Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she’s always had a passion for animation. Maureen’s mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual Reality. She left Zynga about six months ago, and within a couple of weeks met her Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell who directed Antz as well as wrote and directed four Madagascar films. They quickly assembled a team of other animated film veterans and put together a 2-minute trailer that helped them to secure $6 million dollars led by Comcast Ventures with participation from HTC and Samsung Ventures as well as others.
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Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell has written a number of animated feature films, and has already written a number of different scripts for animated shorts that take place within immersive virtual reality. The first production from Baobab Studios is Invasion! which features an alien and bunny as the main characters. They rendered out two-minute 360-degree video which can be found on Milk VR on the Gear VR, but Maureen says that they have also produced a more interactive version that can be run on the Oculus Rift.
HTC was also an investor into Baobab Studios, and Maureen says that do intend on creating animated shorts that are best suited to the VR medium implying that they are indeed also working on creating room-scale animated experiences.
One of the open challenges that Oculus Story Studio has talked about at Oculus Connect as well as written about on their blog, is the challenge of balancing cultivating a sense of presence with narrative. Maureen doesn’t think that they necessarily have to be in conflict with each other and says that they have some ideas for how they’re going to find a balance between these, but didn’t provide any concrete specific details as to how or what they plan on doing.
Another big open question that Baobab Studios will have to address is what the revenue stream is going to be for producing short animated 360-degree videos as well as some more interactive immersive stories. Maureen says that one thing that she will be bringing to the table from her experiences at Zynga is a dedication to testing and using objective behavioral data from the audience in order to find a sustainable business model. Zynga was a pioneer of causal gaming, and was driven by testing and finding a sustainable minimization strategy based upon a free-to-play model and different ways to either speed up gameplay or extend the experience in different ways. Baobab Studios has a number of different hypotheses for a viable business model that they will be testing as the ecosystem of distribution starts to get fleshed out.
Maureen says that the underlying motivation and mission statement of Baobab Studios is to bring out your sense of wonder and to inspire people to dream. They hope that their shorts can bring out that childlike sense of wonder and awe in people who watch their shorts, and they’ve been able to recruit an impressive team of creatives who are excited to translate their visions into actual virtual worlds, characters, and stories. They still have to discover and form the cinematic language of VR given the new constraints that the audience will be shaping a lot of the experience based upon what they’re looking at and where they’re looking.
For Maureen, she spent some time at Pixar, but wanted to have more control and freedom that a start-up would provide and decided to go to Zynga. She also spent some of her free time working with some friends on the animated short called The Dam Keeper, which ended up getting nominated for an Academy Award. But after seeing virtual reality, she knew that she wanted to start her own company to start to chase after her lifelong dream of bringing animated stories to life. They’re starting with short films, and the full Invasion! experience should be ready sometime in the first quarter of 2016.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.035] Maureen Fan: I'm Maureen Fan, and I'm CEO of a new VR animation company called Baobab Studios. And we do animation in VR and story and character-driven cinematic experiences.
[00:00:25.701] Kent Bye: Great. So you just announced that you raised $6 million from a number of different investors. Talk a bit about raising that money and what that's going to enable you to do.
[00:00:35.101] Maureen Fan: Yeah, so it was great. We had a great response from investors, and we're especially excited about Comcast, who's leading, because they do have such strong connections in the entertainment field. We're using the money specifically to fund more films and more cinematic experiences.
[00:00:54.114] Kent Bye: So tell me a bit about the first experience that you're working on, which is Invasion.
