"I very much believe that the future of entertainment will be immersive!" – We speak to award-winning filmmaker and series director of Apple TV's 'Adventure', Charlotte Mikkelborg

I was in a meeting with a producer who regularly works with a documentary filmmaker called Lucy Walker, based out in LA. I asked what Lucy was working on, and she said she was making a 360 film. This was all the way back in 2015, so I was like, "What's a 360 film?"

She explained that it’s literally 360° immersion all around you. I needed to see it because, for some reason, my brain just couldn’t compute. I had a look and was amazed, I immediately got it. Even though back then, the headsets were kind of basic – sorry, Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard, but they were!

It was the first iteration of something to come, so the resolution wasn’t great, which obviously limited your sense of presence in a scene. But at the same time, it was like, "Yeah, of course, why would we not want to immerse ourselves completely in the scenes of our favorite entertainment, instead of just looking at it through a rectangular screen?"

If you think about how old that technology is, it's well over a century old, it’s time to move on. I saw the potential immediately.

I immediately thought I needed to find a way to start working in this space. At the time, the UN was very interested in the art form early on. They had made a film called Clouds Over Sidra for UNICEF and found that when they showed it to people on the street, they received far more donations than with regular 2D content.

It's about a little girl named Sidra in a Syrian refugee camp, and because you feel present in her space, you can empathize much more.

The UN started putting out occasional tenders saying, "We want to make a VR film about X, Y or Z." I saw one about women in conflict zones and thought, "I want to pitch for this!"

But at the time, I didn’t have specific experience in immersive media. I had storytelling experience, as I had been a BBC journalist and had become an independent documentary maker, but I hadn't yet worked in the immersive space.

I contacted a Spanish 360 photographer and cinematographer, Ignacio Ferrando Margelí, to see if he would be interested, and he was. I also brought in a spatial sound specialist called Jeffrey Anderson. So, with a team of three, we pitched the project.

It wasn’t a huge budget, but with this team, we won the job and made my first 360 film, Born into Exile, which went on to win a Cine Golden Eagle Award.

Shortly after that, I made another film for UNICEF called The Journey, tracing the experience of childhood in some of the most challenging places to live on Earth. That film also won a Cine Golden Eagle Award and was selected for SXSW [the South by Southwest festival].

My last XR project before Adventure was a piece called Escape to Shanghai, which was part of a trilogy of films, each one about a different female survivor of the Holocaust. Until 2009, I was the BBC's Shanghai correspondent, so I knew the city quite well.

This particular story was about a woman called Doris Fogel, whose family escaped Germany for Shanghai, one of the few places that kept its doors open to Jewish refugees when other countries had closed theirs. About 18,000 Jews made that journey, and Doris was one of them.

I’ve just always been obsessed with visual storytelling. But there’s a limited amount you can really do with that when you're working in news, because it's quite bam, bam, bam; you’ve got this story to cover, then you’ve got to get onto the next one.

Especially in Shanghai at that time, there was so much happening and so few people to cover it. You'd literally be working 24/7. That was fine, I was in my 20s so I could work 24/7, but the stories were just coming in so hard and fast.

There wasn’t a ton of investigative work you could do, either, because you just didn’t have the time or the resources, and in terms of visual storytelling, you couldn’t really explore it in a meaningful way. So it just got a little bit frustrating in that respect, and I was ready to move on to something I could really dig my teeth into.

The first film I made was while I was still in Shanghai. I had bought a flat in a building there, and in the process I found out so much about the incredible history of this particular place.

It had been bought by the best friend of a famous gangster, a Shanghai equivalent of Al Capone in the late 1920s, early 1930s. The building had this fascinating history, so I decided to tell its story, but through the microcosm of the building and the families who lived within it.

It was like a historical documentary in a sense, but it was also a very intimate look into that history, and that was really satisfying. It was called Building 173 and was my first real foray into longer-form filmmaking.

I had met Elliot Graves, who was instrumental in the immersive work happening at Atlantic Productions at the time. He originally contacted me about a different project, but around the same time, he mentioned he also wanted to talk about another idea – a longer-form series for Apple TV and the Apple Vision Pro.

I was like, this sounds fantastic! Everyone working in immersive had been kind of waiting for this, the much-rumored possibility that Apple would enter the space, but it hadn't happened yet. So this was like, oh my god, yes, I'll work on that!

