ASU professor’s documentary on LA fires to debut at Venice Film Festival
Ashley Buschhorn, a student in the Narrative and Emerging Media master's program, wore protective gear while she took images of the destruction at fire sites in Los Angeles in January. Footage captured by students, staff and faculty is part of a new immersive documentary that will have its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September. Photo by Mary Matheson
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Students, staff and faculty from ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program raced to the site of the LA fires in January 2025 to take 3D 360-degree images of the destruction using new technology.
Those images evolved into a 25-minute immersive documentary, including interviews with people who lost their homes, called “Out of the Ashes.”
The documentary will have its world premiere at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival in September.
Last year, a team from Arizona State University used cutting-edge technology to capture astonishing images at the sites of the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles.
The before-and-after, 3D 360-degree images were taken by students, staff and faculty from the Narrative and Emerging Media program led by Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer in the field of extended-reality storytelling.
The heartbreaking images show people’s homes and the charred aftermath, with scorched toys and kitchenware, and objects that remained strangely untouched by the flames.
The project was published by several media outlets, but the story didn’t end there. Over the past 18 months, de la Peña worked with her co-director, extended-reality director and producer Rory Mitchell, to expand on the work with additional interviews and images.
Now their immersive documentary, titled “Out of the Ashes,” will have its world premiere at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival in September.
“Out of the Ashes” is one of 68 projects from 26 countries in the Venice Immersive category, which includes all forms of extended-reality work: immersive videos, virtual and mixed reality, virtual worlds and immersive installations. Thirty of the projects are part of the competition, including “Out of the Ashes.”
“We took it from archive journalism to actual major storytelling,” said de la Peña, director of the Narrative and Emerging Media program and a professor practice.
The project is like a “memory palace,” in which original photos and videos from victims were modified to become three-dimensional, she said.
“You can view them both in the ashes and within the memories of what it used to be like. It’s really quite powerful.”
Two fires that started on Jan. 7, 2025 — the Eaton fire in Altadena and the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades — destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed 31 people, according to Cal Fire.
Even as she grieved the devastation of her hometown, de la Peña knew it was a hands-on opportunity for her students to use technology she had purchased only months before.
During that time, Mitchell had tried to access the scene to record his own images but wasn’t able to until he connected with the ASU team, which had acquired press passes. They worked for more than a week, from dawn to dusk, while wearing protective jumpsuits amid the smoke, broken glass and debris.
The team carried a rig with four cameras that captured different angles of one spot simultaneously and then used artificial intelligence to organize the images. The “Gaussian Splat” technology creates high-quality, three-dimensional images faster and more efficiently and allows the viewer to spatially “walk” around the scene.
In the past five years, de la Peña has built the Narrative and Emerging Media program, based at the ASU California Center Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, into a one-of-a-kind convergence of film and journalism technology and innovation. The program is located jointly in The Sidney Poitier New American Film School and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The immersive “Out of the Ashes” documentary that will debut in Venice — which de la Peña and Mitchell are still tweaking — will include seven vignettes of people who lost their homes.
“We interviewed the subjects about how they learned that there was a fire, when they realized that they had to make the decision to flee, what they took with them when they left and what it's been like after the fact in attempts to try to rebuild their homes,” said Mitchell, a visiting scholar in the program.
“In some cases, we've also scanned the objects that they took with them, so we’re telling their story through those objects.”
One of the people interviewed is actress and producer Melissa Rivers, daughter of legendary comedian Joan Rivers.
“She took Joan Rivers’ Emmy with her and a few other objects, like a picture of her deceased father because she didn't have too many pictures of him,” Mitchell said.
At the Venice festival, “Out of the Ashes” will feature images projected onto the walls of a 13th-century building.
“It’s an incredible setting in which to tell these powerful stories,” he said.
“And in the middle of that set will be people in headsets who will hear a soundscape of music composed by survivors and audio clips from the interviews.”
The full experience is 25 minutes and is interactive through a map.
A portion of “Out of the Ashes” was shown publicly in January at a Los Angeles event demonstrating how emerging technologies can help people process collective experiences such as the LA fires. The review in the Los Angeles Times said: “The instinct to extend a hand feels natural in virtual reality, as it’s visceral and creates a sense of presence. And it also seems a part of the mission for ‘Out of the Ashes,’ a work as much about the effects of the fires as it is a vessel for collective grief and empathy.”
Peter Murrieta, interim associate dean and deputy director of The Poitier Film School, said the work is awe-inspiring.
“So many of our students were immediately involved and became a part of it, as well as the NEM staff and faculty. It became this big joint effort by that program to swing into action.
“When you think about the core of NEM as a shared program between Poitier Film School and the Cronkite School of Journalism — that's it in action. It was already an outstanding achievement. Then to have it hit the Venice Film Festival is beyond anything you would expect.
“This is completely treasured by everybody at Herberger Institute.”
In addition to capturing images at the fire sites, students have also helped with other parts of the project, including interviews, scanning and sound, de la Peña said.
She teaches her students about immersive storytelling beyond the technical aspects.
“I try to encourage them to understand and have a sense that there's something valuable and important that you have to capture, and then you come back and think about the human story that goes with it,” she said.
She said that no one on site in January 2025 knew how the project would evolve.
“Obviously, it's an incredibly impactful event. Part of teaching is not just how you do the work, but how you think and feel about the work and the stories and opportunities when you have to just get out there and start getting material even before you understand how the story's going to come together,” she said.
De la Peña and Mitchell want to record Angelenos’ efforts at rebuilding to eventually have a more expansive version of the project that could travel around the country.
“We’ll be following the rebuilding because this is also about resilience,” she said.
The tragedy was personal for the directors, both of whom grew up in Los Angeles.
“We both had dozens of friends who have been displaced by this,” Mitchell said.
“This is something that people are going to be arguing about for the rest of our lives, as far as what happened and what went wrong in all of this. And our focus is not really on that aspect, but really on the human cost.”
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