We did a sort of crazy

VR experience where people came into

VR, or you can watch on a zoom or a

YouTube, they were streaming it as well. But people all came in

and we got them into a space, and then we brought up the slides, and

then after every slide, we blew them up with macaroni and

cheese. I know it sounds crazy, but,

yeah, so each slide would get blown up with macaroni and cheese. And we did

this thing where the festivals and the conferences, you could only talk 1

minute each. And we had like different team members from the team

doing one slide to talking about south by Southwest or

Tribeca or Venice, and then blowing it up after a minute like, oh, sorry, I

didn't quite get there all the way. So we did that. And I've also

been part of the jury, along with my husband, Stephen

Butchko, who also does this crazy VR thing with

me and helped, started and co founded the

company with the other team members, Braden Roy,

Brian Tull, Christopher Lane, Davis, Whiton Frank. We're

all the ferryman collective, because there's a collective,

this group of us, and so we're during the Raindance

festival, which we will announce the winners coming

this weekend for Best VR

Short Film. Best VR Music Video, and best immersive

experience is the one I'm doing. I'm doing all three of those,

and Steve's doing two of them anyway, so that's crazy.

So many things. And you've hit on some of the interesting

issues of VR, both in terms of how do you find

audience, language, the festival circuits. I'd

love to come back to all that stuff, but I'd like you to walk

us through your history. A

was what was Deirdre's excitement when she was in high

school? Wow, you're going far

back. I am. So were you a tech person, a

visual person, deals person?

None of that? No, I was not. I was a performer. And we

can go back even further. I've been a performer since I was, like Teeny

Tiny, since I was very, very young. Started dance classes when

I was three, and then started doing shows in

my grade school. I think my mother heard from a teacher

that, oh, she really likes this. She has

a spark, which now,

knowing what I know, the talent

versus the idea of

growth is a little bit of more of an

interesting topic to me, because I always felt like I was told I was

talented, which was great, except for the fact that

within that, it's harder to

process failure. Right. And it's harder to process growth

and having a growth mindset, as per

the author of Mindset, Carolyn Dweck,

I believe.

Yes, that woman, she's fabulous. I learned

so much reading her book, but a side,

so she has a spark. So then my mother started taking me not only

to dance classes, but to plays. And I did stuff in school. And so I've

been performing since I was super duper Young, and that's kind of always what I

want. Let me ask you a related question. Was your mom

a performer? Was your dad a performer? Were they

closet performers that didn't let it out? Because for some

people, part of the journey step is that their parents were

already creatives or already performers, so they kind of got the

journey. And for some people, they

were aspiring performers. And so we're living through some of their

kids journey. Yeah, for sure. My

dad was not came from a farming background,

and then he worked for Mabel and then

onto at T and then onto Lucent Technologies. So

he mostly ran phones and started out climbing the phone

poles and moving up through the ranks

of a tech in that space. And

my mother was always a bit.

Like. She

gave me all of these amazing things, but she could have be distracted quite

easily. So for a very long

time, I was the focus of

her life. And I think that maybe she thought she

was a good singer and that she would have liked to pursue that, but

it was never anything that she actually did. So I

appreciated all of the support that my family

gave me growing up, which is not always the

case. So I'm very lucky. So you didn't face the, you

must be a lawyer, engineer, teacher, the

defined narrative channel. No. Gosh,

no. I was always on the path of

performance and such.

There was a moment where I was like, is this really what I want,

or is this what my mother wanted? And it was just something I always came

back to. So I continued pursuing it. Moved

from Seattle, Washington, to Los Angeles,

continued pursuing it here. Got here in 98. So I've been here a

long time and just knocking on doors, and none of them

are opening right. People are like, well, it's hard to get the part.

No, it's hard to get the audition. There

are thousands and thousands

of people who look just like you. And just to have the. You actually

need the right agent. You can't just have any agent. You've got to

have CAA for anybody to look at you because

there's so many. There's so many

know, people said, you got to produce your own stuff. So we started producing stuff.

