Every now and then I try to make my list of the ten best films of all time, but the best I’ve been able to do is to come up with my favorite films by my favorite directors. Stanley Kubrick has lots of great movies, and they’re all worth watching over and over again. That said, my favorite Kubrick movie is The Shining. As you might imagine I was immediately intrigued when I stumbled across an Open Culture tweet about digital artist Claire Hentschker’s virtual reality deconstruction of Kubrick’s masterpiece. Here are some of their words…
In other words, the project allows viewers to move around, using 360-degree Youtube video, in a digitally fragmented space built out of the first 30 minutes of the film. Be aware that there are browser restrictions, but if you open the video in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, you’ll be able to navigate through the space using your mouse or the WASD keys.
It’s a very weird experience. The Overlook’s interior exists in contiguous 3D photographic blobs suspended in black nothingness—giving one the feeling of reaching the edge of some previously-believable video game world and finding out there’s nothing beyond it. And it’s made all the creepier by the near-exclusion of the very few people the hotel does contain—with the exception of a kind of residue of partial bodies—and by a droning, one-note ambient synthesizer score.
Last one to the Overlook freezes in the maze…
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