Sample Track by TZU: Neon Lake

Come to Brazil: Emmy and Venice Triumphs from São Paulo to Hollywood

Emmy and Cannes Film Festival Award-winning director Ricardo Laganaro has spent over a decade shifting the paradigms of immersive storytelling. As a partner at the venture-backed ARVORE Entertainment, Laganaro defied international expectations when designing his acclaimed interactive film, The Line (A Linha). Rather than leaning into exotic caricatures of Brazil like samba or soccer, he chose his hometown of São Paulo as a backdrop to prove that universal love stories belong in South American metropolises just as much as in New York or Los Angeles. This bold creative stance paid off globally. The Line captured the prestigious Best Experience Lion at Venice, secured a Primetime Emmy, and opened doors directly to Hollywood studios—culminating in a partnership with Sony Pictures to build the canonical, choice-driven interactive experience The Boys: Trigger Warning.

Pixie Dust Waterfalls: Venture Architecture and Virtual Reality Aesthetics

Laganaro’s diverse creative portfolio spans decades, ranging from directing music videos for NX Zero with 27 million YouTube views to doing 3D rendering for 360 film with Anthony Hopkins. When transitioning to virtual reality, he aimed to give users a nostalgic feeling from the very first moment. The experience opens with a literal digital scan of his own father's 1950s graduation photo album. In its original festival run, the piece achieved magical status by requiring users to physically blow virtual dust off the pages—an interaction that left audiences in disbelief that such a thing was even possible in virtual reality.

To ensure interactions and storytelling are seamlessly stitched together, Laganaro built a rigorous internal design framework. Rejecting the standard model of writing a screenplay and going straight into production, ARVOR treats narrative design similarly to software engineering with a Kanban board. The team constructs hypotheses and prototypes together, testing and iterating repeatedly. The Line went through 16 distinct versions of its story, simplifying interactions whenever they interfered with the narrative, to ensure the features and the story were built as one cohesive experience. For The Boys: Trigger Warning, they integrated narrative deeply by collaborating with the show's writers, showrunner Eric Kripke, and a dedicated consultant, creatively solving gameplay mechanics—like administering powerful upgrades with intense side effects—using the official lore of the universe.

Operating a high-end interactive studio out of Brazil presents unique financial challenges, particularly given the absence of traditional government support. Laganaro and his team bridged this gap by securing venture capital, pitching investors on a vision of capturing global attention to build a foundation rather than focusing on immediate commercial results. While average Americans visited movie theaters 50 times a year in the 1920s, that figure has plummeted to a mere two times a year today. Highly curated, sensorial installations are the ultimate key to giving audiences a definitive reason to consume entertainment outside their homes.

Don’t Fear the REAPER: Giving Creators Superpowers via Reactive NPCs

ARVORE launched Fábula Rasa, a groundbreaking project that clinched the Audience Award at South by Southwest (SXSW) by using Large Language Models to power non-player characters (NPCs) that dynamically understand and verbally converse with the player in real time. There is a vast structural gulf between unvetted generative prompts and technical automation workflows—such as executing LLMs directly inside the Houdini console or modulating raw audio wavelengths via DAWs like REAPER. Shifting a long-term outlook toward location-based entertainment and betting heavily on physical, omni-sensory spaces like Disney’s Imagineering parks or Los Angeles’ Dataland is embracing the future.