We did a play, we did a short film, we did webisodes, we did documentary,

we did another short film. We did lots of different things,

and those went well, but never really opened in the way that

we were kind of hoping they would. And then I started

doing live immersive theater in Los Angeles with some of the

top companies in LA. So

JFI, just fix it Productions, speakeasy Society,

these are just theater that's taken off the

proscenium stage and put in any kind of a

location, laundromat, house, apartment,

school, warehouse, whatever location,

restaurant. It's a little like a murder mystery without the dinner

theater aspect to it. Right. I was going to say this is

an aspect of live performance that I would suggest most

people don't know exists. Yes, It's a niche. The

niche, but they know. So fun. Tony and Tina's wedding, if they were

in Los Angeles for a long time, that had taken over

not the Friars Club, but had taken over a facility in LA, and it was

a big tourist attraction. But even longtime LA people may

not be aware of the entities that you just commented on.

So what did you learn from that part of the adventure?

Oh, it was so fun. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Tony and

Tina's wedding was big. Some people may have heard of sleep no

more in New York. Tamar was a big, long running,

immersive theater piece in Los Angeles that was in

the believe. There was a big movement in immersive and

sight specific theater back in the 70s where people were

pulling things out of the theater and making a performance out

of different spaces. And

it's just so much more intimate. You

are actually talking to an audience member oftentimes having

a scene with an audience member, even though they don't know

what's going on or the line. So it's incumbent upon the actor

to inform them of that and guide them while you're

interacting with them. But I would suggest sleep no more. Didn't do

that all that well. Only went once, and it was like I got pulled

into a scene and I'm going, what the heck's going on?

And I'm not the only one. I had to go sit in a corner for

a while and put my head in my hands because it was just so

dynamically overwhelming.

It can be overwhelming. I have heard that before, although I haven't seen sleep

no more. So I don't know much about it

other than what I've read. I wish I could. It's

closing, so try to see it. Well, it was interesting also because I

know I was standing in line to go in and people behind me. It was

$100 ticket per person. Yes. And the people behind me had been

doing it five times already. So there is a bit of

the bring other people and repetitive factor

that some people are willing to do these interactions more than

once. Yes. Because most of the time there's different tracks

that you can go and experience. It's not usually just you've

seen the plaY, but did you follow Macbeth? Did you follow Lady Macbeth? Did

you follow the Rosencranst and Gildenstern?

Oops, sorry, wrong play.

It's just a niche of theater

that people, if they find it, often get hooked and

will and love it and will come back more and more. But it is

definitely a different experience because you are

interacting and immersed in a different environment than what you're used to and what your

brain says, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do here. I'm supposed to sit

in a seat and be quiet now. All right, I watch a play face. Forward

and then not have things happening around you.

And also often,

I would say hard to scale so that you

have a troop doing a show in New York, Los Angeles, San

Diego, wherever it is, and people know of it. But

there isn't a history for a lot of these, of scaling,

of having a scalable business model. Yes, they are much

more intimate in general. They are built that way because

people are looking for something different than being in the nosebleed section of the

Amundsen. People are looking for something different than seeing a gazillion

pre recorded things on TV and streaming. So having this

experience that feels intimate and profound and

different than what's generally out

there has got people excited and seeking it out. And I do

think it is a special experience. And I think as

we continue on with all of the pre recorded content

that keeps bombarding us, because I remember the days

when it was just network television, and then we got cable and oh my God,

look at all these channels. But now we got cabing and streaming and all of

these different streaming services that you can sign up for,

as well as TikTok and all the YouTube. It's

a lot. And sports, right,

which also looks at some of the similar issues, but not the repeatability.

So when was this timeframe?

So I was doing all of this stuff, and

I saw some of my colleagues working at a you

in a photo on Facebook, at a Facebook group. And I was like, I know

those friends. Those are friends of mine. What are they doing? BecAuse it said,

noah Nelson from no persinion says, if you don't know what they're doing at Tinderclaws,

you should check it out because it's really cool. I'm like, what are they doing?

So I emailed Samantha, or I actually emailed the company. I didn't know Samantha

at the time saying, do you need more performers? And she's like, yeah, it's the

holidays. Come work for us. So this is like November of 2019. I

was working on a couple of other projects, and

then, of course, March of 2020. I've

been working on this VR

game, for lack of a better word, which was going really well. The

concept is sort of like these players go into this

world that looks like a vaudeville stage and they can

see and see and interact with each other, but they can't speak.

And then all of a sudden, they run into what they think is an NPC.

And then the NPC turns to them and says, hello, do you want a

martini? Or something to that effect? Because there's. I'm going to

pause this a second, because we're saying, I always like

to back up and go, not everybody understands what we're talking about. So, Tenderclause. Yeah.