[00:00:58.487] Maureen Fan: Yeah, so that's a IP that was developed by Eric Darnell, my co-founder. And he's great because he was the director of Ants in Madagascar. One thing we're really excited about is he was actually a storyteller first. So he actually got his undergrad in journalism. He loves writing and telling stories. And so he didn't only direct Ants in Madagascar and all the sequels, he actually wrote the scripts for all of them. So he's developed many scripts for us already and we chose this one out of all the different ones because we thought this alien character is someone that you could really fall in love with. And something we love about VR in particular is instead of viewing a character in a rectangle and thinking that, Oh, that's really cool. That character kind of feels alive. You're actually in that world with that character. It's almost as though you're living in that world with the character. So you have a lot more empathy for that character. You feel like you have control responsibility over that character and you love that character even more. which is why the alien we thought would really connect really well with audiences. So you can see a short little teaser trailer for that and the full-length animated short, which is only five to ten minutes, not a feature-length film, is coming out in Q1 next year. But it should give you a little sense of the dynamic between the aliens and this bunny and this cute little animal that's on Earth.
[00:02:18.963] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just had a chance to check out the short two minute video preview in MilkVR. And there's a little bunny there. And the thing that really struck me was that there's a eagle that just kind of swoops up the bunny that I was like, Whoa, where did that come from? And I actually went back and watched it again, just to see if I could not pay attention to the bunny and kind of look for the eagle swooping down and yep, there it was. So, so talk about, it looks like you're actually doing kind of these pre-rendered 360 degree videos rather than doing sort of a real time dynamic environment, such as like what the Oculus story studio has done. And so is that what we can kind of expect is that you're going to be outputting these non-interactive 360 degree videos then?
[00:02:59.628] Maureen Fan: No, not necessarily. What matters to us is that we take full advantage of VR. And we know that sometimes people, when they come home from work, they just want to experience a story. They don't necessarily want to strap in with a headset with wires and walk around the room and be super interactive. We want to make sure that we have experiences for them. But at the same time, we also know that being able to be in that experience, walking around and being interactive is super powerful for VR as well. And some people, when they come home, do want to go and be super interactive. So we also want to make sure our experiences are available for that as well. The short alien piece that you've seen so far is actually available in both the format that you've seen it as well as interactive. And that will come out in the new year.
[00:03:45.342] Kent Bye: Oh, I see. So, you know, talk a bit about some of those differences that I understand on a gear VR, you may have to kind of reduce it down to a video in order for performance reasons, but in the more interactive versions, what have you found in terms of being able to balance this combination of presence and story, or, you know, another way of saying is that agency and interactivity with narrative.
[00:04:08.035] Maureen Fan: Right. It's actually funny because even though pre-rendered means that, and it's good on the gear VR, You think that you have to make it lower performance, but actually, if you do pre-render, you can actually make more beautiful images, to be honest. So it's still very high quality. It's just you lose some of that interaction and positional tracking in it. So we think that both experiences are great. However, when you are actually interacting with inside the world, you do, of course, feel even more so like you are a character in the film rather than just a bystander who's locked in a position and only look around. So we think there are advantages of definitely both. It's more of the technical challenge, actually, that I would draw attention to. You know, Pixar DreamWorks, when you're doing these amazing films, they look really great, but it takes like 11 hours, say, to render a beautiful frame versus when you're trying to do in a real time game engine, you have like 11 milliseconds to render a frame. So there are a lot of performance requirements. And it's really interesting because we're blending having people on our team, some from the game world, as well as some people from the film world as well. And it's merging those two cultures together.
[00:05:17.224] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that Oculus Story Studio, both at Oculus Connect and a recent blog post, kind of shared some learnings of having this challenge of combining this interactivity with the narrative. And they found kind of late in the game that one of the most compelling moments was when Henry was giving you eye contact and actually interacting and engaging with you. termed it the Swayze effect. Another way of thinking about that is the plausibility illusion, which is that you're in a world and you actually have some sort of impact on that world. And so having a narrative kind of can go against that in terms of having a fixed story where it's unfolding versus you having some sort of interactivity engagement. The lesson that I heard from Oculus Story Studio is that this is sort of an open problem and it's a challenge that they're trying to figure out still and trying to kind of rapidly iterate cheaply in order to really find what the sweet spot between this combination of interactivity and story is going to be. So from your perspective, what have you found so far with trying to balance those two things?
