The Egg VR
A VR retelling of Andy Weir's popular short story, "The Egg," exploring themes of life, death, reincarnation, and how they are connected.
Developed via 5th Wall Forum Connectors Program, Winter 2020-Spring 2021.
Creative Team: Jesse Carrey, Douglas Jay Goldstein, Stan Mathabane, Adam Rei Siegel, Mary Stewart-David, Kelly Tsai
In a year of immeasurable loss, confinement of quarantine has driven into isolation a society that together thrives by collaboration and community, one that celebrates its differences through exchange of knowledge and culture and laughter. The global village is universally bound together by the shared paradox that is our humanity: we are all born into a life sentence defined by its pursuit against a mortal truth, we are divined in wonder at its selfsame mystery.
Confronting this reality, the people of earth have demonstrated another truth: that through teamwork and caring for one another, we can protect the ones closest to us, and that by elevating our neighbor we elevate ourselves. It is by that exchange that we glimpse the eternal, the unknowable, yet undeniable harmony that links us beyond the reach of this plane from every beginning and to every end.
What you are about to see began as a seed of an idea begotten by a fellowship of strangers. Cooped up in our isolated cells, team Ellington laid an egg and hatched a vision— undertaking the challenge in the hope that it might spark some restoration of the rite of presence that theater holds space for, for self-reflection in congregation, and the communal catharsis from which we are all reborn.
The following scenes are a glimpse at a process, an awakening. It is an exploration toward how we might cultivate togetherness from solitude, plurality from selfhood, and presence from absence.
In the poetry of Andy Weir’s “The Egg”, it is Team Ellington’s privilege to present a concept for embodied storytelling that may not resemble a broadway stage, rather aiming to strike a truth beyond imagination toward a paradigm and platform for a first-person multiverse, driving innovation toward poetry; a virtual venue where every guest is at once the star in a constellation of stories, as well as a chorus in the universal horizon of possibility.
For more information please reach out to [email protected]
The Team
Jesse Carrey is a cross-disciplinary performer and storymaker based in Brooklyn, NY. His mission is to expand consciousness through storytelling. Jesse is the Co-Founder of Rebis, an immersive experience company, and creator of Those Before Us, an audio-immersive XR dance experience inspired by the history of Governors Island, which premiered in August 2019. Those Before Us aims to be brought to many other historical spaces that can engage the community through empathetic storytelling, dance, and state-of-the-art technology. Jesse is also a Co-Founder of North Star, a coaching and workshopping service for early to mid career writers. North Star applies tech world-inspired methodologies to the creative process of new script development. Jesse has also traveled the country as a lead immersive actor in The Macallan Manor, an invite-only immersive experience by Macallan. He is currently enrolled in General Assembly’s UX Design course to inform the development of live and digital stories that are user-focused. BFA Carnegie Mellon (Musical Theater)
Douglas Jay Goldstein is a creative technologist and immersive storyteller whose practices in XR development, game design, and virtual production draw from a palette of classical languages & literature as well as a lifetime in folk music. A master of 5-string banjo, his playing has graced stages near and far, from Dollywood to Broadway, where Douglas stepped out of the pit of Oklahoma at Circle in the Square Theater to devote his efforts toward earning his masters at ITP, NYU (spring '21). His work emphasizes embodiment, narratology, and cognition, seeking to breathe poetry into human computer interaction with reality as its canvas. In this past year Douglas has developed projects with CannesXR Garage Stories, BoseAR, NYC Media Lab, ASCAP Seed Lab, Snap Research, and the Electric Dreams Festival.
Stan Mathabane (they/he) is an award-winning Sound Designer / Composer / Audio-Engineer / Musician actively working in Augmented and Virtual Reality, Podcasts & Radio, Film & TV, Videogames, Live Events, and Theater. Their performance and design have been encountered around the world from the Dublin Theater Festival to onstage at Lincoln Center. A bicoastally-based offspring of South Africa and America, Stan approaches Sound Design from a complex perspective informed by a blend of psychoacoustics, jazz, and cognitive psychology (the field in which they hold their bachelor’s from Princeton University). Stan is currently a first year in the Yale School of Drama’s MFA Program in Sound Design.
Adam Rei Siegel
Adam Rei Siegel is an experiential and off-Broadway producer whose clients include Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, Walmart, Spotify, Yale University, Wayfair, HBO and more. Most recently, he has been the co-creator and co-producer of Reconnected, an interactive mentalism experience executive produced by Alan Cumming with almost 400 performances since summer 2020, as well as the co-producer of off-Broadway's The Other Side and associate producer on off Broadway's Beyond Babel. He worked as the Outreach Specialist for Dancers Responding to AIDS and Classical Action, both programs of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and produces the Fire Island Dance Festival and Hudson Valley Dance Festival. He is the Vice President of the Board of New York Theater Barn, Advisory Board Member of National Queer Theater , NextGen Advocate and Auction Committee member for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, graduate of the Theatre Resources Unlimited master class as well as a theater writer for W42ST Magazine and Broadway Roulette. @adamreisiegel
Mary Stewart-David is currently working with Digital Creativity Labs at University of York to develop a live Musical Theatre performance platform in WebVR. With a background in West End Musical Theatre production, she now works as a writer and lyricist across theatre, film and interactive storytelling. More information at DC Labs.
KELLY TSAI is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice includes music production, dance, devised theater, film, 3D art, new media, 360 video, spoken word poetry, fashion design / sewing, writing, and photography. She is currently a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature (Memoir). Her work as a spoken word poet has been featured at over 700 venues worldwide including the White House (under Obama), Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, and for multiple programs on HBO. Her work has been profiled by Forbes, NPR, New York Daily News, Huffington Post, NBC News, NY1 and more. (kellytsai.com, @kellytsai_nyc)
Our Pitch
Team Leaders: Adam & Mary
When asked what we wanted to explore, our team was inspired by the capabilities of technology to inspire empathy through storytelling. Our work is an artistic interpretation inspired by an iconic short story entitled “The Egg” that creates an embodied experience of what it could feel like if you lived every life that existed on Earth.
For our next steps, our team is looking to build out the experience with a residency program and have access to the technology to create more high fidelity assets with interactivity. The partnerships are endless with this story structure baseline and we look forward to using this technology to remind us all of our humanity.
We are seeking:
— Grant or Residency opportunity to build out a high fidelity prototype
— VR Developers
— 3D Modelers
— Partnerships with non-profits interested in developing an experience through this format
— Access to volumetric capture technology to experiment with how performance can be built within the experience
— Opportunities to develop a VR or AR beta version using cutting edge technology
Our Process
Team Leaders: Kelly & Jesse
We want the experience to incite empathy, wonder, and to truly expand the way we see and treat ourselves and each other. With the adaptation of the story as a base, there are many different ways to bring someone into this world and experience different lives that shift the way we understand our similarities and differences. When the audience steps back into reality following the experience, we want them to have an embodied experience of what the short story has done for millions; a transformed perspective on our relationship to self, each other, and our collective reality.
We shared all of our ideas and proposed elements that could inspire this experience.
We adapted Andy Weir's short story into a script where the audience is first person.
We crafted a storyboard that walks through all the possible visual, aural, and interactive touchpoints, which helped us narrow down how we could begin to prototype the beginning of this experience.
Our Tech
Team Leaders: Doug & Stan
Cross-Platform Narrative concept prototyped within Unity.
Can be adapted for VR, AR, Desktop, and mobile devices.
User interactions progress the narrative at moments.
