War Remains: Using LBE to Transport Audiences to WWI

[Music] we're here to talk about war remains which hopefully some of you have seen it it's a vr experience that transports viewers to the front lines of the western front in the first world war and i first of all just kind of want to introduce some of the people who are involved in it uh it was created by madison wells media and ethan stearns back here taking pictures ethan hi ethan so madison wells incredible group they like to bring creative storytellers together to make uh impressive incredible uh interactive uh entertainment and create produce and distribute um also involved is flight school studio and that's me i'm executive producer at flight school my name is taylor um it was directed by brandon oldenberg he's our cco produced by head of production gen caddick um we're a studio based in dallas

we've we've done a lot of vr work and ar work we just launched a game on switch a couple of weeks ago uh with madison wells called uh creature in the well um did a project called manifest 99 emmy nominated vr project so it we've done a lot of ip as well as branded work including the oculus vr for good program and then uh with me is mac mac you want to kind of introduce yourself and your team sure my name is mack smith and i work at skywalker sound here in the bay area uh about 45 minutes north and west marin and i've worked there as a project employee for about 19 years now i worked on uh all kinds of projects from like toy story 3 tron legacy rango i was a sound effects recordist on avengers end game also work on documentaries um a couple of theme park experiences uh but coming to vr was brand new for me

because i come from the world of cinematic sound design you know really linear storytelling so this was a completely new thing for me and uh and i definitely learned a lot from the experience i was not the only one part of the team at skywalker my co-supervising sound editor was bill rudolph a very talented sound designer who comes more from the video game and vr experience he was involved with carnegie arena among other things mike brinkmann was the technical sound designer so he was really the implementer of all the sounds and he also created uh uh steve morris our head of engineering at skywalker is a mad genius and have to give credit to him and then damien caspar who's here came out for a couple weeks at the start and helped us get the experience stood up and and is such a great spirit and encouraging especially someone like me who doesn't come from the vr world um so that's that's kind of my team

there and then i want to talk about um dan carlin who's uh in the center of that picture there dan is uh known most of all for this incredibly popular podcast called hardcore history if you haven't heard it it's uh it's amazing he's got this uh knowledge and enthusiasm for history that that i've never seen before one of his most famous podcasts is called a the blueprint for armageddon which is a six-part 23-hour long series just about world war one you think like how could i sit through 23 hours it's incredible like i mean how do you tackle a subject like world war one you know in the first place and he he finds an amazing way to get you know a macro perspective and a micro perspective and and talking about big picture things and then dialing way down into like a single person's experience so dan was the one who who really thought of this this project and um he wanted to figure out like how could you take somebody and have them

walk a mile in the moccasins of like a soldier in world war one um he was thinking you know yeah you could do a tv show or you could do a movie or a video game but but what's something that you could do that you could really immerse somebody in by making them feel like they're a soldier in a trench uh in the western front of the first world war and like how how can you really make them feel like they're there and fool their their brain he kept referring to like i want to tap into people's lizard brain and uh vr seemed like the best the best way to to do it um so it's like yeah a way to to put people in this this situation that previously was like unimaginable that they could experience yeah absolutely i think one of the things that's really interesting about dan and his approach to content like this is that he is fascinated by extreme situations and and not for the stats of it or for the just the insanity of it before the humanity in that situation and how

do people respond when they're put in these these crazy crazy places and that's really what what the jumping off point of this experience was is we don't want to create an experience that's telling you a bunch of facts about world war one we want to just drop you into it and we want to give you a chance to see what it's like to feel it to experience it viscerally instead of instead of removed and separated and kind of intellectually and so you know one of the things that's really important about this experience and we'll talk about this a lot is that there's a major physical component to the experience everything that you're seeing digitally is recreated with a high degree of detail physically and so one of one of the first challenges that we had is how do you introduce somebody to that concept how do you tease it how do you put together a trailer for something that relies so heavily on the physical and so i the the way that that dan wanted to approach that is let's lean

into the history and the authenticity that's going into everything that we're doing so uh he put together this this trailer we put together this trailer where dan carlin who you'll hear here is reading a letter um from a soldier in the first world war that he was actually riding home to his daughter marjorie at christmas in 1916 and i'll let this play [Music] my dear little marjorie i've only just received your little letter which mama sent with hers on november 19th do you remember that you asked me to be home for christmas i only wish i could but there are many more soldiers in our battery who are more entitled to the christmas leave than i am so i'm afraid you will have to do without daddy this christmas santa claus will come and shoot daddy is as comfortable as possible i expect even you would get tired enough to go soundly sleep in this dugout

