How do you tell a story in which a piece of code is the main character?
That was the main challenge in a newly released virtual reality film, Zero Days VR, which follows the destructive path of Stuxnet–the world’s first real cyber weapon and perhaps the most dangerous piece of code in history. Based on director Alex Gibney’s 2016 documentary Zero Days, the film takes you back to 2010, when a vicious malware thought to be created by the NSA and Israel’s intelligence agency attacked the uranium centrifuges inside a nuclear plant in Iran with the express purpose of preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon (neither the U.S. nor Iran has confirmed the allegation). But the virus didn’t stop there–it quickly spread around the world, showing just how lethal a cyber weapon could be.
But translating a documentary full of archival footage and talking heads into virtual reality is a serious challenge–especially when your main character is a piece of code. So Zero Days VR’s director, Yasmin Elayat, turned to the designer and animator Michael Rigley to come up with a concept for what the malicious virus might look like.
“We didn’t want to do the overused visual digital language, with ones and zeros, code that’s green,” Rigley says. “We tried to develop a new language for it. We wanted it to feel both organic and computational at the same time, almost corrosive.”
To bring it to life in the VR film, the team built the animation in code–and it generates live as you’re watching. “We built an algorithm for Stuxnet,” she says. “It was a true conversion of content and method. It’s code representing code.”
Elayat, who studied computer science in college, says that during the process of writing the script for the VR film, she became utterly fascinated with Stuxnet. “This thing became a character to me, this well-trained soldier that was on a different level,” she says. “It’s so precise. It was not messy at all, it was very subtle and it took its time, and it worked autonomously. When it was out in the world, you didn’t know what it was doing.”
Since the United States is such a connected country, it’s particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks, and Elayat hopes that the film and documentary help people understand just how vital cybersecurity is and will be in the future. The NSA informant character, whose testimony points to the NSA and Israeli intelligence agency as the creators of Stuxnet, says that Stuxnet is the tip of the iceberg. “There’s no way to put the weapon back in the box,” Elayat says. “That’s the stakes. It’s a bit scary to hear, but we thought it was critical.“