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What happens when cinema escapes the frame?
Nested Cinema explores new forms of cinematic storytelling across screens, physical environments and virtual reality. We are interested in how film can move beyond the boundaries of the conventional screen and how image, sound, light, space and audience can become part of a single authored cinematic experience.
The Frame Is Only the Beginning
At the heart of every Nested Cinema experience is a film. That film becomes the centre of a wider, layered cinematic environment. Image, spatial sound, light, production design, physical space and virtual reality can extend its world beyond the conventional frame — each layer composed in relation to the film’s story, rhythm, atmosphere and emotion. The audience is situated within these layers, experiencing cinema not only as something viewed, but as something spatial and embodied. This is the principle of nesting: film within space, space within experience, audience within cinema. Our current research is developing a browser-based creative platform for filmmakers and independent cinema venues. It will enable filmmakers to create and author spatial layers around their work, opening up new possibilities for cinematic storytelling, while giving venues new ways to present films and audiences greater choice in how they experience them.
The question at the heart of our research.
The frame has traditionally helped filmmakers control attention: deciding what is seen, what remains unseen, and where the audience should look. Spatial cinema complicates that relationship. A film might remain centred on a screen while sound, light, imagery and production design extend its world into the surrounding venue. In virtual reality, the fixed frame may disappear altogether, placing the viewer inside a cinematic environment. These different forms present filmmakers with a shared creative challenge: How do we compose cinematic experiences when the space of the film extends around the audience?
NESTED CINEMA PROJECT: VERA'S NOT ALONE (2023)
When Space Becomes Story
We use spatialised cinema to describe filmmaking in which physical or virtual space becomes part of cinematic composition. Just as filmmakers use framing, camera movement, editing, sound and mise-en-scène to guide attention and create meaning, spatialised cinema asks how those same intentions might operate across a wider field. Sound can direct attention towards an unseen event. Light can shift emphasis or emotion. Production design can extend the world of the film beyond the image. In virtual reality, movement, blocking and spatial relationships can shape where the audience looks and how a scene unfolds. Spatialisation is therefore not simply about making cinema more immersive. It is about exploring how space itself can become part of film language.
Cinema, Reimagined
Framing, composition, montage, camera movement, sound, performance and production design all shape what an audience sees, hears and feels. But many of these conventions were developed for a rectangular screen viewed from a largely fixed position. Our research asks what happens when those conditions begin to change. How do filmmakers compose when an audience can look around? What happens to framing and mise-en-scène in virtual reality? How might spatial sound, lighting and the surrounding environment become part of a film’s narrative language? We are not interested in replacing established film language, but in exploring how it might adapt, expand and evolve.
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