I initially came on to direct the second episode of Adventure, and then that evolved into directing the series. In the meantime, Elliot actually went to work at Apple.

We were working together at Atlantic little bit at the very beginning, he was finishing off the pilot episode, which became episode one, and I was starting on episode two. It was nice that we had that crossover. It was really useful for my learning. Then he went off to Apple, and I continued on the series.

The response to the episodes across Reddit, social media, and the mainstream media has been overwhelmingly positive. Which the whole team is obviously thrilled about. A lot of people worked incredibly hard to make it as good as it is!

I think with every live-action filmic experience in VR, there's always been this little bit of compromise in quality versus what you’re expecting. That’s not to say that after you ease into the experience, you don’t start living it, even if the quality may be a little under what you initially wanted or expected. But with this, there’s no compromise. You’re just in it, and it’s clear and crisp.

In terms of audio, whereas the visuals have a 180° field of view, we’re not limited that way with the audio. It can move around you, which further immerses you in the scene.

We used some really high-order ambisonic microphones for sound recordings, and then Apple has its own proprietary post-production processes for the Vision Pro, which meant we could get the most out of the device in spatial audio terms.

It’s incredible, considering you don’t have to wear headphones with it. The audio is directed towards your ears, and the whole sound field is spatialized.

The scores also formed an important part of the storytelling and we had some great composers working on the series including Marco Caricola ('Parkour'), Atli Orvarsson ('Ice Dive'), who also did the music for the Apple TV series Silo, Nainita Desai ('Deep Water Solo') and Raven Bush ('Hill Climb').

The thing I’d add is, in addition to the visuals and audio, it's also about the narrative. What was so exciting for me was getting to work with Apple TV Originals and Atlantic Productions, both of whom have amazing track records in narrative. Apple TV does both fiction and non-fiction, and Atlantic is more non-fiction.

Apple TV, and I don’t say this to win brownie points (though I hope I do), was just incredible to work with. Every bit of feedback they gave elevated the storytelling. It was marvelous. And the same was true for our exec producer at the Atlantic end, Anthony Geffen.

Not only did they bring technical expertise to the table, but they also brought so much narrative insight. I, of course, had my own narrative insights, but to have those extra voices, with their endless experience in the narrative world, was brilliant.

It’s non-fiction, so real people, true stories. But you're right, there’s a lot that goes into it. We had big crews because one of the things Apple was keen on was making sure that any cinematic motion within the pieces was super smooth.

At this level of resolution, if you have a shaky dolly track, it’s a lot more noticeable than at a lower resolution. So, everything had to be silky smooth in terms of motion, yet these are high-energy sports. So we had decent-sized crews with a lot of custom grip to capture that motion in an exciting, cinematic, and smooth way.

There's also the immersive content element where you're choreographing scenes. You're thinking about all these factors to make sure you’re not following a parkour athlete off to one side of the screen and then missing something important on the other side in the next cut. You’re trying to think ahead while the action is happening in real-time.

I really believe in best-laid plans. You organize and plan, but then you can innovate once you know it all well. I wanted to approach it that way, so we storyboarded everything.

Storyboarding is usually reserved for fiction, not non-fiction, but I wanted to have a sense of how the athletes would take on each obstacle, what the shots would look like, and how those shots would flow into each other. There was still room for improvisation on set.

The size of the crews and the need to tightly storyboard did take away a little from the organic narrative flow, because we had to capture one shot and reset for the next, which is different from a lower-budget, on-the-shoulder type of documentary where you’re just following the action and capturing those moments as they happen.

What was really important to me were the key moments, like the climax of the 'Parkour' episode where they take on this massive roof jump, and in 'Ice Dive' where he's going for the world record attempt. Those moments were organic and captured in the moment, but we thought ahead to make sure it stayed true to the real experience.

For the roof jump in 'Parkour', the members of Storror (the parkour group) know each other’s capabilities so well because they’ve been together for about 15 years.

We had one team member, who wasn’t one of the three subjects of the piece, on set to assess the obstacles and ensure the jump was challenging but also safe.

Once we were on the roof, the cameras were set up, and the guys could experience it and do their prep organically. The roof took longer, which allowed for a more fluid and real experience.

Similarly, 'Ice Dive' required a lot of logistical planning because we were working with an underwater rope cable that stretched 40 meters, but the track for the divers and the crew was almost 200 meters long. So we had to figure out how to make that work!

