Justin Perkinson has a passion for bringing stories to life

I really love storytelling. I love visual storytelling. I got into filmmaking through photography and then being like, oh, I like this. I like framing things. And then as a kid, I liked acting and was in theater and loved movies always. And so, at some point there was this aha moment where like, oh, I could actually be behind the camera and do some of this work. I'm from Virginia. I was born in Richmond and my father moved to Jamaica when I was a little boy. He was a dentist and broke his back and could no longer practice and had an idea for helping youth in developing countries learn about oral hygiene and best practices. I started going to visit and kind of started this rhythm between school time in Virginia and school breaks, like spent most of my summer breaks in Jamaica and really opened my mind to a whole other way of thinking and living and the ocean was a real big part of that story for me growing up, right? There was a cove. I would go out and I remember some of the first times going underwater and being exposed to this completely underwater magical world that opened my eyes to just, wow, this is fascinating. And so, I really developed a fondness and love and appreciation for the sea and the ocean and the environment, which I think came to really bear here at Virginia Tech, where I didn't really fuse those two together the filmmaking and the underwater world until I got here. My work spans from traditional filmmaking with normal cameras to more emerging tools like virtual reality, 360 cameras, 3D platforms. I had the real fortune to work with the United Nations Foundation for my first big VR project about the global malaria crisis and mosquito bed nets and how that's a really important tool. And so that kind of got me into more and more immersive stories. I tend to gravitate towards stories that bring people together across cultural areas. More and more I'm working with scientists to help tell their stories and bring their stories to life. I started working with a couple scientists here at Virginia Tech, a nano scientist and a restoration biologist who were working with freshwater mussels. We wanted to leverage these immersive technologies to get you under the water to have you experience this underwater world as if you were there. I think the 360 space and the more immersive kind of VR platforms and extended reality really puts the viewer inside of the story in a new kind of way where they have a sense of agency, at the very least how they can look around and kind of experience the environment the way that they choose. I love learning. My grandfather at one point was like, Justin, you'd be a student your whole life if you could. And I was like, yeah, I hope so. Filmmaking is both a medium and an excuse to learn more things and to share that knowledge.