Telling stories is something akin to humankind. It is perhaps the single best descriptor for our species. Our culture, our systems and infrastructure and all its underlying technology, have amplified both the impact and the range of our stories by many orders of magnitude. We are drawn to recognize patterns, and find heuristics connected by a thread that can guide us through seemingly chaotic and random events. In this study, the use of sound spatialization and acoustic narrative techniques will be analyzed as a method for supporting and enhancing the immersive quality of sound-design and music-design in film. The 360 Video -Virtual Reality (360-VR) documentary film “Caves”, by director Carlos Isabel García, was used to develop an auditive spatial storytelling approach. The idea of creating the soundscape for a documentary movie in VR, where the story takes place inside a cave system, felt like a technically complex but creative project, and the prospect of the evocative and mysterious setting, and the challenge to find a suitable language for that special character, was an idea I simply could not resist.
After providing a background of foundational literature, exploring the topic of immersion, documentary- style film and VR & Spatialization technology, I define a framework to question the design decisions and approaches taken for the project. I also provide an overview of the project, detailing the location, the story and outlining relevant information regarding the team, the process, and my workflow. Finally, a Scene Analysis dissects the selected “rooms”, delving into a Narrative and Spatial Analysis. Analyzing a work in retrospective provides the advantage of ‘foresight’, but the main goal of this work is to challenge certain preconceptions about VR technology, and to hopefully discover some counter-intuitive possibilities while exploring further into the realm of perception and psyche in a fascinating underground world.