Some of this year’s Emmys have already been awarded. There’s a few non-broadcast Emmy awards and even some non-ballot awards that are presented. There’s a kind of Emmy called a “juried award” that doesn’t even have a list of nominees. In the categories of Animation, Costumes for a Variety Program or Special, Motion Design, and Interactive Media, there are juried awards that are decided by a panel of experts in the field.
Picture this: a panel of professional costumers get together for some coffee and talk about the best costume work done for entertainment purposes on TV or in TV-related events. If they decide there was a single Emmy-worthy achievement, only one award is given out. If they decide there are three things worthy of awards, three winners are announced. If they decide the year sucked and nothing is worthy of special recognition, no awards are given out. As an example, this year, Over the Garden Wall, the animated Cartoon Network miniseries that aired last fall, won “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.” So did episodes of Adventure Time and Gravity Falls, but they didn’t beat a list of nominees, they were simply the best (according to the jury).
The reason the 2015 juried award Emmys are a bigger deal than other years is that this year saw the first virtual reality experience win an award. With consumer-friendly VR headsets making their way to the market for the first time, people are about to engage with their Oculus Rift or HTC Vive in new ways. Those ways are now worthy of award.
In the category of User Experience and Visual Design, the Emmy goes to Fox’s Sleepy Hollow Virtual Reality Experience that premiered at San Diego Comic-Con 2014. Using the Oculus Rift DK2 headset, users are transported into the world of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow TV series where Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) tells you the Headless Horseman is in the area. Then, the Horseman approaches the user and cuts his or her head off and lifts it off the ground where it falls. Using VR, it’s pretty simple, but it was also effective enough to get the Emmy.
The short was produced by a Canadian company called The Secret Location, which used a combination of CGI and live action elements to create the experience.
It seems like there’s a premium in introductory VR experiences based on horror premises. A lot of the noticeable VR popping up at film festivals in the past year has had a thriller or horror bent, and this year at E3, a demo called “Kitchen” where a demonic figure stabs the user in the leg with a knife and pulls their head back made waves as being gut-wrenching.
“Kitchen” ran on Sony’s Morpheus headset at E3, but seemed to have played with the basic thrill Sleepy Hollow provides: a shocking and sudden change in perspective without the user’s motion motivating the software. A Kotaku writer who tried Kitchenconcluded: “The demon’s gnarled fingers slowly slid over my eyes from behind and yanked my head back hard…The vision in the headset tilted upwards which means my eyes were pointing in a completely different direction to the way I was facing. It was a deliberately disorientating effect that caused a huge rush of vertigo; probably the worst I’ve ever experienced. And with that, the game cut to black.”
Although Sleepy Hollow‘s graphics aren’t cutting edge, a lot can be said for immersing new users in a new system of experiencing visual entertainment. If you’ve ever gotten to try a VR headset, you know the experience can occasionally feel claustrophobic and immersive simultaneously. It looks like the great leaps forward in VR story-telling will be made with things we can witness and feel even though we know them to be fake. Like the Headless Horseman decapitating you.
One small step for man, a giant leap for VR, and Sleepy Hollow‘s first Emmy as a show.
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