Have you ever seen a world so imaginative on your TV that you want to jump in and be part of it? Brie Larson and Elijah Allan-Blitz just created a way for their own ideas to pop out of the constraints of your rectangular screen with their augmented reality short Remembering, now streaming with a Disney+ subscription. The new Disney+ release is a seven-minute short that features an enhanced experience from your iPhone or iPad with exciting inspirations to connect with one’s inner child.
CinemaBlend had the opportunity to learn about Remembering from star/producer Brie Larson and writer/director Elijah Allan-Blitz at Walt Disney Studios, alongside several other journalists. After an intimate presentation of the short and its AR capabilities, available with a download of the Remembering iOS app, Larson spoke to how it came about, saying this:
It was the pandemic, and we were needing to be creative. We had been watching movies from our childhood and digging into all of these things. One day, Elijah went into the office, and I feel like it was within 20 minutes, but maybe it was an hour, he had this whole concept. And then, parallel to that, some parents in our neighborhood had asked if I would give art lessons to their kids. As I was doing that, the youngest one, Dusty [Peak], was just saying stuff where I was like, ‘How do you know that?’ She’s so tapped in and can build worlds so easily. Elijah has known Dusty for years, and I was like, ‘We’ve gotta start paying more attention to what this kid is saying.’
After becoming energized by Allan-Blitz’s concept and Dusty Peak, who stars alongside Brie Larson in the Disney+ release, the collaborators and real-life partners worked with her to build out the imaginative world they would later film together on the same LED digital sets The Mandalorian uses. Larson continued to share the process behind Remembering with these words:
She would come over to hang out and we would ask her questions and she started talking about there's even more gold, if we were given the opportunity to expand this into a feature. I mean, the amount of stuff that she talked about, it's a very detailed world. This world, imagination is a lot happening, beyond seven minutes. And, we have just had like hours of her talking about it and it's so cute. It's so real and fluid and not self-conscious in any way. And so we took some of those things that were, I don't know, I love unicorns that I'd never thought about a unicorn made out of moonlight. Like that was wow. And then Elijah went through all the audio kind of pulled bits and pieces of it and then worked with an artist to then build that out.
The result is an immersive and emotional experience about bringing together one’s fantasies to a palpable space. Through the app, viewers get an additional experience where they can step into the short’s ideas for a moment and see beyond the TV screen.
Following the AR experience, after Larson’s character gets to meet her inner child, the ending has her having a moment of overcoming emotion. Here’s what it means to Larson:
It's actually more of gratitude than anything else because I don't know if you've ever lost anything or lost an idea, in this case, but, to be given the gift of it coming back to you is really quite special. You could think about it as a loss of self that comes back and you go, ‘Oh, that's who I am. Oh, thank goodness. I came back to me’. There's just something quite powerful about that. And the gold light can be whatever it is that you want and the phone can be, whatever it is that you want and the ways that we distract ourselves from whatever. So the more you watch [Remembering], the more you think about it, the more you can kind of, you can project whatever that is. But to me, yeah, it definitely was gratitude. And thinking of like, ‘Oh, thank you for reminding me of that. I can't believe I forgot, but I did’.
And while Larson and Allan-Blitz are clear that the technology of Remembering would not work for every type of story, it already has them thinking of more ways they could implement this technology or continue to delve into the world they created. As Larson shared:
Ultimately for us, it's like, we just wanna keep creating. This is just, this is like, we can finally share what it is that we've been talking about visually. And now it's like, okay, how do we expand this? Is it expanding this story into a feature? Is it expanding it into a series? Is there another film altogether that could use this technology, plus all the other things that we're talking about that the future can hold? Like how can we progress? And this is just for us a taste of what we're capable of.
Could Disney+ implement more AR moments like in Remembering to its content? The creators of the short certainly have ideas for it to expand, as Larson said. Perhaps this will be through a version where viewers can interact with the space more, and, for example, put their arm out and have a bird land on their fingers. Time will tell.
Remembering is one of many new additions to Disney+ on its annual Disney+ Day, which also involves a major limited-time price drop, along with new releases like the live-action Pinocchio movie and the streaming debut of Thor: Love and Thunder. Brie Larson’s next films are in 2023, with Fast X coming on May 19 and The Marvels set to hit theaters on July 28.