Which I fangirl Samantha's work. I just love, love, love.

Tenderclause is a virtual

reality game and environment

and building space, I guess, for lack of a better

delineation, where you go into something that looks like an orange and

brown tone shifting desert, and then you're going into.

You could either go into an environment where you just hang out or that you

could buy a ticket and be watching people be characters

in the space. So it was sort of taking that

idea that you would see non player

characters be player characters. So that NPC non player

character. It's not

assuming that I've got this automated thing person that

is just giving me lines, that it's actually sitting

through an experience with actors. So for a lot of people, Tenderclause is the

first time they saw something like that. Yes. I like to call them

the Cadillac of experiences. Yes. They were brilliant in what they

created. And the live actor portion

of the underpresents was only supposed to go three months. And

then because of the pandemic, it ended up extending to over a

year. And within that, they developed the Tempest, which was

a Shakespearean experience because you never knew

when the actors were going to show up in the underpresents. It was just very

random, but this, you could actually go to the theater, buy the ticket, and

see the show and interact with an actor, you and up

to six people. So that won a bunch of awards.

The underpresent won a bunch of awards. It was a

brilliant concept and executed beautifully that

ended up having to close. They're off doing stranger things now, which is

super awesome and Bravo for them for getting such great

IP. And that was my first foray

into VR theater as a performer. But when that shut down, it

was still the pandemic, and I was like, whoa, what are we going to do

now? And Brian Tull, who

is one of the reviewers

and fans of immersive theater and of the

underpresents, was like, well, I know enough about unity to

build something in VR chat. I hate that Halloween has been

canceled. Maybe we could do that. And Braden Roy was

like, I'll write it and perform in it. And I was like, okay,

well, I'll come in and I'll help you with the actors and the scheduling. And

I got my husband Steve to help as well. So the four

of us started pair, which was sort of a 20 minutes proof of concept,

went brilliantly. And then we moved into

Krampus Knock, which was like a month and a half later, which was like a

Christmas themed version of a VR theater production.

And that went well. And we submitted it for the PGA

Innovation Award. Thinking, okay, so we're going to set up this

for later. Sorry,

your cat is thinking about now. Well, and

Charleston was trying to take down your calendar back there. Yeah, she wants down.

She's going to jump. There she goes. All right.

This is an interactive conversation for those watching on YouTube. You

can watch the Cat. It's an incentive for those of you who listen to go

to YouTube and watch the cat. That's right, the cat getting down,

because it was time to get down now in Cat World. So that's what

cats do. That's what cats do. They have no sense of time. It's cat

time. So PGA is Producers Guild,

and so it's a finalist. Oh, very

cool. Thank you. We're like, so it's working.

Wow. All right, so this is

Peach. It was the Innovation Award. We didn't think we'd even get

considered, but we did. And then we're like, this is working, so let's move

on to something else. And I wanted to do something that sort of

highlighted intimacy. I wanted to take all of our lessons from the previous productions and

put them into a new production, take some time. And I talked to

a friend of mine whose show I had done in real life, in the immersive

theater realm, and I'd done the voice of the Shadow. I was like, I think

this would work really well in VR. Do you want to do it? And she's

like, it's a pandemic. Okay, let me buy

a headset. And off we go. So she came on board. We

did. Welcome to Respite, which was

about an hour VR piece. It was about an

adult going back into the memory of childhood. It deals with

dissociative identity disorder and what that would

have been like had you had symptoms of that as a child but not knowing

what it is. And there's this sort of beautiful

love from the parents that you feel, even though they're having issues.

And then there's also this sort of shadow monster in there

that's pretty scary. And I have to say, I think our VR version was a

little scarier than the real version because we were able to do some really fun

stuff with VR and take advantage of the fordances of VR. We were able

to shrink our audience member down to a child size avatar

who's, like, seven years old looking up at their parents, and over the countertop, which

you haven't done since you were that age. Like, it's weird because

your mind's like, I'm an adult. I'm an adult. And your body's going, but I

feel like a child again, and all these chemicals and emotions are

happening at the same time. So that was really successful. We went

around all over the festival circuit. It was really

well received. We were like, oh, my God. It worked way beyond

our imagination, and we were just so

grateful. And we're going to continue on with this story to the chapter

two and three and four is going to be about a three or four chapter

series. And Lindsay got pregnant. So happy

for her, but not so good for continuing with our plan of the

art theater along this storyline. So we

pivoted to a new show called Gumball Dreams, which I had this

idea for a show that was

built around worlds that already existed from one of our team members, Christopher

