Launched in 2025, the Workshop for the Immersive Storyteller course has Johns Hopkins students taking a deep dive into emerging technologies to expand and refine their storytelling capabilities and enhance their artistic expression in the growing field of virtual reality filmmaking.
Designed by Jason Gray, the course allows aspiring filmmakers to explore new media to tell cinematic and interactive stories. They will insert real-time technology into their work through a focus on advanced 360-degree virtual reality production, cinematics, and game engine development. This course builds on Foundations of Immersive Storytelling, an introductory course within the Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies concentration of the MA in Film and Media program. The ISET concentration introduces students to the concepts of VR, augmented reality, photogrammetry, and other keystone technologies.
“This new course has three components,” said Gray, a former student and now lecturer in the program. “First, we take a deeper dive into advanced virtual reality filmmaking by adding spatial audio. Then we go into cinematics and game engine, a software framework for the development of video games, using a 3D industry program called Unreal used to create visual effects, animations, and virtual environments. We end with an introduction to game design. Each component covers about four weeks, and at the end of each section, there is a culminating project that reinforces the workflow for that particular technology and provides an end-product to enhance the students’ portfolios.”
Gray is hopeful that the hands-on, practical approach to every-changing technologies gives his students practical experience that will position them for work in the field. In addition to all the applications, the course provides information on how to break into and navigate ISET, how to not only secure clients but also have them understand the benefits of the technology, and to create customized projects that incorporate multiple technologies.
“In this field, people are creating assets for the film industry, and in jobs that might not yet exist,” he said. “I am teaching students to use a 360-degree camera, so they could be a cinematographer. You are learning about spatial audio, which could lead to job opportunities in music, because music is now being produced in 360. Since VR filming is very specialized, you could find work at museums or something like The Sphere in Las Vegas and in fields that create simulations or training videos. The opportunities to insert the creativity that ISET provides, as the technology becomes more and more accessible, is exciting.”
Gray was inspired to create this course by a life-changing encounter with VR during his own graduate studies.
“As a second-year student in the program, I experienced The Last Goodbye,” said Gray of the 17-minute award-winning VR film produced in 2017. It transports viewers into the Nazi death camp Majdanek in Poland with Pinchas Gutter, the only member of his family of four to survive the Holocaust. The fully immersive experience enables viewers to virtually walk with Gutter as he travels and recounts his heartbreaking story of suffering, loss, and survival in fully life-sized projections of the camp, including through the railway car, gas chamber, shower room, and barracks of the camp.
“I had never experienced a film like that,” he said. “It was so moving. That experience changed everything. The next day, I contacted my adviser and told him I was changing from a business track to the concentration in ISET, and I never looked back. The experience did more than just give me a new way to create and tell stories. It also changed the way I think about everything.
“There are more than three, four, or five ways to tell a story,” Gray said. “The most important thing is to know what story it is you want to tell. Once you have that, we can teach you the technology to enhance the storytelling and to allow people to experience your story in completely immersive and even life-changing ways.”