Film production company Ridley Scott Associates (RSA) announced the opening of a new virtual reality division RSA VR. The unit will be focused on using VR technology to produce contemporary movies and will be headed by Jen Dennis, the co-executive of The Martian VR Experience, the company said in a release. The firm — founded by Ridley and his late brother Tony in 1968 — confirmed that it’s first official VR project will be an experience based on Alien: Covenant, Scott’s upcoming sci-fi horror movie that’s slated to be released next month. The project will be created in collaboration with the Technicolor-owned MPC and FoxNext and was already announced in January, but the wording of the company’s original announcement suggested that the RSA was looking to release it as an experimental product. However, with the establishment of RSA VR, it seems that Scott’s film production studio is now looking to fully indulge VR and related technologies in the future.
A company representative explained that the opening of RSA VR marks a natural extension of Scott’s lifelong ambition to always take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies when producing his movies, even though the legendary filmmaker apparently won’t be spearheading the RSA’s VR-related ambitions. While the studio now officially opened a VR unit, it was already involved in this industry segment in the past thanks to its contributions to the aforementioned Alien: Covenant experience and Juriaan Booij’s promotional campaign for Siemens that revolved around innovative 360-degree videos. The newly opened division is currently also working on a VR series called Blackbox and another documentary series directed by Michael Muller, a well-known American photographer and filmmaker.
Ridley Scott isn’t the only renowned filmmaker that recently decided to explore VR, as the likes of Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) and Jorge Gutierrez (Book of Life) did the same in recent years. Given how Pearl, one of the latest Google Spotlight Stories, was recently nominated for an Academy Award and numerous studios are now taking an interest in VR, a new era of filmmaking might be on the horizon, though only time will tell what the industry decides to do with this emerging technology.