Lane Davis. He'd built these over the pandemic, and before I'd even met him, he'd

had these done, and they're just amazing and stunning, and I wanted more people to

see them. So I said, hey, what do you think of the script? He's like,

I love let's. And then we worked on it together to make sure it fit

his lore. He put the world together around the show, and then

all of a sudden, we had another show going around the festival circuit. It was

just, like, also really well received, and people loved

and deals with issues of death and

dying. Dignity. Death and

dignity. And then also acceptance and

gratefulness and joy and love and the

journeys that we are all on in this lifetime.

So that was really good. But to

sort of round this story up, because it does

continue on a little bit with. Then we went to find Willie, and now we're

doing him in Cany Alley. But to sort of round out sort of

more of the history of how we got to where we are now

is that I feel like I was set up perfectly for this, right?

I feel like both Steve and I moved to LA. We were both set

up perfectly because we'd both been working

in immersive theater, and we'd both been doing. Just took those

skills and moved them right into VR. And immersive theater,

in my opinion, just fits VR so

well as a platform, as a storytelling mechanism, and all of the

different sort of ways you can do immersive theater

fit in this magical and mystical

environment that you can create and do things that you can't do anywhere else in

the world. So that's sort of the origin story

to wrap it up. Very cool. I'm going to back you up on a few.

I just got back from a trip to Europe, and while I was gone, my

husband goes, I borrowed your Oculus Rift, and I

stuck it in my computer out in his man cave. And I'm going, you know,

I've got newer gear, right? I could let him use

my oculus two with my pink edging thing, because I've got my three

I'm working with now. But for a lot of people, they don't have any

of this stuff. So trying to help them envision what they're doing

for VR chat. So VR chat

is shockingly large in its many ways, and you don't need a

headset. You can just use your PC and wander

around just using the keys on your computer, but it's not the same

experience. But you've got lots of people hanging out,

doing lots of interesting, weird things,

creating lots of weird spaces, including things

I won't talk about on the podcast, but include

sleeping in the platform and doing all sorts of stuff. So you've got an experimental

space already that people don't need a headset.

So as a pilot space where there are

parts. So I guess part of it, my surgeon general's warning is

listeners do not go to VR chat without somebody

else with you who knows VR chat, because you could very quickly end up

with green scrub brushes chasing you around and all sorts of things going on.

So do go with an escort, but this would be an escort that someone would

be signing up to. I want this experience. So it's

an open space. It doesn't cost you money, really to produce

in it other than what you upload into it. So as a play space

for creatives wanting to do something like this, it's not that

you've got to find $100,000 spending for building out a tech

space, et cetera. You sort of expand on VR.

Chat is an early development space. Yeah. It's not made for

theater. So I can tell you that onboarding is

so challenging and difficult because it is like teaching people to

drive a car to get to theater. You're like, come to theater. See it? ThEy're

like, yes, okay. I'm like, okay, so now you're going to have to put on

a headset and download an app. And there's like, all these different steps. I mean,

in a lot of ways, it's not so different than how we learned to use

our phones because those are all apps as well, but

it feels different, and people are still learning about

it. And yes, not everybody has a headset, but maybe their

nephew does, maybe their kid

does. And they're like, I can actually see theater in this. I'm like, yeah,

you can. And so we're basically

teaching people how to experience this form of

theater, and that's difficult. Onboarding is always a

challenge, so we try to incorporate that into the storyline. We

try to incorporate that into make patient with them, helping them with

different ways of accessing it. We try to be

available on, like, a Zoom or a video call. So if somebody's like, I can't

figure this out, they can actually speak to a human. So

it's been a very challenging platform, but also an amazing

platform because unlike some of the other social VR platforms,

of which some of your audience may have heard of. So Verizon's

Mozilla hubs, what used to be Alt space rec

room, you can actually upload any avatar

and any world as long as it fits in within the parameters

of quest. If you're going for a quest world or

PCVR, and

they are great, they have

an incredible community. And

it's true, you shouldn't go into a public space because you will run into a

bunch of six year olds who are not supervised, and their parents probably shouldn't

have let them go in there in the first place, and they're running around being

like, so silly and as annoying as you can

imagine. So going in and finding they have now the groups feature

where you can find a group that would be of interest to you. Like there's

trip is doing a meditation group in there, and

that's really cool. And there's like

a beautiful sign language group in there that teaches

people sign languages. There's different people doing

Japan culture and language

classes and all kinds of amazing communities. If anybody has

a chance to watch the movie called we met in virtual

reality, a friend of mine was the director of that.

