Giant (virtual reality film)

Giant is a short cinematic virtual reality film directed by Milica Zec and co-created and produced by Winslow Turner Porter III. It places the viewer in a basement shelter with a mother, a father and their young daughter during a bombing raid in an unnamed war zone; to keep the girl calm, the parents tell her that the explosions are the footsteps of a friendly giant who wants to play. The story is fictional but loosely based on Zec's childhood in Serbia during the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade.

Giant premiered in the New Frontier exhibition of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Its production team filmed live actors on a green screen, added depth data captured with a Kinect camera, and composited the footage into a real-time 3D set built in Unreal Engine 4, so that viewers wearing a headset could look around the room while the performances played out in front of them. At festivals it was shown to three seated viewers at a time, on stools or seats that vibrated with each bomb blast. It was later distributed through the Within app.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Credits, dates, runtimes, production details, festival dates, quotes and review claims checked against every cited source (Sundance archive, Unreal Engine and Voices of VR interviews, CGW, press reviews, Within, Digital Dozen and the official site). About review dates.

Synopsis

The Sundance programme note describes two parents "trapped in an active war zone" who try to distract their young daughter by inventing a fantastical tale that incorporates the fighting around them; the viewer is placed in the family's makeshift basement shelter while bomb blasts draw closer. In Zec's own summary, the parents say that the explosions are the footsteps of a friendly giant who is approaching their building to play with the girl, and the fairy tale intensifies as the bombs come nearer. Zec and the screenwriter Lizzie Donahue moved the story from a Serbian family to an American one; the characters are Rose (the daughter), Clara and Josh.

In The New Yorker's description, the viewer hears the approaching blasts in headphones, sees them in the flickering light bulbs overhead and feels them through the vibrating seat, and can turn to look behind or above but finds only close walls and a low ceiling. The Los Angeles Times described the visuals as basic, mostly boxes of computers and a child's toys in a dark room, and wrote that much of the piece is spent waiting for the attack. Writing for The Cut, Dayna Evans said the parents debate whether they should have evacuated, and that the experience ends with the ceiling coming down over the family.

Production

Development

Zec was in high school when the NATO bombing began in 1999; she recalled her teacher telling the class not to come to school the next day, and hearing air-raid sirens the following morning. She told The New Yorker that "parents would omit the truth, trying to create a normal situation in the home", and that she wanted to turn that emotion into fiction. In an interview on the Voices of VR podcast she said that after she told her story to Donahue, then a friend, Donahue suggested making a short film of it; Zec at first refused because she wanted to forget the experience, then called Donahue about six months later and asked her to write a first draft. Zec said Giant was first planned as a conventional short film before she decided that VR would better convey the fear of being in a conflict zone to people who had never experienced it. Donahue wrote the script around an American family, and the team deliberately cast English-speaking, Western-looking actors so that Western audiences would identify with the victims.

Porter said that before production it was only Zec, Donahue and himself. The project was developed at NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator in New York City, and production started in September 2015. Sundance New Frontier made its final selection decision at the end of November; by then the team, working with the co-producer Virtualize, had grown to more than forty people, which Porter attributed to the need to cover both live action and game-engine work. Porter named HP, NVIDIA, Comcast Ventures and Microsoft as sponsors and Framestore and Hello World Communications as production partners, and Zec said Mike Woods, founder of Framestore's VR studio, was one of the team's mentors at the incubator. Zec told Voices of VR that the piece took nine months to make. Zec cited Chris Milk's Evolution of Verse as a VR work that influenced her, and Porter named 360-degree videos from Vrse and the video game The Last of Us.

