Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning director and Co-Founder at Scatter, an immersive entertainment and software company. Their contributions include Depthkit, the most widely used toolkit for volumetric video capture.
Amongst many awards, Elayat won an Emmy for Original Approaches: Documentary and Best Cinematic VR. Festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, SIGGRAPH, Festival de Cannes, and the World Economic Forum have all shown her work.
Her latest project: afro-futurist virtual-reality film The Changing Same, a co-production with RADA studio. The film explores the cyclical history of racial injustice in America.
Yasmin Elayat: storytelling career
Elayat started off as a software development engineer, before working at New York University developing interactive installations. She then worked as a creative technologist at Potion, an interactive design firm. Elayat soon quit her job and took the leap into setting up her own project.
In 2011, Elayat co-founded Group Stream, a collaborative story-telling platform where the crowd can upload and share their media and stories from any event. This platform drove the collaborative web-documentary 18 Days in Egypt, which called on the Egyptian community to tell their story of the Egyptian Revolution. Tribeca New Media Fund and the Sundance New Frontier Lab both supported the project.
Elayat also directed the VR film Zero Days, a documentary about cyber warfare. It won the Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches: Documentary.
Elayat then worked as Tech director at Second Story Interactive Studios. Since 2016, she taught a class at New York University on new media. That same year, Elayat co-founded Scatter, the award-winning immersive media studio.
Yasmin Elayat: personal life
Innovation has surrounded Elayat from a young age, growing up in Silicon Valley. She taught herself how to program at just 10 years old. Specifically, she built websites to show off her art and poetry.
Elayat studied Computer engineering at Santa Clara University and Computer Science at the American University in Cairo. She then went to art school in New York. There, she really discovered her creative potential:
“It’s always been there, but it became more solidified after grad school when I was in art school and in New York. New York is a place where hybrids, like me, could find a place because you can be an artist and a technologist,” she says.
Elayat wants to contribute to diversifying her industry. “I was one of two women in my class or a few women and always the only female engineer,” she says. With Scatter, Elayat aims to give a platform to a diverse range of storytellers, with an emphasis on accessibility in volumetric filmmaking.
Yasmin Elayat: The Changing Same
Elayat’s latest project is virtual reality afro-futurist film The Changing Same. This magical-realist immersive film unflinchingly tackles the issue of racism in America. The user travels through time and space to be a witness to the connected historical experiences of racial injustice.
The film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the award for Best Immersive Narrative at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. This is just the first episode, introducing the audience to a world and characters built for an entire series.
“We’re doing something that is quite different, more like a beautiful marriage between filmmaking and game design,” Elayat says.
