On June 2, 1943 Lieutenant Charles B. Hall of the Army Air Forces shot down an enemy Italian fighter airplane over the island of Pantelleria off the Tunisian Coast. He was the primary African American ever to take action.
Hall was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black fighter pilots who educated on the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and served as essential air help through the invasion of Italy and as bomber escorts over Occupied Europe thereafter. Their achievement is immortalized in a brand new 360-degree VR film created by New York-based studio Koncept VR and the World War II Foundation.
“Tuskegee Airmen,” directed by Uli Futschik and Joergen Geerds, combines archive footage with voiceover reminiscences of surviving members of the Airmen and newly shot materials — reminiscent of a 360-degree digicam mounted on a P-51 Mustang, the nimble fighter craft related to the Airmen that usually had their tails painted pink (hence the movie “Red Tails”).
“Research led us to the Commemorative Air Force, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving historic airplanes, and their restored P51,” Futschik recenetly advised XR Magazine. “We hired the P-51 and the dedicated CAF pilot for a day to shoot several aerial sequences. We set up our camera inside of the Mustang P-51 cockpit, as well as on the wings and the tail outside. This may very well have been the first flight in virtual reality on such a historical aircraft.”
At sure moments the film even interpolates footage shot not too long ago with previous archive photographs: A nonetheless picture of the classic P-51 photographed in shade now all of the sudden has a Tuskegee Airman within the cockpit as taken from a black-and-white photograph.
For the World War II Foundation, it is a approach of constructing historical past come alive. The president and founding father of the tutorial group, Tim Gray, tells IndieWire that VR experiences like this — they’ve additionally launched immersive 360-degree experiences putting you on Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge — have obtained a constructive reception. The Omaha Beach movie has obtained over 145,000 views from headset wearers on Oculus TV and YouTube VR.
“The 360-degree films ‘bring’ people to places in history where the events actually happened,” Gray stated. “In World War II that means Omaha Beach in Normandy, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge and in this case, Italy, to the actual base where the Tuskegee Airmen were stationed during the war or in an actual P-51 Mustang, which the Tuskegee Airmen flew in missions over Europe… It’s the next best thing to actually visiting the historic sites yourself.”
Watch the “Tuskegee Airmen” movie under — and use the arrows to navigate across the photographs.