[00:06:18.877] Maureen Fan: I actually think they can be used together and don't need to be in conflict with each other. We actually talked to them about this as well. So for example, in Henry right now, You know the hedgehog looks at you but then is lonely for the rest of the time and they talked about how the story conflicts with the interactivity where he's actually looking at you for us because the story part is the most important thing when we're looking at interactivity is how to enhance the story itself and how to tell the story better. we wouldn't use it in a way that would conflict with the story. Because ultimately we care about what audiences think, like making sure that it's experience that's good for them, and we don't want there to be any cognitive dissonance for them. And we also want to make sure that, especially with their first experience in VR, that everything is congruous and works together, and they feel like, oh, this interactivity draws me even more into the story, and I empathize even more so with the characters.
[00:07:11.605] Kent Bye: Right. And I noticed that HTC is one of the investors. And so they've obviously got the Vive, which is a room scale experience. And so I'm curious if you're planning to do room scale VR stories.
[00:07:25.449] Maureen Fan: We want to make sure that whatever release, whatever content is best for that platform, because we want to stand for the best animated content out there. So we'll be making sure we will be definitely distributing content with HTC. And since. The Vive really has room space and that's how you fully take advantage of it. We do plan on having that.
[00:07:46.051] Kent Bye: Okay. And so maybe you could talk a bit about your own background from Zynga and what kind of lessons that you can get from like casual gaming and how you see those kind of lessons be applied to kind of like the interactive component of storytelling.
[00:07:58.955] Maureen Fan: Zynga was an amazing experience because, you know, people thought games are these super hardcore games, which by definition means super long session times. And Zynga created this new category that casual games, right? When people play these games, they don't even think that they're playing games. They're like, these are just awesome experiences for me to escape for small chunks of time, right? Not for, I don't have to like sit there and invest myself for hours and hours into a really long story or a really long game. I can just have this at like small bits. And the interesting thing right now when we're creating these shorts is the ability to do these smaller chunks of content. And that's why what I was talking about earlier is really important about both the mobile pre-rendered stuff as well as the interactive things because there's definitely an audience for the pre-rendered content where you don't want to watch for a super long time or be inside a game for a super long time. And what Zynga really helped me understand is basically the psychology of that. People don't think that they're necessarily gamers, but they still want interactive experiences, and we want to be able to deliver that to them. And I think that's really important for what we are doing as well. The other thing I really learned from Zynga I'm very thankful for is about how to make entertainment more rational. So something that's always a little scary about the entertainment industry, in terms of business, you're investing all this money into something you don't know if it's going to be successful, right? It's driven. And one thing I really learned at Zynga is how to make that more consistent, how to monetize, so being able to test. In a lot of traditional entertainment industries, the person who gets to decide everything is like the loudest person in the room or the highest ranking creative person. At Zynga, we really learned to be humbled by the user. Instead of us thinking that we knew what was best, it was watching behavior and seeing what people's reactions were to our content and then changing it based off of that. And so I really want to bring that into our culture here too and making sure that we just don't always think we have the answers or reacting to feedback from the audience and making our choices based off of that as well.
[00:10:06.893] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you mentioned monetization, which at this point, there's not really a clear path towards, you know, the type of 360 degree video, what the revenue stream is even going to be with generating this kind of content. And you're really forming a really strong team and doing some really innovative cutting edge stuff, pushing forward these types of, you know, highly polished stories. But yeah, at this point, we don't really have a good sense of. You know, how is this going to be sustainable or where's the money going to be coming in from? So what is your strategy moving forward? You know, you've got enough money to obviously continue to do the creative part, but what are you doing on the other end in order to make sure that there's going to be a sustainable path for not only you, but other content creators who want to perhaps go down this route?
[00:10:51.710] Maureen Fan: So you're exactly right, which is no one has completely figured this out yet because I think monetization methods are definitely somewhat dependent on distribution methods, right? And right now, there are so many entrants in the market trying to own distribution. We don't know who is going to win and which model is going to win. All I can say, however, is coming from Zynga and having a background and specifically being really good at monetization, that we have hypotheses and definitely can be very adaptable to whichever way the market goes.