it would be a change from your pink bedroom right again soon dear heaps of love and kisses from your ever loving daddy so the soldier who is writing that um gunner wilfred cove uh died in 1917 and that letter was found in his in his pocket um and we don't mention it overtly in that trailer in the experience anywhere but it's it's this kind of subtle uh subtext that's i think woven into the trailer and you get a sense of it anyway um and a lot of that i think comes down to the sound design you want to talk about how you approach that and some of the thoughts that went into it sure uh bill rudolph gets all the credit for the sound in the trailer and it's interesting when he originally saw this cut uh he was told like oh you know this we need to cut it down it's not right it's not going to work and he's like whoa like let me just put some sound to

it and we'll see see how it works and and this ended up they ended up not changing the picture because the sound worked so well and he decided to go for a very expressionistic way with the sound i mean yeah we could have like had all this artillery pounding but instead of like focusing on you know little unique details one at a time um you know and that's a lot of what sound can do it's like creating that feeling that mood um walter mirch who i don't know if any of you have heard of he's a very famous sound designer from apocalypse now and is here in the bay area he has a lot of fascinating things to say about the power of sound but one of it is you know people are so used to visuals you know we're a visual creature but sound was really the very first sense that any of us ever experienced in the womb before sight so it has this this feeling and while visuals sneak in through the front door of your brain through your eyes sound can even you know sneak in through the back door and sort of play with your emotions

without you being conscious of why you're feeling a certain way so we found that was really important in this i wish we had better headphones for y'all to hear it right now but i think you could still get and i apologize you're not getting the stereo effect um or the low end that we want you to hear but just imagine so so let's kind of just talk about the overview of the experience a little bit um it debuted at tribeca and it's currently set up in its own location in austin um and and so we transport these viewers to the people who come to see it to the front lines of world war one um and and it's roughly 650 square feet uh in the experience and you're actually in a trench that's modeled very closely after a world war one trench and when you reach out and touch things they're there we had a really large focus on the tactile set and how that interplayed with the visuals um we wanted to make sure that the the digital the physical and the sound were all blended together really harmoniously and

seamlessly so that we we establish this persistence of illusion you know it's something we talked about a lot as we were as we were producing it we didn't want you to have anything that you could remind yourself uh that you could reach out and not touch that you could remind yourself wasn't real that you weren't there it anything that you interact with uh is there um you know we're not the first project to do that um you know you mentioned carne before that that obviously uh had that in spades and hero and and several others but i think that um what's what's really interesting about this is the the level of detail in all of those sets uh when you reach out and touch something it's it's not just there's a block where there needs to be a block but the texture is right it feels right yeah i've never seen an experience that's built in this detail yeah it's incredible the sandbags the the corrugated metal everything what you see is what you feel so i'm going to the this next video i'm going to play just kind of cuts back and forth between the digital experience and the physical

so that you can kind of see what we're talking about [Music] so so when we talk about the the details on the physical set i think that um i really like this this image of uh of holding up the rat and testing its

placement um all of these different physical pieces were were installed and then tested and back and forth between the headset and the physical and making sure that not only was it where it needed to be but that the experience of touching it was actually paying off on what what you wanted from the experience so you know we had we had dangling arms and and a periscope that you could interact with and this the sandbags all over the place and the the corrugated boards and you know even the duck boards that you were walking on were elevated up on a little bit of foam so that as you stepped on it there was a give to it like you were stepping on boards laid down a mud and we we took that idea and you start the experience in this hot air balloon and we use the same concept of that foam to put that air balloon up on even more foam so as you step the one side of the basket to the other it has a sway to it and it was a really nice kind of you know low-tech solve for i want this balloon to feel like it's actually slaying and

swaying in the breeze it just happens to be doing it from your own weight instead of us moving you round hydraulically and those rats i think are one of the best examples of that is we as we first had those rats installed um we reached out and touched them and they felt like teddy bears and and that wasn't the reaction that we wanted people to have so um we actually went in and and sliced them open and took some of the stuffing out and then put little rib cages in there and sewed them back up and put put some hot glue on them so that the the coats felt nappy because they just you know been running around in these trenches in the mud so yeah so when you reach out and touch these rats it's like not only are you at first you're like oh holy cow they actually put the rats there but then you feel them and you're like oh my gosh you have this really really strong visceral reaction that you want to step back and and that level of detail just carried through the entire experience yeah audio is obviously a huge part of that you know our team had to match uh the great attention to detail

