As the firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors become increasingly scarce, the urgency to preserve these narratives has never been greater.

Comissioned by Illinois Holocaust Museum and award-winning production company East City Films, Escape to Shanghai is a virtual reality experience that follows Doris Fogel’s epic journey from Nazi Germany to Shanghai, China, as her family made a temporary home and a new life cut off from the horrors playing out in German-occupied Europe.

Through 360 video technology alongside 3D environments, stylized animation, motion capture, and a spatial soundtrack, audiences are immersed in Doris Fogel’s story.

After witnessing Doris’ firsthand experience of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, audiences travel with Doris from Berlin, Germany to the Hongkew area of Shanghai, China, where she lived in a single room with five family members amongst 20,000 Jewish refugees.

Filmed on location in Shanghai, Chicago, and Berlin, Escape to Shanghai allows audiences to journey with Doris from 1930s Berlin to Shanghai in the Jewish ghetto, and their ultimate escape from the ghetto for a new sense of freedom in the United States.

East City Films came to us to develop a trilogy of VR documentaries for the Illinois Holocaust Museum, sharing the stories of Survivors Marion Deichmann, Rodi Glass and Doris Fogel, working with Darren Emerson, Mary Matheson and Charlotte Mikkelborg respectively on each film.

Built to be installed in the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s VR Cinema for the HTC Vive Pro, running on Nvidia RTX 4080’s and using Unity’s High-Definition Render Pipeline, the 3 films combine detailed and realistic 6-DOF 3D environments which blend seamlessly with 360° 5.5k stereoscopic film and third order ambisonic audio.