The Sundance Film Festival isn’t just an important event for independent filmmakers. In recent years, the festival has become an annual gathering for VR filmmakers to debut their latest works.
Today, while Oculus’ founders are in court fighting an IP case, the company’s Story Studio has released its latest VR production, Dear Angelica. The 12-minute experience is a visual feast: it’s the first experience hand-illustrated inside VR itself, using Oculus’ Touch controllers and the creation app Quill. The result is spectacular to see: brush strokes explode in light and colour as the narrative unspools the touching tale of a daughter (Mae Whitman) mourning her deceased mother (Geena Davis).
But, as with Story Studio’s previous films Henry and Lost, Dear Angelica is as much experiment as it is finished product. Quill itself – currently available in beta – was the direct result of Dear Angelica’s development. “It didn’t exist when we conceived the story,” explains Saschka Unseld, creative director of Oculus Story Studio. “It wasn’t until we were nearly done that we realised we should release it as a product.”
Alongside apps like Tiltbrush and Gravity Sketch, Quill is the latest in an explosion of creative tools that use VR itself as a tool for design – and now, animation. WIRED spoke to Unseld about Dear Angelica’s development, the company’s plans for Quill, and the merging of film and VR.
WIRED: How much do you see Story Studio as a lab, and how much as a content studio?Saschka Unseld: We actually think of ourselves very much as a lab, but we don’t call ourselves a lab because we think it’s also important we actually release things. The beginning of each project happens more in the lab phase – we experiment with what currently hasn’t been explored. When we find something fascinating, then we set out to make something with it, as happened with Dear Angelica.
Tell me about the idea of doing an illustrated VR film, and of using Quill to do it.SU: At the first Oculus Connect conference I had this thought of ‘how would it look to do something illustrated in VR? How would it feel to step inside an illustration?’ That evolved into Dear Angelica, which has a lot to do with storytelling itself – the stories our parents tell us, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Quill came about purely as a means to enable Wesley Allsbrook – who is the illustrator of everything you see – to paint directly in VR. So we wrote Quill, basically, for her. The touch controllers were a huge shift in what VR is for us. Having the process of designing inside VR allows for experimentation, because you instantly see how it would look. Whereas before you had to take the headset off and change something on the monitor then put the headset back on – it was just so slow and so cumbersome. Ultimately VR is about exploration and trying things. We don’t really know yet what is effective and what’s not, so we have to try 100 things to find two that are really powerful.
Is every frame hand-animated?Every stroke you see is hand-painted by Wesley with the Touch Controllers inside of VR. Quill records the order of your strokes and the speed and all that stuff, so the way things draw is a mix of that and then we also used Houdini and Unreal to help that flow with the music and sound. We’ve released a beta version of Quill which you can just do still illustrations with, but the way we’re developing Quill now is we’ll add those features. We are working already with a bunch of independent comic book artists so they can create narratives all by themselves – they don’t need the overhead of a whole production team. So that’s the direction it is heading.
Is your aim for anybody to be able to make self-contained pieces inside of Quill?The goal is that it’s a completely self-contained thing, so that anyone who is working as an illustrator or painter or designer can fully create inside of Quill and they don’t need any other software. But the second path for Quill is as a production tool. We’ve used it so much to storyboard locationss, or to annotate things. Here at the Story Studio, we built a specific room that you experience [Dear Angelica] in, and when we started thinking about designing it, we just said, ‘well, let’s just go into Quill and sketch it up’. So as a production tool it’s incredibly valuable as well.
Unlike Henry, there’s no interaction in the film other than the users’ movement. What was behind that decision?What this is, as an experiment, is opening a door to one potential type of storytelling – animated VR narratives. So we felt we should put all our efforts in on this and explore interactivity in future projects. Now that the Touch Controllers are out, all our future things will in some way or another utilize touch.
What are the user numbers like for experiences like Henry? What does success look like to you for a film like that?The biggest focus of the projects we do is not only in the right now, but in the future audience and creators of VR. So being at Sundance and New Frontiers and places where we’ve shown things is hugely important. The majority of people haven’t had experience with this kind of VR. With Henry pushing that, and Dear Angelica pushing that further, for me the biggest success is having people seeing that and feeling, ‘oh, this is something I’m actually really interested in watching’ or directors and writers saying, ‘oh, I never thought of this before, but this is something I really want to write or direct in’.
You’ve got Geena Davis and Mae Whitman as voice talent in this movie. Are you seeing increased awareness of VR among acting talent and directing talent in the industry?Yes, it’s massively different. It’s interesting for us to be at Sundance because it’s a yearly marker for things that happened in the last year. In the last year, there is raised awareness of VR in Hollywood, particularly for directors and writers and actors. But the groundswell of interest that has built over the last year is amazing to see.
Do you see the lines between VR and Hollywood blurring? For instance, ILM xLab’s use of VR in the production of Rogue One and its upcoming Star Wars films.Yeah, I think so. I think VR as a tool for creation for movies, or prototyping for movies, is really interesting. I know Rob Bredow, who runs the xLab, quite well, and that’s what they’re really excited about. It goes back to the first James Cameron Avatar film, when they had virtual cameras and virtual sets and all these things. It was just a bit more cumbersome. With creating things directly in VR, that takes things to another level. So VR as a production tool is another path, which is really going to fundamentally shift how the creation of movies works and functions, as the directors and productions designers can interact with it.
What other experiences are you excited to see at Sundance?
I haven’t seen any of the stuff at Sundance yet. I’ve heard of a lot of them. Chris [Milk] has a new piece here. The nice thing about the VR community is everybody knows each other, and it’s supportive. I think that’s important because no single one person is going to pioneer the evolution of the medium and what’s possible in narrative – it’s going to be everyone chipping away at it. The combined knowledge is what will push the medium forward.
Dear Angelica is out today on the Oculus Store.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