that they were doing on the visual side and the the physical side um it was very important you know so getting into a little bit of the research you know dan carlin definitely took the lead on this and provided with us with a lot of material to you know dive into and to look at from old photographs um paintings you know things like that um his podcast was actually a great resource um so as far as the the location of where this is supposed to take place this was the battle of passchendaele 1917 belgium which is fairly late into world war one um and you know i didn't learn tremendous about world war one in school so it was it was great like sort of diving into this and realizing that world war one was a huge shift in technology um that battles had not really been fought this way you know it was the first time that machine guns were really used a lot in a war tanks came into effect you know later on in the war airplanes obviously uh and

barbed wire believe it or not you know caused significant deaths so that was a new weapon um you know and dan always talks about you know things are bad but it can always get worse um so yeah we you know one thing that dan kept harping on is he wanted uh for the people going through this experience to experience drum fire and what is drum fire um it was this horrific amount of explosions and sounds that that would happen that in a large part would drive people crazy you know you hear about shell shock you know shell shock was a term that came out of world war one because there were these soldiers that had experienced just like day after day week week after week months after months being in the same trench living you know sometimes next to their you know buddy who's a dead soldier next to them and this drum fire was you know cannons on the other side like the germans would shoot their howitzers and cannons over and the aiming was not great but in order to sort of uh take that in

effect they would fire a lot of them all at once so it's explosion after explosion after explosion quick succession and we don't have any recordings of those because there were you know we're not great recording technology during that time frame so in a lot of cases we had to take um you know people that like soldiers their first count their what they would say firsthand of what it sounded like and and why it would make them feel like they were going crazy yeah i think i think that was a really interesting challenge from from my point of view when you were talking about that before the the thought that you were going in and listening to what people were saying about their experience and not just what did it sound like but what what did i feel because of what it sounded like and what i was going through and then finding ways to translate that into the sound and the experience but also the emotions that you're trying to that you're trying to instill in people as they're going through it and they're hearing it definitely and then it's like you know okay what if someone's going to go into this experience and like you have to

take in account you know what are they going to expect you know they they have a certain sense of what they think war is going to be like so yes we want to be as accurate as possible but we also want to make sure that we're also catering to people who think like okay i've seen a bunch of war movies i've seen a bunch of war movies and this is what i think it sounds like and also i play a bunch of video games of warfare so we kind of had to like balance between you know reality and then cinematic war and also you know video game war and sort of bring all those things together with the sounds of explosions and and all those things you can kind of see here you know some of the experience with the soldiers going up over the wall and one thing you'll also notice too is you know we're we're trying to create this illusion that that this is a very long trench that goes miles and miles long and there's you know warfare happening behind you and ahead of you you know you're actually not in a very big space but but we make it seem like it's huge from both visual and a sound standpoint

yeah that was that was really important and we thought about that a lot as we were kind of laying out the physical design and so the the way that we were able to approach that and then we kind of had to approach it was to take it in in layers right so we started you can kind of see us in the the upper left hand here taping off a space so that we could really easily really quickly iterate on what's the amount of space that that i'm walking through um and then we went from tape to cardboard so we set up all these giant cardboard walls um brandon our director is a uh he's a master with cardboard it's it's kind of crazy what what he can do and we use that process a lot with vr experiences especially when we're using a physical space where we want to as quickly as possible get to the heart of what's important and what's working and and see it played out in the space around you so we'll mock things up with cardboard a lot then we moved into into plywood and setting up setting up the plywood system

and then once all of that was kind of down and we were happy with the flow of it then we put the final finishes on it um and and we worked with a great group called the bender brothers built by bender and they came in and helped us iterate on this grid system so that that we could quickly pack this up and roll it out and install it places um play a little this is a little time lapse here kind of going through all of the different steps um so so we wanted to iterate a lot on on the pathway that you go through we knew that we wanted different stages in different sections for a couple of reasons one was throughput was really important and we wanted to set something up where there were different stages in the experience where we could start somebody off and then once they were through a certain number of gates start the next person behind them and not have to be one person at a time through the experience and that's this is kind of how we were able to achieve that

talking about some of the hardware on this so this was an interesting and an ambitious project for the um for the hardware that we were using so we decided to go with the uh the wireless vive system which which came out in the middle of us uh of the production on this you actually might have seen in a previous slide we had a backpack pc on which was really cumbersome and we wanted to um to make it a lot easier for people to onboard and get into the experience so we ended up with this final set of hardware where you're wearing a a little sling that you put on it's got the wireless receiver in it you've got a battery pack you've got a headphones receiver and then the vive pro and some headphones um we had a lot of interesting challenges working with this system it was our first time using the vive wireless system and it's very much a line of sight system there's a there's a little bit of of give but it

