Brief:

To celebrate the life of Robert De Niro, Tribeca Festival partnered with Little Cinema to create a one of a kind immersive short film starring Robert De Niro, designed exclusively for 360° immersive viewing.

SYNOPSIS:

DE NIRO, NEW YORK was a first-of-its-kind immersive film installation that reimagines Robert De Niro’s career through 360-degree projection, spatial audio and mind-bending scale — pulling audiences into the heart of De Niro’s cinematic world and his deep ties to downtown NYC. Directed by Sam Gill and Luke Neher and produced by Tribeca Studios and Little Cinema, the piece merges scenes from 40+ of De Niro’s films into one continuous visual and emotional journey.

STRATEGY & Execution:

Constructed from over five decades of films featuring Robert De Niro in New York City, DE NIRO, NEW YORK moves through space and time with a dream logic, placing De Niro’s many on-screen personalities in direct conversation with each other. These moments of connection and interaction transcend eras to form a captivating portrait of an artist and his city evolving together over more than half a century.

Like a cross between Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK (2010) and Richard Linklater’s BOYHOOD (2014), this one-man show sees De Niro portraying an anonymous artist dreaming of making it in New York City, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the heights of fame and back again.

To achieve this, Sam Gill and Luke Neher meticulously re-edited hundreds of scenes to create a new immersive narrative short using an original score and 360° spatial sound design. With a focus on titles set in New York City, DE NIRO, NEW YORK draws on material spanning the artist’s entire career, incorporating 500+ samples from 40+ films such as early collaborations with director Brian De Palma in the late 1960s to more recent titles such as Barry Levinson’s THE WIZARD OF LIES (2017) and Martin Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN (2019).

Originally designed for a screening on the ISM Hexadome, (which comprises six 1:1 projector screens and a 52-channel spatial sound system), the piece was then adapted for the Mercer Labs Main Hall - a 5,000 squarefoot x 40 ft ceiling room with four walls and floorspace that create a seamless 360° canvas.

The differences between these spaces and screening systems presented us with significant creative and technical challenges in adapting the piece. For us, tackling these challenges became a process of discovery as we developed an understanding of how best to utilize Mercer Labs' distinct qualities to tell our story in a way that felt tailored for the space.

The piece required 2000+ hours of editing, sound design, and original composition (a process spanning 18+ months) as well as weeks of mixing and testing. Expanding beyond the Hexadome's 6x 1:1 square frames into the Mercer Labs’ 5x 'frames' (2x 3.24:1 walls, 2x 1.31:1 walls and 1x 2.47:1 floor) demanded a re-tooling of how we told the story. The version adapted for Mercer Labs required a complete shot-by-shot, frame-by-frame reconstruction of the piece and a remixing of its 350+ channel spatial audio mix. Each of these many hundreds of shots required a careful, highly-intensive process of upscaling and restoration into 8K to ensure the source material was represented faithfully on the Mercer Labs expansive canvas.

For example: a single 20-30 second sequence in which our protagonist walks down a NYC street at night incorporated visual elements excerpted from dozens of exterior shots from films such as Sleepers (1995), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), A Bronx Tale (1993), The Irishman (2019) and more. These elements (i.e., a passing train from Sleepers or a portion of NYC skyline from A Bronx Tale) were woven together into a single 360° frame - created as a kind of mosaic.

DE NIRO, NEW YORK touches heavily on memory and the passing of time, so these mosaic 'environments' were pieced together as a dreamy, painterly images to create an entirely new narrative, exploring many of the defining themes, character archetypes and visual motifs recurrent throughout De Niro’s filmography.