Credits

Role	Credited
Director, co-creator	Milica Zec
Producer, co-creator	Winslow Turner Porter III
Scriptwriter	Lizzie Donahue
Co-producers	Jess Engel, David Mullett (Virtualize)
Cast	Jordana Rose (Rose), Zoë Winters (Clara), Clem McIntosh (Josh)
Director of photography	Alex Corn
Lead technical artist	Jack Caron
Director of creative technology	Todd Bryant
Technical producer, finishing artist and depth pipeline designer	Juan Salvo
VR technical director	Omer Shapira
Visual effects	Uros Otasevic, Uros Perisic, Omer Shapira
Sound designer	Aleksandar Protić
Additional sound designer and mixer	Scott Martin Gershin

Filming and technology

Porter said the team wanted real actors with real emotions inside the game engine in order to avoid the uncanny valley. Alex Corn shot the live action on a green-screen stage where the actors had an area of about 8 by 3 feet to move in. Because no ready-made way of mixing such footage with a 3D environment in real time existed when production began, the team tested several volumetric video capture systems, which had problems with jagged edges and occlusion and with several actors interacting closely. They chose Depthkit by Simile, which uses the Kinect 2 depth sensor, and merged its data with footage from a RED Dragon 5K camera. Zec gave the same account on Voices of VR: a single RED Dragon camera shooting 5K, with a Microsoft Kinect version 2 placed next to it to record depth, after which the depth video and alpha channel were merged and the keyed actors placed in Unreal Engine. An article by NVIDIA's Michael Kaplan described the footage as shot in 6K. Porter said the depth data, which only covers what the camera can see directly, worked well because the viewer sits in a fixed position. Donahue's script was written to play like a one-act play with no cuts, with the camera fixed and pointed toward the family across the basement.

Giant was built in Unreal Engine 4.9 and driven by a series of Matinee sequences. With few programmers on the team, Caron said sound, dynamics and level streaming were handled with Blueprints. To display the live-action footage in stereo, the team wrote a disparity shader that split one side-by-side video file into left-eye and right-eye playback; Caron said they had earlier tried parallax offsets and displaced geometry. Each time a bomb blast cut the lights, the team swapped the video assets of the actors. Visual effects, editorial and finishing used Nuke, Flame and After Effects, and Salvo graded the footage in DaVinci Resolve. At the Busan International Film Festival forum in October 2016, Porter told the audience: "We are the first virtual reality experience to combine live action footage with depth data to produce stereoscopic disparity and enable head-tracking effects to work with live action."

Sound

The sound designer, Aleksandar Protić from Belgrade, had also lived in Serbia during the bombing. Zec told Voices of VR that directional sound was used so that, for example, a bomb blast could come from the viewer's left and a siren from the right, making viewers turn around in the space. She also described visual cues placed around the viewer, such as a window exploding, dust falling from the ceiling, and a game in which the family looks for objects in the basement. After Sundance, the team worked with Technicolor and Scott Gershin to complete the final sound mix before wider distribution.

Installation

Todd Bryant said the team wanted Giant to be watched with other people in the room. Viewers could not see each other, but they wore open-ear headphones so that they could talk to one another. This required the three headsets to stay exactly in sync, otherwise sound from the neighbouring headphones and the haptic feedback from the "rumbling seats" would spoil dramatic moments. The team ran the show with Open Sound Control over a private network: a custom iOS app triggered a show-controller computer, which sent commands to the three computers running the headsets and changed images on a projector.

NVIDIA's account of the Sundance installation lists three HP Z840 workstations, each with an NVIDIA Quadro M6000 graphics card, 64 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD and two 8-core Xeon processors, driving Oculus Rift headsets. In the same article Porter is quoted as saying the piece ran at 45 frames per second on other workstation cards and at 90 frames per second on the Quadro M6000. The New Yorker described the seat as a "rumble chair", an IKEA stool with a built-in subwoofer, and said viewers wore an Oculus or Vive headset.