doesn't want to go through walls it certainly doesn't want to go through plywood so the way we ended up having to solve that was bolting the pcs to the top of the trench and actually on a shelf that was a few feet above the top of the trench so that the antenna for the wireless system could point back down into the trench and and see all of the different spaces um which you know we wanted to have this bunker experience and so we had to get up high enough that we could come down and people could see it that was the only place we we ended up having a a spot that cut out if you kind of got down into the bunker and up against the wall you could make it cut out um but but it was it was fun and both flight school and madison wells were really great in letting us set skywalker help pick which headphones we were going to use and we actually you know tested a lot we we spent probably two months deciding which headphones to use because you know this had to be an experience where people could hear the full fidelity of what you know at least we thought world war one sounded like um

to really you know give that low end feeling and and all that so we ended up with the uh fostex closed back uh audiophile headphones the th dash x zero zero they're the ones that you can see with sort of the wood grain on the side um and while those are great headphones um we still weren't quite feeling the explosions and all those things so we were able to at least we got involved early enough in the project that we were able to tell flight school you know hey is our way to build these transducers into the floor of the experience which uh which give you a visceral feeling that they're timed with you know a lot of explosions you're feeling the low end through your feet so it's tricking your brain that there's you know a massive subwoofer in the room or you're really there and feeling that stuff um so there there were these uh i think things believe four transducers that were put into the experience and they were discrete channels and floor zones and they didn't just rumble we were

actually able to send uh specific audio to them in those frequencies so we could really shape them to work with with what you're hearing in the headphones yeah we frustrated a lot of animators in our studios we had those uh those setup and testing right next to where they were working and uh and speaking of that uh one thing that i came across you know we were at skywalker and while we didn't have the physical space we were able to sort of map out on the floor and walk through the this experience and test it um i would go into the bunker section and suddenly my eyes were in the ceiling it was like wait a second like this isn't great like like this totally takes me out of the experience because i never i never saw that you didn't why not because i'm yeah i'm this tall and here that's all so makes a difference you gotta gotta test things yeah bill told me uh because he had been down at flight school i was like oh yeah all those guys are like under six feet so this is yeah definitely a valid concern

and so we were able to put that in and they were able to raise up virtually the ceiling of the bunker and we'll show you a little bit of the the bunker scene now yeah thankfully that was easy enough to strikes drove adjust insane the shock waves may have literally shattered their nerves or remember something i don't care how bad it seems on the western front of the first world war things can always get worse they can always get much much [Music] worse so in that moment there you know you were sort of the tail under the bunker hearing dan's voice which is obviously leading the experience and very important but then we you know after the series of drum fire you know you've

really been pummeled with the sound we got into that more stylized section of like hearing the blood flowing in your heart beating for for the person experiencing it and then back out into like sort of the final section of the experience um yeah i mean sound is so important i you know i keep harping on that but but that's what really sort of sells this this whole experience and part of part of the thing that was nice about this is it's this is not a long experience it's you know it may be eight to ten minutes maybe a little bit longer yeah it's it's kind of it depends on how quickly you want to go through it i think most people are closer to 15. okay but that's like okay 15 minutes it's not you know we can really have the intensity ratcheted way up um unlike if this is a much longer experience you know somebody just couldn't deal with that that much intensity so when you're in the trench you know there's explosions and explosions and shouting and you're hearing all this stuff we instead of like in a movie where it's like okay

we're quiet and we're going to be loud here and we're going to be loud here and then loud later on it was like okay we're going to be you know it starts off pretty quiet but then it's going to be really loud let's find a couple moments where we can duck out and and be quiet which was a nice nice change of pace and the other great thing about this experience is you know we didn't have any music to contend with um it was really just dan's voice and uh and the sound effects uh in the other audio you know the one thing that i brought to this experience which the other guys uh coming from vr and video games didn't have was you know in in cinema we were often dealing with you know foley teams which yeah they you know you deal with that in video games to some degree but but i was experienced with with how to make sure that we get all the character movements for the soldiers coming out of the trench we're hearing all their gear we're hearing uh their body falls and all those things that are very specific and then also loop group we hired a professional set of actors to come in who could um do convincing english accents who could also shout at the top of their lungs and not

