How a VRChat world became a documentary set
In We Met in Virtual Reality, the camera never leaves VRChat. Director Joe Hunting filmed the documentary inside the online social platform, where people meet as avatars in digitally built spaces. Rather than pointing a physical camera at a headset wearer, the production used virtual camera tools: software-controlled cameras that can be positioned and moved through the same 3D environments as the avatars.
That changes what “filming” means. The camera records the world as it appears inside VRChat, including its rooms, characters, and movements. The people on screen are represented by their chosen avatars, not by images of their bodies outside the headset. A conversation can therefore unfold in a neon bar or another designed setting without the film cutting away to a conventional interview room.
The avatar is part of the story
An avatar can be playful, fantastic, or deliberately unlike its user’s everyday appearance. That does not make the conversation fictional: the people behind the characters are speaking about their own experiences. The film’s subjects discuss isolation, deaf culture, and connection, while their avatar identities remain visible. The contrast lets viewers see both the intimacy of a personal account and the unusual form through which it is shared.
The setting also shapes the documentary’s access. Hunting could film people meeting in the spaces where they already socialized, rather than asking them to recreate those encounters in a physical location. But the camera could show only what the virtual environment conveyed; an avatar is not a transparent window onto its user’s face or surroundings.
Machinima as documentary craft
Machinima—film made using video-game or virtual-world technology—has often been associated with animation, play, or fan-made work. This film demonstrates a different possibility: virtual camera placement and avatar performance can serve the familiar documentary tasks of observing people, framing a scene, and giving conversations a visual setting. The medium’s artifice is not hidden; it is the very condition of the encounter. Viewers see a record of people meeting through avatars, in a world their chosen platform makes possible.
