(Image Courtesy of Ferryman Collective)
Among the most intriguing corners of the TV Academy’s many, many Emmy categories now being voted upon is Outstanding Emerging Media Program, featuring apps from Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation and NBCUniversal’s Blumhouse specialty horror unit, facing off with a quirky, boundary-pushing hybrid virtual/live experience from the tiny non-profit Ferryman Collective.
Ferryman’s Uncanny Alley A New Day is built on Rick “Metarick” Treweek’s six-year-old Uncanny Alley universe of virtual worlds, and itself is accessed through the 12-year-old VRChat, a social virtual-world that attracts an estimated 10 million monthly active users globally. Ferryman sells tickets online to scheduled performances that run on the widely available Quest VR headset, and also streams the virtual experiences on YouTube.
So far, so familiarly out there compared to the usual broadcast sitcoms, limited-run streaming series and cable-network reality competitions that stuff dozens of Emmy categories.
Where Ferryman takes an extra, highly intriguing step is A New Day’s use of two live actors, who voice a total of 15 characters, while simultaneously interacting with the audience and triggering in-experience actions that drive the narrative.
Writer-director Stephen Butchko, for instance, may voice a robot cop with a Southern drawl, then seamlessly shift to a fussy Jarvis-like service bot with an English accent. Show producer and Ferryman development director Whitton Frank voiced the “female-presenting” characters during my experience, again with the same bewildering facility and range.
“Though the script is technically the same, you never know how the audience will respond,” said Deirdre V. Lyons, Ferryman co-founder/artistic director and a producer/assistant director on A New Day. “We have two different endings, and the audience can choose which one they want.”
Fully engaged audience members can build a more unique experience, though there are tools if needed to deal with a disruptive or excessively nomadic attendee. But more generally, as Butchko put it, “We drop bread crumbs where we want them to go and need them to go.”
In creating the hour-long experience, Lyons said the Uncanny Alley universe “is pretty much a puzzle box … We’re having to think about the relationship between actors and audience, because they’re part of the story. We wanted the audience to experience as much of this world as possible.”
The interactivity and reliance on improvisational actors limits audience size to around seven people at a time, Lyons said. “We’ve had 12 to 15 audience members, but it can be overwhelming if they’re all talking at the same time.”
A New Day has been on the festival circuit the past two years, making some 50 such appearances since a world premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, which each year spotlights top interactive experiences at an immersive pavilion on an island just offshore of Venice’s Lido, where the main festival takes place.
Another Ferryman project, A Wonderful Thing to Realize from co-founder Screaming Color (aka Christopher Lane Davis), will be part of this year’s Venice Best Of retrospective.
After Venice in 2024, A New Day went dark for several months until SXSW in the spring of 2025, Lyons said.
Since then, it’s done the Raindance Festival, AWE USA, Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, Indiecade, and SIGGRAPH among many others. It and previous Ferryman projects such as Gumball Dreams, Welcome to Respite and Find Willy have also been performed overseas, and translated into other languages, including Mandarin and French.
All told, Lyons said the “universe of worlds” that includes A New Day has had almost 750,000 visitors over its existence.
But compared to even many immersive experiences created over the past decade or more, A New Day represents something different, made more unique and special with each audience’s own take on the performance.
“It isn’t (pre-)recorded,” Lyons said. “It is different. Our worlds are always changing and updating as we go. It’s pretty magical. We’re able to actually stretch the boundaries of what’s possible on the Quest.”
The Emmy nomination already has been transformative for Ferryman, regardless of final voting in the Immersive Media category, Lyons said.
“It’s an absolute life changer,” Lyons said. “We’ve never had a sexy credit before. You say, ‘I just won an Emmy,’ they stop and back up. The perspective and prestige is already changing the way people think about our work. They know it’s being held up by the (voting) peers in the Emerging Media Peer Group.”
In and around the voting and Emmy festivities, Ferryman will offer a number of public performances of A New Day, and also showcase it at the TV Academy’s Televerse conference.
That visibility and imprimatur of achievement has been particularly important for Ferryman, a tiny non-profit that relies on grant funding, donations and ticket sales to keep creating unique experiences, Lyons said.
Emmy voting closes Aug. 27, ahead of multiple ceremonies capped by the Primetime Emmy Awards telecast Sept. 14 on NBC and Peacock.
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