Hardcore Henry (2015)

Hardcore Henry is an interesting film not because it has a good story or interesting character development. But because it's one of the first main stream films that are shot for a VR experience. Now I didn't watch it in VR instead I watched it in the 1st person perspective but from what I've heard its not a very good experience, making the audience feel sick and disorientated. But this film was the first of its kind being classed as and experimental first person film. I think as film makers we still have along way to go with this kind of technology, but we are learning.

The director Ilya Naishuller went on to shoot a music video for the Weeknd being false alarm where it feels like they've improved using it but not mastered.

There's some BTS to accompany the film, mostly showing the technology, and the way they shot it was with a massive head mount that wrapped around the head like a box that had a go pro attached with it. One of the limitations of this was that the actors that were wearing the mount would have to extend their arms further and exaggerate their movements because the go pros can't get as close to the eyes as they wanted due to restricting their vision. This coupled with the wires that the actors would use to preform stunts would really endanger the actors, and for the audience would mess up their sense of surroundings.

In fact there's a point where shooting a chase scene one of the actors fell on top of an actress sending her face first down an escalator, where everyone thought she had serious damage. Luckily she got up and brushed herself off and said she was fine. This made it into the film because on the camera it was really good, but outside that was really dangerous.



I think it will be a good while before we will see a film created well in VR but we are making progression with VR projects like lazer tag which will help the development of VR later down the line.

Link To Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96EChBYVFhU
Link To BTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz3_57Y7ju0