lose their voice after the after three takes um so we got different people to do voices for both the english soldiers and then later on some of the german soldiers that you see in the distance and then it's like you know how do you put all that stuff together and how do you make it work you know with damien's help we we set up a lot of systems early on to do things like you're coming down in the balloon and we're hearing thunder and that thunder gradually transitions into artillery explosions and that was that was pretty cool and interesting and randomizing wind and then setting up systems to like launch um you're hearing the launch of you know the howitzers and artillery and coming over your head and you know that was kind of great to sort of initially get set up but as we progressed and progressed and kept adding more layers a lot of that stuff sort of ended up pushing to the background and we were focused on you know really what you're seeing and also you know creating the illusion of hearing soldiers around you that you don't see and then how do you contend with that with dan's voice um because dan's voice had to be paramount so we created a lot of ducking systems

so when his voice came up it would sort of lower other things to some degree without being too obvious to the user what was happening to let his narration be king and then finding those moments to get more stylized yeah i think this is the ring out section here yeah so we're gonna start up kind of right where we ended before coming out of the bunker and uh coming around the corner and seeing this this tank and getting stylized again this is

yeah the intensity just keeps building throughout the whole thing absolutely so you know one of the things that that you were talking about that um i think is is a really important consideration is how we make the space feel bigger and you know you did a lot on the audio side to do that and then there was a lot in the game design as well um and and one of the things that that we did was you start off in this void and you hear dan's narration and it's just it's giving you this threshold moment this transition to go okay i'm coming from wherever i was i'm stepping into this space and i'm we're giving you a moment to get acclimated and then there's this explosion and you're invited to step into the fire and so you take a couple of steps and you go from being in this very large open void and then you're into a hot air balloon all of a sudden and so

that's a confined space but even though we physically have you in a very small space we're moving the camera as you move along so it feels like you're traversing this this long area um and and one of the things we had to do was we found as we were testing this that people in the balloon wanted to just stare at this map board that we had so we had to actually get overt with the statement hey look around see what's going on around you get a sense of where you are this all happens before you get into the trench right and and this is kind of setting everything up and you feel like you're just up above the clouds but you start to realize you're descending into this kind of hellscape um and and so we we looked for all of these different moments to move you through the space you you'll step down the trench and then you'll you'll encounter a block section that you can't physically go any further down but as you look the site continues down and you can see people going up over the edge and getting mowed down and

you can turn around and there's a periscope that there's a flare that goes over and it lights up the periscope and so that lighting contrast draws your eye to it and you're invited to come look at that periscope and see that yes you can see up over the edge of the trench and you can see what's happening and then you go through this bunker moment so again it's a small confined space you feel like you're going to get some relief when you step in there but instead you start experiencing this drum fire and you're getting rattled and it finally opens up and you're you're allowed down the back hallway and down that back hall of the trench it's where the rain starts and where we start to really lean in on on dan's statement that it can always get worse and so now the mud is really prevalent and the walls of the trench are falling down and you can see out over the battlefield um until the the final shell finally falls and and you're kind of raising up above it so we we looked for a lot of ways to you know 650 square feet to somebody who's been

designing a tethered vr experience is a incredibly luxurious amount of space but it's not adequate for the the expanse of world war one and so we had to find all of these different areas both in in sound and in the physical production to find ways to extend the space that you're in so the key takeaways yeah yeah you got any key takeaways absolutely high quality headphones make a huge difference um you know it's easier for us to make content for really great headphones instead of like spending a lot of time trying to sort of optimize it for inferior headphones so i can't say that enough so you get what you pay for um don't underestimate the power of sound and it's never too early to get sound involved um absolutely um and you know one thing that's that you know key takeaway for me too is like i like to say in the you know we work on sound for movies is there's always like

a pencils down time okay you know we make creative decisions and then there's you know time where it's like pencils down on the test well for this this kind of thing you everybody can't have the same deadline you can't have you know the visuals the physical the audio all have the same deadline because suddenly it's like oh you know we're tweaking things and then something else happens and and now our sound doesn't match the visual so try to please build in time for your audio team to kind of be the last one standing and tweak things and make sure that it's right for the user and then one also thing that they were able to do at the austin build out is to really sort of set up a um a way to go into the experience very graciously and then come out where you're really setting up the the people to have this experience so you walk into this you know sort of mock recruiting office and you're hearing a loop of people you know working and typing on typewriters and you're hearing a victrola and you're hearing dan talk a little bit in the corner so you're setting that