And that is shot entirely in VR chat. And it is

about, I mean, it doesn't say that in the film, but it is, and it

is about people and their relationships they had

mostly during the pandemic and

how beautiful this space can be when it's

at its best. So, yeah, it is a very challenging

platform. It's a bit like

Facebook, but in VR maybe kind

of like that, if you think of it as a social space.

And yeah, I'm happy to take anybody on a tour if they

want to see it. Well, I was going to say. So part of the opportunity

and challenge is VR chats. Very busy, lots

of things going on. How would people. I

take a look at some of the challenges with doing any type of content in

VR. That's discovery. So people not only have to get a

headset on, but again, VR chat you could go to on

your screen. It's just not going to be as engaging.

And you can hook up an old headset to your computer and use it. You

don't have to have the most current things, but

Discovery and then payment was two other folds of it that you

wouldn't walk in and big sign saying, come to your

stuff.

How are you dealing with discovery, ticketing,

community building? And then what are you building in now?

Are you still doing VR chat as a space? Are you using any of the

other platforms or building into the

new sort of spatial computing ish new tools?

I find that we'll start there because I want to also talk

about the same thing with the festival circuit, because I get the festival

circuit as an expensive

dance where you want to get

noticed, but your average VR user never finds you there

either. You get discovered and talked around. So can

you talk about Discovery and maybe the nerdy way to say and

business models? Right. So how does this work?

Because I know a lot of people who create stuff into VR, and then they're

going, oh, yeah, it was fun. So where's the people

and how do I create a business model, other than having to go

through quest and paying them 30%

of everything I get. Yeah. So right

now, we're just so small

and we're not making any money

that is. Well, we make a little bit. It's like latte money, right? Like a

little bit. And we are able to make sure our actors are taken care of

and all that. But it's not like we're not like we

have any sort of big

plans as of yet. We're kind of like

exploring this space. I feel like I accidentally stumbled in. Into

something that people got excited about and the timing was right,

and so now I'm just walking through doors that are open and seeing where

it leads. Right. Because I have that ability in my life, because

of the circumstances that are surrounding me to be able

to explore this platform. But it's still not my full

time anything. It's just this thing that we're growing in that we

hope will and expect to grow into something else. So the business

model, for the most part, is the same as theater, right. It's the

same sort of idea about

building your community. You could maybe do a subscription base if you

wanted to, if you had that many productions to do.

You can go the sort of nonprofit route and

get funds for your arts and things like that.

Some of theater companies I work with is they will do things

like pop ups for different movies and commercials

and stuff, and that will pay them a big chunk of money, and then they

can do the arts version of the stuff. We wouldn't be able to

do this right now if it was expensive.

So most of our team is just. We're just working it away with the

belief that it will grow into something because it's not there yet. The audience

isn't there yet. People who love our stuff will then go

off and look for other people's stuff and see their stuff. They become very

much fans of the genre, but there's not a lot of people out there doing

it. So the idea is to bring more. That

builds up the audience, that creates more interest. And that's

part of the festival circuit, too, is to get the visibility out

there so people can understand and get excited about and

find what it is that we do. And

we're so busy doing shows, doing

runs, doing things for universities that we actually don't have a lot of

time to even do, like, sort of a public offering

grabbed by this university and that conference to

do internal stuff. So that's kind of where we're at.

We're a little under the radar. We're still developing. It's not a

viable business model yet. We're still building

the audience, and I do think it'll get there,

but it's just creating right

now. Can you share what you're doing with universities?

Because I'm aware of educators in

XR and other groups that are trying to help

universities get up to speed in XR. Are you

working with people who are building programs or doing demos or what's the university

side? Usually universities will come to us and they'll want

to have us either talk or do a performance

or do a backstage tour or some combination of those

things. And we've worked with Aaron

Riley in Texas. We actually taught with Charlie

Fink at Chapman University doing a show

on XR performance. We've

done stuff for the University of know, different

cohorts from Canada who reach out to us and ask us

to know, can you do a show? And then a talk back?