It took a lot of detailed planning, but yes, a bit of luck, too. For example, I had planned to use cinemagraphs, which are made by animating a sequence of high-resolution stills to create a slo-mo video effect.

I wanted to do this with the lava flow in Iceland, given that lava doesn’t erupt on demand, so there was no guarantee we’d get it while we were shooting. But then, the volcano started erupting a day or two before we were supposed to shoot.

I was praying it would keep erupting, and luckily, it kept going when I landed, and we got those incredible shots.

We also had some luck with 'Ice Dive'. We were flying in a helicopter, and as we were capturing an extra shot flying down a canyon, snowflakes started hitting the lens.

Normally, any precipitation on the lens is a disaster and would mean having to land and wipe it clear. But miraculously, the snowflakes hit the lens, froze, and then fell off. It became the best end shot ever, but again, it was by luck, not by design.

Yeah, we did use both. In Paris, for the parkour episode, it was definitely helicopter-only because they wouldn’t allow drones in downtown Paris. Certainly not a heavy-lift drone, which is what we needed, for safety reasons.

For the 'Parkour' episode, aerial shots probably played the least part, but they were still useful for scene-setting. They helped give the audience an overview of the journey, with some really beautiful graphics done by Apple to show the progression.

In 'Ice Dive', we used both. We had to cover quite a distance between the glacier and the volcano, which aren’t close to each other. We needed shots of the glacier, the volcano, and everything in between, so that required a helicopter. For shooting the track of the ice dive attempt, we used a heavy-lift drone.

In terms of not disturbing the athletes, as I mentioned before, there were several scenes where they did get disturbed, because we had a lot of shots to capture, and not all of them were in the same location. But what we tried to do was allow them to organically perform the climactic moments of the film.

In 'Parkour', the climactic roof jump is a huge part of the film, You don’t feel a disturbance as there wasn’t one. That was the point. We wanted you to experience it as it played out.

Similarly, in 'Ice Dive', the world record attempt is the best part of half the film. These moments were captured organically, which required a lot of very careful planning about where to place the cameras.

We couldn’t cover the entire underwater track from 0 to 180/200 meters, and we also weren’t sure if the athlete would make it to the end. The biggest challenge was whether he would make it to the end, and if he didn’t, whether we’d have the camera in the right place.

So we decided to cover the first 40 meters underwater, knowing he’d make it there. We had one static cam to cover the start, and then had to decide whether to place another static cam either at the end or around 120 meters, which was the least he thought he could make. We went with the 120-meter mark, and then if he made it further, we’d continue.

We didn’t know exactly where he was underwater, only where the safety diver was. We had to run the static cam to the end and managed to land the tripod just seconds before he emerged from the surface to capture that final moment.

We had a brilliant editor called Richard Lester, who was also fundamental in honing all of these stories, together with me in the edit. We spent weeks and weeks batting ideas back and forth, figuring out what would work best before presenting it to our exec at Atlantic Productions, and our exec on the team at Apple TV.

Then we'd get their feedback, incorporate it, and go again. So we had some great narrative brains working on this project, not only my own.

Apologies that I can’t speak in detail about the actual rigs used, but we had a dedicated close-up rig. This 12K rig enabled us to shoot close-ups of our talent during key moments in their narratives.

For example, as freediver Ant Williams takes his last breath before diving beneath the ice for his world record attempt in 'Ice Dive', we were able to capture those moments of fear, apprehension, and determination on an intimate scale.

Or with Laura Hayes on the start line of the Pike’s Peak race course just before the flag comes down in episode five, 'Hill Climb'. This rig also gave us the possibility to play with depth of field so that we could soften the background while having the emotion on our athlete’s face in sharp focus.

I'm not allowed to say much at all. All I can really say is that they were proprietary cameras to Apple. Apple had made them, and Apple owned them. We also had Apple DPs on the first handful of episodes until the last couple of episodes, because Apple wanted those proprietary cameras in the hands of their own people.

For the last two episodes, we had independent cinematographers with experience in the specific sports – JR Racine on the episode 'Deep Water Solo' and experienced motorsports cinematographer Ben Joiner on 'Hill Climb'.

