Secret Location cranks up the volume with Banger Films

A new VR experience co-produced by the Toronto companies takes viewers to the Wacken Open Air heavy metal festival in northern Germany.

Secret Location has partnered with Banger Films on a VR experience that takes the viewer to the Wacken Open Air heavy metal festival in northern Germany.

Welcome to Wacken, launched in December, is a five-chapter, 23-minute documentary project directed by Banger Films’ Sam Dunn (Hip-Hop Evolution). It runs on the Secret Location-created VR platform Vusr, which aims to solve VR’s “fragmentation” issue by allowing content creators to publish and distribute virtual reality content across every current VR platform. The project is compatible with Gear VR, iOS and Google Cardboard.

Wacken targets a male-skewing demo of metal enthusiasts, as well as the documentary film community and festival goers. There is also a non-VR, behind-the-scenes doc to accompany Wacken, but it is a VR-first project.

Banger and Secret Location have previously partnered on seasons one and two of the TV series Gaming Show (Disney XD), a comedy series in which teenagers create a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming. They also collaborated on the interactive website for Banger’s Hip-Hop Evolution. The pair produced the VR experience with the financial participation of the CMF.

The release of Wacken comes three weeks after Banger won an International Emmy for its docuseries Hip-Hop Evolutionwhich revisits New York City in the 1970s to explore how the genre transformed from a house-party experiment to a global phenomenon.

In September, Secret Location, which has ramped up its production of VR projects in recent months, released its first ever original VR project, Blasters of the Universe, a first-person shooter game for Oculus and SteamVR. The VR experience is the first in a slate of original games that the Toronto-based company plans to release over the coming year.