So that's mostly what it has been thus far. Not

really building a show with a university, but showing them

what we've done, what's possible, and talking to them

about

how we got here, and why we're doing what we

do. Very cool.

I'll put in the show notes that there's actually a whole bunch of university

organizations that are all trying to find their way in this space. So it's

interesting that that's kind of a leading edge space. And Aaron's doing

cool things at UT Austin and other stuff, so

there's lots of cool things afoot, but a lot of

universities are getting their feet wet, so it's an interesting time to be doing

that. Yeah. You talked about scalability as well

and asked about scalability. And I would say that scalability in this

space is the same way you would scale in an immersive theater space.

So you've been to sleep no more. So you know how many people were there,

but you also know how many actors they had and how big this space

was. So we're not there tech wise,

so it doesn't matter if we had that many people who wanted

to come, we just couldn't do it. So it's actually a great

time to explore the more intimate immersive theater experiences

that only have 3510 audience

members and one or two or three actors. And

that's where we're at right now, is just sort of honoring the tech and

its ability and then teaching people how to experience

it and waiting for the

platform to grow interesting.

And it's at a time where in real life, immersive

experiences there's people playing with scale. So

fever and doing all of the fever things. I didn't realize

until I was just in Barcelona that they're from Spain,

that they've got all sorts of immersive stuff that they've got built

out and are scaling out, that are getting people thinking this is

immersive, which is going to potentially cause some interesting

issues that are very scalable concepts. Once you land it in

one city, then I can take that and duplicate it everywhere

with generic IP. So we

are changing the space a little bit about expectations.

And not everyone's done a nice, intimate, immersive theater piece

to know what that is in real life. So it's kind of an interesting bridge.

And then during the pandemic, before the pandemic,

people were larping. So live action role playing, so they

were being the characters and then having their friends

be the non player characters, too. So creating a narrative in a

physical space. So you do have a lot of people who are still kind of

playing in that space. And if you haven't larped from our

wonderful audience here, go play with LARPing. It is fun

and somewhat strange. And there's people who

LARP, you would never know LARP that go do that, who are actually

members of the Screen Actors Guild, so they won't let their LARPing be

photographed. That

could be a whole nother show, I'm sure, on weird things with

LARPing. So what are you then

doing for your living side of the equation? This

is a building experience. Are you acting

and doing other things? Yes, I'm part of the Willows, which

is an immersive

theater experience here in Los Angeles

that's come back like five times

now because people love it so much. And they've spent

the time building the company and building their reputation and building their audience and

the community. And so it's just very popular.

So I do those shows. I also

am assistant to a gentleman, and I help

him for sort of logistics with his company.

So I do that as well, which I do from home, which helps

to be able to have a more flexible schedule.

So those are the types of things that I do

to not only keep creative, but to make sure that

I pay the rent every month. Because being an artist

in America is very hard. It's a capitalistic based

society. We value

so much money, but not

necessarily artists. What we tend

to reward are celebrities

and their viewership that they can bring to

any product, whether that product be a nonprofit or

an item or a show. You know, that

is what generally people are after

when they move to Los Angeles to become an actor

is the celebrity, because that's really where you can actually make a

living, whereas most actor artists that I know

are having a very hard time making a living and

often have many side gigs that

help support their artistry. Hyphenates. You're a

hyphenate? Yeah. And a lot

of our guests have had multiple tiers of jobs that all kind of fold

into each other, both over time, but also at the same

time, to be able to pay for being a creative and to make that all

work. We're heading into a world

of

immersive imaging, new tools, and tech

that is letting the content be in a

real space. With the new quest three and

the Vision Pro coming out next year, does

that change you guys'imaginings on where you can take

narrative? Sure. One of our team members, Witten

Frank, has this really great idea and

script that she's working on for the idea of doing, like, a Seder

in a pass through kind of environment,

and she's working on fleshing that out and

seeing if she can get that to a point

where it's ready to get produced. But, yeah, that would be something

that would use, like, the pass through technology and, yeah, that

opens up so much more options in

storytelling and fun and for artists and creatives

around the world, being able to play with the idea of

bringing something into your space, bringing

the art, the play, the event into your personal

space, as opposed to us taking you and putting you on an alien

planet or something like that, you'd actually bring and

welcome all these things into your house and, like, how cool is

that? Or out in the world, as people have been taking the new quest three

headset and going to Disneyland and going to bars and

going to restaurants and taking the world in and seeing

overlays on the world, which, yes, keep reading the ask me

anything from the quest team going. We did not anticipate that. We did

not anticipate that pass through would go out into the world. So kind of an

interesting question. It's a little challenging for, like I had said,

they don't work great in the sunlight, so it can

be better inside,

but that's where we're going.