Release

Giant was installed in the New Frontier exhibition at ClaimJumper, 573 Main Street in Park City, Utah, from 22 to 29 January 2016, with a final session on 30 January. The festival archive lists it as a United States VR work with a running time of 4.22 minutes. Contemporary accounts gave other durations: NVIDIA's article called it a five-minute film, while the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker described it as six minutes long. The version later listed on Within, dated 2017, runs 6 minutes 43 seconds.

The piece was then shown at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March 2016, presented by Unreal Engine. The official website lists further exhibitions through October 2017; selected entries are below.

Dates	Event	Notes
22-30 January 2016	2016 Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier	World premiere
14-18 March 2016	Game Developers Conference, San Francisco	Presented by Unreal Engine
16-18 May 2016	Marché du Film, Cannes	Listed on the official website
3-5 June 2016	Seattle International Film Festival (SIFFX)	Listed on the official website
26-28 July 2016	SIGGRAPH	Listed on the official website
1-2 October 2016	New York Film Festival, Convergence	Listed on the official website
10-11 October 2016	Busan International Film Festival	VR booth and forum appearance by the creators
17-26 October 2016	Astra Film Festival	Listed on the official website
13-29 April 2017	Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival	Listed on the official website
6-8 October 2017	MAXXI, Rome	Listed on the official website

For home viewing, Porter said in May 2016 that Giant would be released on major platforms that support head-tracked headsets, along with a stereoscopic 360-degree video version for smartphone viewers. The film's official website directed viewers to watch it on Within. Within's page for the film credits Zec and Porter, rates it VR-G and lists it for the web, WebVR, PlayStation VR, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, Vive, Daydream, Android and iOS. Within's founders announced that the Within app would shut down in February 2023, and said many of its stories would remain available on Within's YouTube VR channel.

Reception

Adi Robertson of The Verge included Giant among her top three VR experiences at Sundance 2016. She compared its mix of green-screened actors and a stage-like CG backdrop to full-motion video adventure games of the 1990s, adding that it felt like a medium that had never quite worked then "now coming into its own", and called its story "briefly told but powerful". Steven Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times listed it among nine VR pieces from the festival, calling it "the rare political VR piece that is also a fictional narrative". He found the visuals basic but the piece effective at conveying "a palpable feeling of fear", and wrote that it showed how VR could convey the horror of war in a way that a film like American Sniper could not.

The Guardian's festival summary noted that Zec took viewers inside a bombing raid in an urban area and made it a communal experience, with three people watching at the same time. Ryland Aldrich of Screen Anarchy wrote that the piece "is at its most effective when the rumble seats are active". In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz called it "another promising experiment" and wrote that combining green-screen actors with a computer-rendered 3D environment had not been attempted before. Beckett Mufson, writing for VICE, said few projects lived up so well to the idea of VR as an "empathy machine". Dayna Evans of The Cut called it "a moving piece of work" that made headlines about far-off places feel visceral.

Zec told Kent Bye at Sundance that one woman came out of the installation crying for ten minutes, and that parents were often the most affected because they imagined their own children in the situation. In a Comcast blog post, she said many viewers cried and many said it had changed their viewpoint on wars and on their own safety. In his Voices of VR commentary, Bye noted the full-body sensation produced by the subwoofers and said the live-action characters seemed to stand roughly 15 feet away, a distance at which he saw little stereoscopic effect and which created some detachment from the action.

Awards

Year	Award	Result
2016	The Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling (Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab), VR category	Special Jury Prize

Legacy

In May 2016, Zec described Giant as the first part of a planned trilogy of short VR experiences about "the current state of our collective life on this planet": Giant dealt with atrocities people commit against each other, a second part would deal with harm done to nature, and a third would offer hope. Zec and Porter went on to co-found the studio New Reality Co. Their next work, Tree, premiered at Sundance New Frontier in January 2017 and was described as the second installment in a VR/AR trilogy that examines "our collective life on this planet". Tree was released for home headsets on Viveport on 24 January 2019.

See also

• Cinematic VR
• Sundance New Frontier
• Volumetric video
• Within