You Destroy. We Create: The War on Ukraine’s Culture is a 360-video documentary by NowHere Media & Meta’s VR for Good that was released on Meta Quest TV on November 30th. Shot over the course of 2 weeks and a distance of 4000 kilometers by co-directors Gayatri Parameswaran and Felix Gaedtke (producers of Home After War and Kusunda), this piece documents the story of how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegally targeting cultural heritage sites and shows how artists and museums are reacting to the war and continuing to create cultural artifacts.

This piece mixes a number of modalities from 360-video, 180-video, animation, and stereo drone shots and ties everything together with spatialized sound and at times emotionally-moving or driving sound track. I had a chance to talk with Parameswaran and Gaedtke about the challenges of shooting an immersive documentary within a war zone, and the various tradeoffs for how and when they’d use a particular technology to tell this story. We were also joined by VR for Good executive producer Amy Seidenwurm who gave some additional context on this project.