The idea that it'll be the sunglasses that Meta's

already put out, which just have, like, you can listen to music, you can take

a photo, but eventually the tech will get

fast enough, small enough that those glasses will be able to

do the overlays that you want to see, and you'll be able to

say, hey, I want to know what apartments are for rent in this

area. And all of a sudden you'll see all of the apartments for rent and

you're like, I really want to live in this area. I'm going to call these

guys. Right? Like the idea of being able to do that, or looking into a

car engine and saying, okay, what does that do? And. And how do I change

the oil? Because my dad never taught me that. Right? Being able to put

on some glasses and do that. But also potentially taking

theater with you, right? Taking theater into a forest, taking

theater into a different space, or people being. Choosing different

space overlays to be engaged in the theaters, which,

wouldn't that be. So cool, going in the forest and having some sort of

Arthur and the sword and the stone, or like

some sort of fairy play. Wouldn't that be fun? It would be totally

fabulous. So what have

we not talked about? You've covered a gamut of the great adventures

that you've been on and that the collective has been on. Anything

else that you'd like to mention before we wrap up?

I've learned so much in this

space. I've learned about visibility.

It's very important to bring

up what it is that you're doing and your projects in a space

where they get visibility, which is one of the reasons why we

do the festival circuits. Even though it is rather expensive to

travel to these places.

I say rather expensive. Yes, it's expensive. Let me just say that it's

expensive. They don't pay you to come. It's the other way around that

you're travel and bring everything with you and everything else. But

with our stuff, we actually often

have our actors working from home.

We don't go to all of the festivals that we've been in. Some of them

we can do completely, virtually. It just depends on the festival. Sometimes

they actually will pay a show running fee. Sometimes there's an award

that is associated with winning, and that's

something as well. And then eventually you start doing stuff and

people start noticing you. Then they'll ask you to come and

speak, and maybe now there'll be a fee with it. Not

at the beginning, but as time goes on.

So there is a great value to visibility

that I think is underestimated. And I

would encourage everyone to, whatever it is that you're

doing, try to get out there somehow,

go to places to network, talk to people,

write an article, get on the

podcast with our lovely Gigi here and hang out.

Do all of the things that you can think of doing to raise your visibility,

because that will help people find you. People who are looking for you want

to find you, and that's how it will help. Also, tech has

been a great gift for me because it's really hard.

It's so hard that you have to accept when things go wrong and you

have to go, oh, what do I do if my fellow actor falls off a

wiFi? And how do we pivot when, you know,

when things crash, you have to

start going, okay, I have to let go of this perfectionism or

this wanting to make everything right because you're holding on to some

fear that if it goes wrong, then you're a

failure or the project's a failure, or allowing

yourself to give yourself the gift of imperfection and trusting yourself to

pivot when things go

haywire and be like this

happens is the best gift I could have given myself

because it's allowed me to explore

and enjoy the

exploration along with the creativity and the work that we've done.

Very cool. So would you like to reach out to you? And

how should they reach out? You guys can be found at your website,

which is ferrimancollective.com.

Yes. Who would you like to reach out and

how would you like that to come in? So, yeah,

either through the website. You can also follow us on all the socials

because we do try to post fairly regularly. DM

us on those because I'm very bad at following comments.

We love to talk to anybody in this space because most anybody

in some way can help us. If it's somebody who's looking to create their own

project and just want to know what it's like, then maybe they

will create a project and that will get an audience and that will help build

the audience. If it's somebody who wants to

build a world or wants to do

development and stuff like that, reach out to us and

chat with us and see if it's a good fit.

Happy to chat with most anyone about what it is

that they're doing or to talk about

their passions and excitements. Right now we're so new.

It's all an experiment and we're all collaborating on this

together. Well, thank you for joining us. We'll put

ways to find you in the show notes and hopefully you guys in

the audience will go enjoy one of your shows in

your headset or computer near you. So thanks for joining

us. Thank you, Gigi. Have a beautiful day.