Step Into a Virtual World to Experience Blindness at Tribeca Film Festival

NOTES ON BLINDNESS, a 2015 TFI New Media Fund grantee, is a feature film and multi-platform interactive project based on the audio diaries of writer and academic John Hull, who, after decades of steady deterioration of his vision, became totally blind in 1983. To help him understand the turmoil he was feeling during this immense transformation John began keeping an audio diary of his rapidly-changing reality.

Over three years he recorded more than 16 hours of material capturing his personal experience of gradually becoming blind.

World-renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks described John’s account as ”the most extraordinary, precise, deep and beautiful account of blindness I have ever read. It is to my mind a masterpiece.”

NOTES ON BLINDNESS has recently been selected to take part in Tribeca Film Festival®'s fourth annual Storyscapes program.

We asked Arnaud Colinart, the producer of NOTES ON BLINDNESS, what motivated him and his team to turn these audio diaries into such a powerfully moving immersive experience.

Colinart: Our main influence was John Hull's work, especially his amazing book Touching The Rock: An Experience of Blindness. Visually, we were influenced by sequences in which the story and the visual are audio driven, such as the rain fight in DAREDEVIL or the dance scene in HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS. One of our goals was also to give a strong emotion to the audience in an interactive experience. For that we drew inspiration from the online nonfiction piece WELCOME TO PINE POINT, which is for us one of the best interactive works ever done.

When we asked Arnaud about an obstacle he and his team faced while making NOTES ON BLINDNESS, he revealed how their initial version changed after incorporating audience feedback in order to mold a more rewarding user experience.

Colinart: At the beginning of the project, we worked on a pure audio experience. We noticed, however, that sighted users were unable to focus their attention on a black mobile screen. So we started to work on what could be a visual metaphor of the perception of the world for a blind man. We didn't try to be realistic but to give space for the user's imagination to unfold.

The NOTES ON BLINDNESS team is committed to guiding audiences towards empathetic thought. They are also interested in a movement towards tech and VR accessibility for users with special abilities. This team’s powerful blend of beautifully immersive visual storytelling and empathic focus are a glimpse at the potential power VR can have in shaking up our world for the better.