Blue Zoo -MAF

This was my favourite talk of MAF, so informative and interesting, detailing the whole process from pre - production to production of a VR short. The process of creating an immersive, interactive story.

With VR their needs to be content, If there's no convincing content then there's no chance of certain shorts like this becoming popular.

They wanted something playful, interactive and immersive, and they did just that.

Blue zoo themselves are a company who loves differentiating their style.

When it came to deciding on a style of this animation, everyone put forward a treatment in a box and there was a vote to pick the winner which was an interesting and genius idea to get everyone's ideas put forward in an efficient manner.

Hoodoo was animated in maya and rendered realtime in unity.

Catherine salkeld's Idea was the one that got chosen, she wanted a VR interactive experience. It was great to see such a passion for virtual animation in someone other than myself and managed to engage in conversation with her afterwards which was really enjoyable. 

Catherine visages 4 storylines happening at once ! At first thought to me seemed like too much, and I was right as this got adapted as things developed, but the idea of being immersed in 4 narratives at once is such a wonderful one.

As an aspiring VR animator myself it was great to see the pre-production process, it was a great insight into the mechanics of VR production. For example, the use of panorama boards;

Giving a dimensional 360 view of the set making efficiency in the modelling process. Structured in a way so wherever you looked you can find something.

Their aim was to push out of real world and keep it surreal, which they achieved brilliantly in hoodoo, heightened with the interactivity element.

The panorama boards organised also how to section stage in 360 and wouldn't end up seeing too much in your peripheral.

These are their set design boards, yet again displaying a 360 vision:

For the models they used low poly models, for efficiency in real time rendering.

Hoodoo is a Layered world, wrapped round on planes clouds and mountains with a sky dome. Here are some images of reference they used when designing the stage.

Colour tests:

However they soon noticed an issue with the story, people were too busy looking at everything they couldn't decipher story, therefore it lost storytelling focus so they adapted it, and added a narrator to aid narrative, described as a  'Friend in your ear'.

For the testing stage they took the maya scene and viewed it in the vive, which was great to test game mechanics. 

Interactive stories can put the viewer in a negative view because they feel they are missing out other ending, so narrative was made linear, something for me to consider. Instead they had Interactive sections;... Rewind section... Continues ... Interactive.  

To improve efficiency they had scripts to import sections that were needed. However they racked up 20 seconds a week of animation, exposing VR is a slow going process.

In order to divert the users attention, they needed to use sound to draw attention to things. They used FMOD to position audio to come from anywhere within the scene, even elaborating this with triggers for when you look at something a sound is played. For example when you browse the oriental house a zen tune plays and when you look at the sky an ethereal song plays, creating a magical aura immersing you deeper and fitting with the interactivity.

Sound layering example:

And scene layering:

Animating in VR could be related to theatre.