Synopsis
An interactive VR comedy about Taiwanese faking a moon-landing, in which you play the first Taiwanese astronaut on the moon. Follow instructions from the director to give your most heroic performance…until you watch the finished video and realize how outrageous it has become.
Director's Statement
I’ve been an avid gamer and storyteller since I was a kid. At the age of 22, my TV feature debut Real Online (2005) which is about how MMORPG influenced gamers in their real life, started my filmmaking career. After that I’ve been exploring both gaming and the film industry, making more films about digital / gaming culture, and working on World of Warcraft /Hearthstone machinima productions in collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment, for more than a decade.
When the indie-game scene on Steam suddenly exploded several years ago, my interest in gaming shifted from the gameplay elements to new forms and possibilities of storytelling. I became a huge fan of innovative game projects like What Remains of Edith Finch, Stanley Parable and Detention, a Taiwanese indie-game that I’ve been honored to direct the film adaption as my feature film debut (currently in post-production). When Vive and Rift were released in 2017, I had a pleasant discovery that VR storytelling is actually a delightful combination of my dual identities in gaming and filmmaking.
By making audiences believe they are actually inside the story world, we can now tell stories in completely new perspectives that are so different from films or traditional games. That discovery lead me to my first VR comedy project Your Spiritual Temple Sucks (2018), a live-action 3DVR short film. After that experience, I fell deeply in love with the medium and want to take a step further into the field of interactive narrative, by developing my next VR project - Great Hoax. I want to make an interactive political satire about the Taiwanese government faking our own moon landing to show its people and the world that we can be “great” too. You, the audience, are going to become “the first Taiwanese astronaut landing on the moon” and help them fake the moon landing video. If we cannot solve the actual problems on Earth, we can always stun everyone with a spectacular show.
Writer and Director
John Hsu
Director
Credits
•
PRESENTED BY : PTS, Kaohsiung Film Archive, Serendipity
•
PRODUCED BY : Serendipity, 3DAR