[00:11:21.910] Kent Bye: Can you expand on that a little bit in terms of Zynga? For people who don't know, for example, the monetization strategy of Zynga, how did Zynga make money? What were they doing that was so great?
[00:11:31.933] Maureen Fan: We tested out many different ways, but one of the ways that was highly successful is the free-to-play model, right, where you get into the experience and people want to just continue having more of that experience, and then they purchase, whether it's digital goods, like for Farmville, purchase more cows, or it could be what's more common in mobile right now, paying to speed things up, like it usually takes this amount of time for the crops to grow, and now I can pay to speed that up, or I can purchase boots that speed it up as well. Really, people are paying for more time and more entertainment, and there are different ways to do that. And sometimes there's ways to make it feel as though you're paying for the experience, and there's ways to make it feel less obvious or more integrated into the gameplay so that it doesn't feel as onerous.
[00:12:20.580] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I think about this, I think that makes sense in terms of like highly dynamic interactive games that are out there where you do not wait and just pay and have the end result of that. But when I think of film content, which is, you know, cinematic VR or immersive cinema, whatever this ends up being called, there's this different model, which is kind of like a Netflix model where if you want access to the content, you just pay Netflix and it may be automatically charged. And it's kind of like out of sight, out of mind. people aren't there paying for individual things unless they're perhaps going on iTunes and buying stuff individually. So do you expect to kind of create these little episodic pieces of media that people are going to be buying? Or how do you see that forming out in terms of the actual moment when people have to make a decision to pay money?
[00:13:08.082] Maureen Fan: So again, we have hypotheses for it, but it's ultimately about testing. For example, the thing that I just told you about how Zynga did it, we didn't only have that as a method, right? We also tested subscriptions. We tested all different types of monetization methods and figure out what was best for the entertainment that we were providing. So a lot of the things that you just described will be things that we will be testing ourselves to figure out what's appropriate for our shorts.
[00:13:32.002] Kent Bye: I see. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about your team, you know, how you guys got together and then, you know, that moment where you decided to start this.
[00:13:40.608] Maureen Fan: Yeah. It's been pretty magical. Um, so I've always wanted to do animation my entire life. My undergraduate degree at Stanford, I actually designed was computer science, art and psychology because I've always wanted to animation. And it was a dream to be able to work at Pixar on toy story three. But ultimately I, after doing the stint at Pixar, I realized that I really want to be part of something smaller, a startup I had joined in the earlier days of eBay. And I love startup culture specifically because there's fewer politics, right? Because everyone's just working so hard. There's little time to be able to do anything except the work at hand, but realized that it didn't necessarily make sense to go into the animation industry at the time because there's a lot of competition coming in and they're just cannibalizing each other in the box office. So I went to Zynga. I love Zynga because it was both an entertainment world as well as it was a startup. And I always had had an interest in gaming in particular. So it was the perfect combination of all that. And I was there for the last six years. During that time, I was still doing animation because my friends, Dyson, Robert, Kondo at Pixar actually created this animated short called The Dam Keeper, which I helped them on. And it was nominated for the Oscars this year. So I helped them on it. So I always still wanted to do animated films. And coincidentally, a bunch of VR companies started to recruit me for their head of product roles. And I was like, oh, this VR thing sounds stupid. They've tried it forever. I remember in undergrad, they're doing it. It's totally not going to be here yet. But my developers at Zynga hacked our game into the VR system. And when I put it on, I was like, oh my god, this is the future of animation. Because the reason why Eric and I, my co-founder and I, love animation is it's not constrained by reality. like live action is, it's only constrained by what's in the director's head, which is freedom to us. And it's about making a world that's magical and different seem so real that you think you could reach out and touch it. And the last thing that I just said, which is take you to a completely different world and make it so real that you feel like you can reach out and touch it, is basically the definition of virtual reality. So we think VR and animation were made for each other. And so I was like, oh my gosh, there's a future. I can't wait to do this. And at that time, I'm like, I want to do this. But I didn't want to leave Zynga yet because I had a best team ever, except my newest team