All I can really say is that we were up to almost 8K resolution per eye on those. It's great now that with the launch of the new Black Magic Ursa Cine Immersive, filmmakers will be able to make a similar quality level to what we were making, but there aren’t many of them out there yet for the general public, and they are quite expensive.

I do hope Apple is invested; they give me no insight into that, but I do hope so. They seem to have continued making content, so that's a good sign.

Where do I see it heading? I've believed for ten years, and I still very much believe, that the future of entertainment will be immersive. The exact form is yet to be determined, but I expect that what we'll be looking at is something a little bit more akin to AR glasses.

However, we probably need a few years before all of the tech that currently goes into something as super as the Vision Pro can be incorporated into something as small as AR glasses.

I think the beauty of something like that will probably be in a hand gesture or an eye gesture that enables you to flip out of your fully immersive entertainment mode into just glasses.

Maybe also mixed-reality modes, where you're watching the same immersive content as someone sitting next to you on the sofa, but somehow that person is still next to you within that immersive content.

I don’t know exactly how that will work, and it might be a bit weird to see someone sitting next to you when you're in the middle of a thriller scene playing out in a New York apartment. But yeah, I think the future will look much more like this than anything we've seen before.

I just think the time of rectangular screens in whatever form they take, phones, iPads, TVs, certainly TVs, is numbered. As soon as people start experiencing this level of XR, they’ll think, "Well, why would I want to watch Lord of the Rings on a 2D set? I want to live Lord of the Rings!"

That did not, no. I mean, each project I go on, because I've done quite different immersive projects, each one differs from the next; some live-action, some game engine, interactive and so on.

The next project I'm doing is in a games engine and will incorporate the feeling of the presence of others in your space. But because I knew from the get-go that Adventure was a live-action film and it was going to fully immerse you in the action, there wasn't really a need for Apple to try to find a way to make that a group experience.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can say much. All I can probably say is it's a music project for a big-name IP.

Yes, definitely. I think the demand’s grown and grown. I mean, I know that people who've run big companies within this space have felt like it’s been cyclical and that the business journey’s been a bit more of a rollercoaster.

But I think that’s just the case with a niche industry where there are limited budgets and only so many clients. In terms of big players in this space, there’s now Meta, Google again with Android XR, and then obviously there’s Apple.

I think that ultimately, demand has just risen and risen, and I feel it continues to rise. This particular project, my next one, I’ve been having a conversation about for probably like six years, and in the beginning, they were not interested in immersive. But that has evolved, and over time, they've changed their minds. So, finally, we are doing something together in 2025.

It depends on where they’re coming from. For writers who want to direct, I feel like if you’ve got an idea for something, try writing a scene or two in the context of immersive filmmaking.

For example, if you want to create a 180 film, first and foremost, watch a ton of immersive content. That’s the best way to see what works and what doesn’t. Even if you can't get access to something like the Vision Pro and watch super high-resolution content like Adventure, watching immersive content is key.

Then, if you're a writer, write a scene or two, and think about how you would live the story versus how you would normally watch a story if you're used to making content for 2D.

Find opportunities to play with the cameras and understand how they work and how they capture scenes. Think about what it means to be capturing a whole scene, especially when working with lenses that capture a 180º field of view or even a 360º field of view.

Personally, I enjoy working with 180, and on the Adventure series, I almost developed a preference for it, whereas a lot of people in immersive filmmaking have a natural bias for 360 because it’s considered ‘fully immersive.’ What I like about 180 is that you can bring more of the tools from traditional 2D filmmaking.

For example, we used a close-up camera rig, which was such an important part of the storytelling because it enabled you to really hone in on the characters’ faces just before they took on immense challenges, helping you feel their emotions.

Moving from 2D to 180 is a more gentle jumping-off point because you can still use tools like close-ups that you’d use in regular filmmaking. In 180, it's slightly different, but it still feels like a close-up. On the other hand, with 360, it's harder to capture that because you would look down to the bottom of the frame and expect the body to continue, but it doesn’t.

Another thing we played with was a top-down shot, which would be harder to pull off in 360 because it would totally reorient the viewer's world. But in 180, you can forgive it more because it's a more controlled field of view, and it can feel like an artistic tableau.

Lastly, in stereoscopic 3D, you can’t be super close to your subject because you start to get parallax between the two eyes. This can create an uncomfortable, cross-eyed feeling. So, these technical things, while easy to learn, are key to understanding immersive filmmaking.