mood to get people into this really intense experience then it's important to have audio as you come out of it too to sort of get people back into the real world you don't want to just like throw these headphones on have the this intense experience and then just sort of like kick them out the door yeah those thresholds are so important we we think a lot about what the onboarding experience is and what the off-boarding experience is and and how you take people and these layers deeper and deeper into the story and into the experience um and then you know i think from our point of view one of the things that that we found was a really important takeaway was this idea of working in layers and in stages and starting as flexible as you can and using that to test it to constantly test send people through it be considerate of the of the actual end user who's going through it and what their experience is and then throughput considerations how can you find ways to build in the chance to get to get more people into it so i go to war remains.com to check out more it's currently installed

in austin and hopefully there will be some more announcements soon ethan shruggs so i we've got i think five minutes left for some questions and then we'll be uh we'll be over at the rap table if you want to follow up with us afterwards yeah i have a question i think what you've done is absolutely brilliant and utterly terrifying even in 2d um i think it's a tremendous anti-war tool you know i mean and i really envision it being used that way but i'm wondering with all the civil war addicts people who travel to civil war battlefields if you've thought of doing gettysburg or anything like that yeah we we've thought about a lot of different things and and so one of the things from from dan's point of view that was important at the beginning is that it it's neither pro pro-war nor anti-war we weren't trying to make a statement we were trying to just show people the experience and the the the crazy craziness of it and then you're invited to draw your own conclusions i think a lot of people will draw that conclusion um but yeah there are a lot of different

places that we could take this i think it shows the power of vr as an educational tool it's a way to step into history right thank you hi so um uh my question is uh did you have uh situations where you know people were freaking out because of how intense the the experience absolutely and how are you trying to mitigate it in the design or were you even trying to mitigate it well there's uh one thing that i neglected to mention uh as far as the the setup the way that we were able to set up the audio for this is uh it was separate you know while it was synced with the visuals it was a separate feed so if somebody like crouched down and cowered in the corner because they were so freaked out the audio would not drop out the audio would continue and there's actually a way for an operator who's watching to tap into that audio feed with a microphone and make sure somebody's okay so that was a really important experience to make sure because everybody's going to experience us in a different different

ways yeah absolutely and i mean it it you can always take the headset off and walk away right so that's that's one of the important things about about making sure that there's a way if somebody needs to go backwards through the physical space to get out we had pass set up for that and is that a part of the introduction as well when you bring people into the experience like this like you can do this it's okay is that is that actually part of the procedure it was um ethan's nodding yes i don't remember setting that up but but yeah i mean it it we we definitely wanted to be cognizant of people we didn't want this to be a trigger for ptsd or anything like that so we definitely wanted people to be able to get out of it hey there i got to experience this at uh oh awesome i tried becca sweet and it was extraordinary and interestingly i had an opportunity to recount the experience to someone just a couple days ago and i said wow it

was interesting i'm in the trenches i feel the fans blowing and i was trying to explain how from the outside it just doesn't look like well it looks like a pile of stuff but when you're inside this is transformed seeing the rosary in front of you and being able to touch it being trapped in this room but at the same time i find myself pushing the boundaries of the system looking up over there's a certain kind of fascination rather than horror but i find myself appreciating getting one a little closer is better than none at all and the person i was talking to who hasn't seen the experience he counted that a little bit he said you know i was reading about a holocaust museum where they used to try to simulate the experience of being put in a train car by hurting all the guests into the elevator together and making them do that and they received pushback from survivors who said you know you can't really ex recreate it and they had some some qualms about

going halfway without going all the way so we can't totally step into history and i'm just curious what's the is it good to get closer or does it help us because we can't get all the way there is it sort of sanitizing what can't really be understood fully that's and i mean it more as a discussion i hope i'm not sounding critical because it was an amazing experience and yet looking at photographs of world war one is is horrifying mm-hmm this is it's we're in this kind of middle space right curious to your impressions yeah totally and and i think that's a lot of where dan was coming from and wanting to set this up and and his desire was very much we can't get you all the way there right we don't have a time machine and we're never going to have one but can we get one step closer can we get one one degree closer to giving you the sense of what it might have been like to be there and that and that was the goal of this and and i do think that it was closer than than some of the other ways that we can study about it well in a lot of ways too it just like

starts the conversation for people to go through this experience and then go from there you know maybe they it inspires them to learn more about world war one and do research or or you know just start talking about you know why did this you know war even happen so i think it's a good thing even though we can't get all the way there yeah i'm going to follow up with my friend with that response yeah yeah this discussion is exactly the goal so well we'll be in the back there to continue any uh questions so uh please come say hi