is the best team. The other previous team. And so I waited a year before leaving. I left earlier this year. And my mentor is Glenn Antus, who is the co-founder of PDI DreamWorks Animation. So he is one of our advisors as well. He knows Eric. So he introduced me to Eric within two weeks of me leaving. And Eric is really excited. So Eric directed Ants in Madagascar, and he was really excited about this because he's like, it feels like the early days of CG, where everything is new and you're experimenting with technology and creativity together. It's like, I'm excited about this new medium, about being able to create new cinematic language and also build a new company as well. I couldn't have asked for a better co-founder. He's also especially excited because, you know, in traditional cinema right now, you have You have all these tools, like the cuts, pans, zooms, dollies, and those things, versus they may not work in the same way. Of course, in VR, if you cut too abruptly, it's disrupting to the audience. So being able to come up with a new cinematic language is exciting to him. And also, right now in film, 2D film, the director composes a shot. And something that's really exciting now about VR is the audience gets to compose a shot. It's more challenging, and you give up some freedom and control, in a way, to the audience. But at the same time, it's exciting because the audience feels like they're actually in the film. So these are some of the reasons why he was super excited about that. And then we also met Larry and Michael on the technical side, and they headed up character technology at DreamWorks. Larry is a judge for the Oscar Technical Achievement Awards. Michael architected all the facial animation and all the character technology at DreamWorks. So all the DreamWorks films that you see now are based off of his architecture. So it was amazing that it all came together. And it's been a pretty awesome recruiting, honestly, because, you know, creative people are really motivated by quality and working with other great creatives. And with Eric's pedigree and his experience and excitement, a lot of creative people have just wanted to work with him and on the tech side with Larry and Michael. So it's been amazing. Put together a team really quickly, honestly, like within two weeks after I left Zynga and went out and raised our Series A and started immediately working on short films. And you see the trailer right now. We actually developed that originally for Oculus Connect. We did that piece in five weeks. It was pretty crazy that we were able to do it at that time, but really awesome because when you're a startup, everyone's just so excited that they can do amazing things that you didn't think could take that short amount of time with really high quality.
[00:18:39.525] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, definitely. When I've talked to different venture capitalists, you know, they talk about the team and that being a key component. And obviously you have a very strong team that you have. And I can tell just from your story there that you've been interested in animation for a really long time. So I'm curious, like what your vision is for what you want to be able to achieve with this new startup.
[00:18:58.794] Maureen Fan: It comes down to the mission statement, which is the reason why Eric and I have always loved animation. To me, it is what I said before. It's about. going to completely different worlds. And the reason why I always loved animation is it's so non-constraining, right? The ability to inspire wonder in people again. You know, when you were a kid, you probably thought you could do anything. And something happens usually when you become an adult where maybe you become a little less idealistic, but yet when you're watching animation, something comes out in you again. You feel like a kid again and you feel like you're invincible and you dream again. And ultimately I want to do that for audiences in the world and for myself and honestly the employees that are our company too, which is have them dream and realize that they're like even more amazing than they thought they could and they should go after their dreams. So the mission statement right now is to bring out your sense of wonder and inspire people to dream. And that's ultimately what I want to be able to achieve.
[00:19:59.742] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:20:08.104] Maureen Fan: I think it's beyond entertainment. Honestly, I think VR is going to be huge in so many fields and healthcare. I know it helps to cure phobias, many different, like I even heard this recent study when I was at a women in VR event, actually about it being able to help with Alzheimer's. I don't know if that is actually true, but that would be amazing. And also. a lot of things about journalism also taking audiences to like war zones for them to be able to see what it's really like to be there and empathize even more. That's another piece. Ours is just a small piece. Entertainment of the larger VR paradigm shift that I think is to come. It just so happens that entertainment is the one that we're most excited about. But I think it completely changes the way we experience life and also stories and also empathize with other people.
[00:20:56.015] Kent Bye: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
