Caixin Media had released their Virtual Reality documentary MOUNTAIN VILLAGE KINDERGARTEN in October 2015 on the Fourth International Symposium on Anti-poverty and Child Development. It's a high-quality piece packed with strong storytelling and directing. The content which depicted the suffering life of children from rural mountain villages is really inspiring and thought provoking.

Weak educational support for those regions is not a news, yet filming in 360-degree provides audiences a more direct and strong visual impact, entirely exposes  the fact, which alert the society how serious the problem is. And in terms of technical skills, there is no ghosting at all and it's been well edited and color graded, and is of no doubt the first of its kind.

In comparing this documentary to other  two similar works from western countries, namely American--bellwether of high-tech cluster, and England--with long history in producing documentary, I notice that even though all of these productions are excellent in their way, they have different focal points.

For VR short film MONSTER, produced by Google, it Looks Awesome by utilizing CGI and other 3D modeling technique, while as an audience I felt overwhelmed and dizzy when watching it. The reason I figured is that the story is really fast paced just like Hollywood style science fiction, and there are numerous of camera movements. It's hard to achieve both when adding 360 experience and audiences would be tired of absorbing everything simultaneously.

Exploring Chernobyl in virtual reality is a narrative documentary. It perfectly recreated the historical scene, however, with similar camera movements showing the empty rooms and still images along with plain narration rather than arresting stories, it is valuable historically and aesthetically yet the visual interest would off a little bit in the second half.

Caixin Media is a main stream media company, mainly focuses on News, Documentary and TV specials, and produced a series of famous shows such as Caixin News, Caixin Times etc. As a branch of Caixin Media, Caixin Video pulls its talents in investing Virtual Reality. Employees are relatively young with high work ethics and full of enthusiasm about content creation. 

Only in three months during this semester, we have witnessed the rapid development of virtual reality. Yet still at the initial stage, VR as a blossom is spreading out to various industries worldwide. The Chinese government has set to put a 150billion RMB investment in VR. There will be a bright future in VR, and for us who is learning this crazy new world now!

For more information, please access to my presentation slides HERE.

And the links to those productions are attached below:

http://www.utovr.com/video/7852759336.html MOUNTAIN VILLAGE KINDERGARTEN Full video

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36113177 Exploring Chernobyl in virtual reality

Google’s VR monster movie will make you wish every movie was filmed in VR

Google’s VR monster movie