World’s 1st VR Sitcom WINS AWARD at CES
Exelauno CEO Eve Weston accepted the Best Project For Television award from DreamlandXR at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest and most influential technology event. Exelauno, Weston’s production studio, received this award for The BizNest, the very first sitcom created for virtual reality, with which it has developed a new approach for telling stories in a 360-degree environment. Intended to be viewed in a VR headset, The BizNest presents more interwoven stories than TV and fully utilizes the space around the viewer in all directions, creating a rich storytelling environment. The show’s cast includes Emmy-nominated Epic Lloyd from YouTube’s Epic Rap Battles of History and Ellie Araiza from FX’s Legion and The Bridge.
“The BizNest is a workplace comedy that takes place in a co-working space where YOU, the viewer, are one of the members,” says Weston, who wrote and directed the show, “Imagine watching The Office from the desk next to Jim.”
Independently produced by an all-female team, The BizNest beat out projects by NBC Nightly News, ABC News, CNN, America’s Got Talent, Nickelodeon, National Geographic, NBC Universal and Verizon. The DreamlandXR Music, Technology and E-sports Festival is a three-day event that takes place in Las Vegas during CES and includes immersive technology exhibits, speaker panels and networking mixers in addition to the awards show. Judges for the awards include experts from Google, Dell, Paramount, HTC, Lenovo, HP, the Producers Guild of America and MIT.
The BizNest, was semi-finalist at the 2019 Louisiana Film Festival (LIFF) and finalist for Best Art or Film at the 2019 Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Silicon Valley. Stanford’s Brown Institute of Media Innovation and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences have both had Weston come speak about The BizNest. Additionally, the forthcoming Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media, publishing February 2020 with IGI Global, devotes an entire chapter to a case study of The BizNest.
ABOUT EVE WESTON (creator/executive producer/writer/director)
Eve Weston, a writer, director and producer, is CEO and Creator of Realities for Exelauno. For television, she has written for Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place and ABC’s Better With You, among others, and has developed shows for ABC Family and AwesomenessTV. Weston has taught 360VR filmmaking for Emerson College Los Angeles and is the author of three double-blind peer reviewed publications on VR. She is also an award-winning journalist and an alumna of Goldman Sachs, Princeton University and USC.
ABOUT EXELAUNO
Exelauno is an independent production studio and storytelling consultancy with expertise in immersive narrative. Exelauno creates content that takes the opportunity — given by XR — for people to interact with technology in a way that is more human than ever. The viewer invests in Exelauno’s stories because Exelauno’s stories invest in the viewer.
