The lynchpin of The Waiting Room VR piece, is a 9 min durational 360 take, a reconstruction of my last session of radiotherapy, which marked the end of nine months of breast cancer treatment. The 360 single take captures the world outside of my body, the clinical space in which I am treated. The user finds themselves in an intimate and unexpected role of bystander. They witness the fears, vulnerabilities and frustrations of a year dealing with the ‘Cut, Poison and Burn’ approach to breast cancer.

This experience is counter balanced by the CGI journey inside my body. Working with 3D artists, we have bought to life the medical imaging I’ve collected though out treatment. Cancer cells, CT scans , mammograms and ultrasound provide a 3D portrait of my body from the inside, out. The user can marvel at the beauty and fragility of my heart, of my lungs and my cancer cells as they split and multiply without emotion or reason. Within this multi platform project, I embraced the challenge of telling my story in the contrasting mediums of ‘flat film’ and spatial storytelling. In the latter, I explored affect, narrative and presence design in VR exploring how users can experience and witness my story as an “embodied visitor”

The Waiting Room begins with a personal journey but as cancer affects one in two of us over the course of a lifetime, it also tells a very universal story. Moving beyond sentimentality and survivor/victim binaries, the project disrupts the objectification of the medical gaze and reminds the audience of the person behind the diagnosis.

The Waiting Room VR project premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival. It was also selected for IDFA in November 2019, where it won the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling The Waiting Room: VR was commissioned by the Virtual Realities Immersive Documentaries Encounters project; a collaboration between Watershed, the University of Bristol, UWE Bristol (University of the West of England) and University of Bath, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The Waiting Room film and VR project will tour festivals, exhibitions and hospitals throughout 2019 – 20.

Victoria Mapplebeck is a BAFTA award winning artist and film director. Victoria’s films explore autobiographical stories which ask universal questions about our relationship with technology, parenting, health and wellbeing.

For the last decade, Victoria has been shooting continuously with smartphones. She is passionate about the innovation, intimacy and accessibility of smartphone filmmaking. In 2015, she wrote, filmed and directed ‘160 Characters’ a smartphone short for Film London. Shot entirely on an iPhone 6, ‘160 Characters’ brings to life the secrets buried in a vintage Nokia. When the film launched online it received a Vimeo Staff pick.

In 2017, Victoria wrote, filmed and directed ‘Missed Call’ which explores the difficult decision to reconnect with her son’s absent father. It begins with the last message he sent in 2006 and ends with the first call to him over a decade later.

‘Missed Call’ won Best Short Form Programme at the 2019 BAFTAs and Best Documentary Short at The 2019 Broadcast Digital Awards.

Victoria recently completed ‘Motherboard’ a smartphone feature documentary, filmed over 20 years which charts the joy, pain and comedy of raising her son Jim alone. Victoria first began documenting their lives with her old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15. She recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first scan, to his first day at college.

‘Motherboard’ is the antidote to the judgmental and unrealistic expectations we have about motherhood, creating an honest, funny and relatable film for any mother who has wept tears of both joy and frustration.

Victoria is also passionate about new modes of documentary storytelling. Over the last three decades she has experimented with new technologies and new platforms to build new audiences. In 2019, she was awarded an EPSRC Immersive Documentary Encounters Commission, to create a VR project which told the story of her breast cancer (as patient and film-maker) . This multi platform project also includes a 30 minute smartphone short film which premiered on The Guardian website in 2019. The Waiting Room VR project premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival , won IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling and was also featured on BBC Click . It was also selected for Forbe’s Top 50 XR experiences of 2019 and chosen by MIT as one of ‘The Best of International 360 Cinema in VR’ projects over the last decade.

In 2021 Victoria wrote and directed, ‘Testing Times’ an immersive audio experience which features over 50 hours of phone calls and voicemails, with friends, family and doctors, capturing the challenges of multiple lockdowns. ‘Testing Times’ premiered at IDFA in 2021. In Spring 2022 it was showcased at The True/False Arts Festival in Ohio and in 2023, it was part of a BFI Expanded showcase celebrating the work of women and non binary directors working in XR.

Victoria is also a BAFTA Member and Professor of Digital Arts in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.