Most of all by Pearl;
Which is a 360 production. The narrative follows a would-be musician and his daughter, told in a non-linear fashion, entirely from the perspective of the passenger sitting next to the driver.
In VR, you take the position of said passenger. You can turn your head and look out the window, observe the driver to your left, turn your head round and see people in the back, look at the floor and see junk accumulating, or just stare absently at the road ahead. You live inside the animation, this is something I would really love to do, REALLY, love to do.
The film was made in 4 different ways on different platforms. One for mobile, which is where all spotlight stories are, like a 360 canvas, the user can move their phone around like looking through a hole into another dimension. There is also a VR version on the phone, when put inside a headset configuration, theres a whole VR version with the Vive headset and theres even a 2D theatrical cut. Each version is rooted with the same story but they are all told ever so slightly differently. The fact they are all told differently kind of makes the story more real and physical, (which is like what the VR achieves visually) because its like each of the platforms tell their own version, like people round a campfire sharing stories passed down for generations, to each generation the story changes slightly, each person shares their own individual version.
I found an extract of the producer of 'Pearl' David Eisenmann going into more detail about the short;
"We build the 360 world out in 3D, and with so much rendering being performed in real time one might expect animation akin to Dire Strait’s 1985 “Money for Nothing” video, but the simple yet sophisticated character design was attractive and conveyed their personalities nicely"
I agree, I loved the character design, they have that tangibility. Sometimes they look angular, like folded boxes, like you can reach out an touch them, even though they are 2D in style with the paint-like aesthetic. I also love the colour scheme, it makes you feel warm inside, with the over-pronunciation of red hues.
Patrick Osborne, director of Disneys "Feast" also had something inetersting to note about Pearl; “When you’re working on real time rendering you need a lot of computing power to make the animation look realistic, I think hand drawn animation on 2’s connects with people so well that your brain fills in the gaps. It gives people enough information to fill in the rest with their imagination.”
I love this statement, because I totally agree with it. Along with the painted, cubic style, I feel it really connects with the audience, really complementing the whole inclusiveness that VR offers you, so many components involve you in the animation. I find it amazing how you can feel involved in an animation thats so unrealistic in style, your brain and imagination can successfully immerse you in a world that is so far from being real, a world that is evidently painted and animated... This is what I would love to elaborate on, and play with.
Osborne continued;
“The choices we made were impressionistic - we had to make production design choices everywhere. If you just look at the back seat all the time, there’s still a sense of a story, you can see junk building up. It limits you in a way but you can use those limits to make beautiful work; they’re not really limits.”
His words are inspiring me more and more to make something like this, to play with this. You have to think of all perspectives, all perspectives telling a story, the ultimate art of storytelling.
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