SECRET LOCATION UNVEILS FIRST VR ADAPTATION OF A PHILIP K. DICK STORY WITH THE GREAT C
Entertainment One’s (eOne) Emmy® Award-winning studio Secret Location today announced that it will adapt Philip K. Dick’s short story The Great C into a cinematic virtual reality (VR) narrative, which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Featuring a poignant storyline, stunning environment and powerful soundtrack, The Great C transports viewers to a post-apocalyptic landscape in which the remnants of humanity are ruled over by an all-powerful supercomputer known as the Great C. Each year, the nearby village is forced to send a young person on a pilgrimage to appease the mysterious machine – a journey from which no one ever returns.
The Great C follows Clare, a young woman who finds her life upended when her fiancé is summoned for this year’s pilgrimage. Forced to leave the safe confines of her village, Clare must now decide whether to accept the rules of this harsh society or fight against the oppressive reality of her world.
“Philip K. Dick’s wonderfully forward-thinking stories have always felt primed for telling in equally forward-thinking mediums. Secret Location is highly focused on ushering in the future of storytelling, so pairing The Great C’s provocative themes with our VR development prowess is helping us redefine how we consume sci-fi stories,” said Ryan Andal, President and Co-Founder of Secret Location. “Authors have long adhered to the ‘show, don’t tell’ technique. We’re hard-pressed to find a better way to ‘show’ a story than in VR – adapting Philip K. Dick’s The Great C only makes our ability to ‘show’ even stronger.”
With The Great C, Secret Location is pushing the boundaries of cinematic experiences by utilizing filmic techniques in areas such as editing, composition, and story structure and adapting them for a new medium, bringing a uniquely robust and visceral narrative to VR. This cinematic language is melded with real-time, room scale, characters and environments to engage audiences in a fully realized, next generation-level of storytelling tailormade for VR.
Philip K. Dick is the author behind stories such as The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – the inspiration for Blade Runner. The Great C will be the first-ever adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story into VR.
The Great C will debut at the Venice Film Festival. Following the premiere, it will be offered as a timed-exclusive at select location-based venues beginning this September.
The title will be available for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation®VR, with an expected release in Q4 2018. This title is not yet rated. Secret Location produced The Great C with the support of the Canadian Media Fund.
About Secret Location
Founded in 2009 and acquired by Entertainment One (eOne) in 2016, Secret Location is reshaping the virtual reality (VR) industry by combining cutting-edge technology with traditional storytelling. Secret Location created the first original serialized VR narrative and is the first company in the world to win a Primetime Emmy Award for a VR project. Secret Location also in-house developed Vusr, a cloud-based content management system that offers solutions to several challenges in VR distribution such as monetization and managing location-based experiences.
About Entertainment One
Entertainment One Ltd. (LSE:ETO) is a global independent studio that specialises in the development, acquisition, production, financing, distribution and sales of entertainment content. The Company’s diversified expertise spans across film, television and music production and sales; family programming, merchandising and licensing; digital content; and live entertainment. Through its global reach and expansive scale, powered by deep local market knowledge, the Company delivers the best content to the world.
Entertainment One’s robust network includes Makeready with Brad Weston; content creation venture Amblin Partners with Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Studios, Participant Media, and Reliance Entertainment; unscripted television production companies Whizz Kid Entertainment and Renegade 83; live entertainment leaders Round Room Entertainment; world-class music labels Dualtone Music Group and Last Gang; and award-winning emerging content and technology studio Secret Location.
The Company’s rights library, valued at US$1.7 billion (as at 31 March 2017), is exploited across all media formats and includes more than 80,000 hours of film and television content and approximately 40,000 music tracks.
