05/22/2026
Woke up to this in my inbox and had to sit with it for a minute.
Huge congratulations and gratitude to our director Keeley Turner, who shaped every frame of this story, and to the huge cast and crew in England who showed up in full Tudor regalia at the historic Harvington Hall - a real great hall, with a real Tudor feast prepared by a chef from Hampton Court, costumes built by The Royal Shakespeare Company, and historical research supported by the one and only British Museum. None of that can be prompted. None of that can be generated. That is what AI cannot fabricate - the months of craft, the institutional knowledge, the real people in a real room. 8K per eye. 16K real pixels 90fps HDR capturing a real moment in time. Real human beings. Real history. The kind of presence you can only feel when you put on a headset and sit down at that table with them.
Most immersive video today takes you to a place. Henry VIII in Warwick tries to take you to a time. We are not just transporting people across geography. We are using the headset as a time machine, building spatial memory of a moment that happened 500 years ago so a viewer in 2026 can sit across from a Tudor courtier and feel the weight of that hall. That is what immersive storytelling can do that no other medium can. History you do not read about. History you remember being inside of.
And I will be honest... period piece is the single hardest thing to shoot in immersive 180. VFX at 16K stereoscopic 3D is still half-invented. Most of the workflow does not exist yet, we built it as we went. Every modern object had to come off set or out of the plate - every light stand, every exit sign, every Game of Throne Starbucks cup on a background. Months of post cleanup frame by frame. Kimchi my Shiba supervised the post pipeline from the couch and demanded snack breaks every 40 minutes...
I make this work because I believe immersive film is not another format competing for your attention. It is a medium that gives something back. A moment of being somewhere else, with someone else, fully present. That is rare right now. That is worth fighting for in the age of AI Slop.
And today, Henry VIII in Warwick: The Lost Tudor Heart is a 2026 AWE Auggie Award Finalist for Best Art or Film. Grateful the AWE Auggies see this medium for what it is, and grateful to every person who put on a headset and sat down at that table with us.
If you have an Apple Vision Pro, watch it on Spatial Film FREE for this month. If you do not, the YouTube version is on all HMD and your phone.
Spatial Film (Free): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spatial-film/id6670564820
YouTube VR: https://youtu.be/6DOHDCBlLec
