The Sound of One
Eye Closing

The premise

The Sound of One Eye Closing follows Cory, whose heartbreak splits her world in two — literally. The 360-degree frame divides: one half holds Cory in her grief, the other her subconscious, where she stays fixated on her ex.

The challenge

Most VR storytelling struggles with a basic problem. When the viewer can look anywhere, how do you tell a cohesive visual narrative? Grief is an inward state, but the 360 frame is all outward, all periphery. The film treats that tension as its subject rather than its obstacle.

My role

I wrote and directed the film, and executive produced it — creating the concept, writing the script, developing the visual language, and directing the production. I created the creative pitch that was selected for Venice and secured the Canada Council funding that moved it into production.

The approach

Rather than fighting the 360 frame, I built the story around its split. Dividing the frame into Cory's outer grief and her inner fixation turns the medium's defining limitation — a viewer who can't be pointed at a single image — into the emotional architecture of the film. The form is the heartbreak: two halves of one world that can't be held in a single gaze.

The hard parts

Directing attention without a frame is the central craft problem of immersive film, and a split-world structure compounds it. The viewer has to feel the two halves as one fractured whole, not miss half the story. Every choice about sound, motion, and pacing had to do the work a cut or a close-up would do in traditional film. Production added its own constraints: with no proper monitoring or on-set review possible, directing demanded creative preparation and workarounds. It also took extensive audience testing to make sure viewers could follow the throughline across both halves.

Recognition

• Venice Biennale College Cinema Immersive — selected; the only North American project in its cohort.
• Canada Council for the Arts — Concept to Realization funding.
• Featured by Emily Carr University: ECUAD news article.

Where it stands

The film is in production, based in Vancouver.

What I'm exploring

This project is my argument that not all of the constraints of 360 video are problems to solve around — they can be the most expressive part of the form, if the story is built to need them. I'm also curious about how storytelling in 360 video can be expanded further, introducing novel narrative forms that are dependent on the medium.