I interviewed Wallace & Gromit in “The Grand Getaway” co-directors Finbar Hawkins and Bram Ttwheam, and No Ghost Creative Director Lawrence Bennett at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast about immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So continuing my series of looking at different experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, this is episode number 26 of 35, and then episode 6 of 10 of looking at the context of ideas and adventure, and also the third of seven of a series of animation, a deep dive into animation pieces there at Venice Immersive. and the underlying grammar of the visual storytelling language of animation. So this is a VR piece called Wallace and Gromit, The Grand Getaway by Aardman and NoGhost and also produced by Atlas 5. And so we have Thimbar Hawkins and Bram Tweam from Aardman as well as Lawrence Bennett from NoGhost. So this is a VR narrative game based upon the IP of Wallace and Gromit, which is a well-known animation series out of Britain, very British humor, that has Wallace, who's kind of a hapless inventor who always gets Wallace and Gromit into some sort of trouble, and then Gromit, who's this really smart dog who has to come in and kind of save the day. And so this is a VR narrative piece that's very much leaning on the narrative aspects and the character dynamics. And you're kind of embodying both Wallace and both Gromit in this third character of the Caddy. So you can witness the different dynamics between Wallace and Gromit. So it's very much building on the adventure stories that they've had throughout the course of stop motion animation films over the years. And it's continuing of that series into this adventure onto Mars as Wallace goes there and plays some rounds of golf. And you kind of have to come up and try to get everything fixed up so you can get back to earth. So this is very much in the context of adventure and there's other aspects of leisure and golf And so the primary center of gravity of this piece is active presence and agency There's just a lot of interactive gameplay moments that I think this piece is really centered around I mean, it's primarily like a narrative game. So it's all serving of the broader narrative that's being told it's not like it's purely just about the interactions because the interactions are trying to push forward the game, but I have it more as agency rather than just interactivity, because there is the possibility to fail. And there are things that you kind of have to do again. So it's very much more of a game playing center of gravity. And I had a chance to actually play through the entirety of the experience. So I get a little bit more than what was shown at finesse immersive. But one of the big things I'm also taking away is just the sense of embodied and environmental presence within this piece, because you are embodying the different characters, but also just the exquisite world building and design that's happening in this piece is really next level as you go into these different alien landscapes on the context of Mars and then the emotional presence of just the narrative of kind of having a satisfying overall journey of these different characters for folks who are familiar with IP then they'll be picking up on lots of other different inside jokes and different character dynamics that may go over the head of folks who are just being introduced to these characters of Wallace and Gromit. I personally did not grow up with Wallace and Gromit, and so I got a bit of a Wallace and Gromit 101 from both Aardman and No Ghost, getting a lot more context for the characters and how they were trying to carry forth different aspects of their characters into this immersive experience. And we also talk a bit about animation and the visual storytelling language of both 2D and what is possible within 3D and all the ways that they're applying different rules of both animation and storytelling rules into how they were telling this story of Wallace and Gromit in the grand getaway. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Finbar, Brahm, and Lawrence happened on Saturday, September 2nd, 2023 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:50.998] Finbar Hawkins: My name is Finbar Hawkins, I'm a creative director for Aardman. So I've worked at Aardman in the interactive department for about 10 years, through lots of different forms of interactive media. So not necessarily specifically specialising in VR, but certainly developing characters and ideas and scenarios that can work in a different interactive space depending on the situation. So that's me.
[00:04:13.180] Lawrence Benett: My name is Lawrence Bennett. I'm the co-founder and creative director at No Ghost. We're an immersive story studio, so we work across all the different XR mediums. We do AR, installation, VR, mostly focusing on narrative, especially when it comes to VR. Our biggest project was Madrid Noir. For us, it's the spiritual successor to it in terms of technology and storytelling and such like that.
[00:04:36.892] Bram Ttwheam: Hi, I'm Bram Tweam, I'm co-director for Aardman, together with Finbar. This is my first foray into VR, but I've worked on a previous project, an AR project with Finbar, again with Wallace & Gromit, so that was kind of a good learning experience for entering this new realm for us, but my actual personal history is within VFX and animation, and I've worked over the years on numerous Wallace & Gromit projects, and many other things, so I direct a lot of short-form things for Aardman as well. So that's me.
[00:05:07.269] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working in this intersection of immersive stories and VR.
[00:05:16.258] Finbar Hawkins: Yes, so I've worked in interactive media for many, many years, kind of about, I don't know, 25, 30 years. I've always been interested in different forms of storytelling, and that's always been kind of the main push for it, really. And then going through kind of things like mobile, starting out in web, playing with a bit of mobile gaming, looking at console games and animations, but it's always been about how do we tell the story with this medium? And that's been kind of like me as a child always being obsessed with technology and growing up with personal computers and moving into things like Game Boys and, you know, what's new? How can I tell a story with it? So landing at Aardman many years ago was perfect because you get an opportunity to play and certainly then it was combining my interest that I've had since a child in interactive media and computer games and having fun and what can this toy do? What can I make it do? Combining that with storytelling and character development. So it's a big kit of parts and that album gives you that lovely melting pot and that's really the kind of perfect place for me to hang out really and work with people like Bram and meeting people like Lawrence.
[00:06:26.560] Lawrence Benett: So yeah, the founders of No Ghost all came from a visual effects background recently. We worked in a number of different studios in Soho and spent a lot of time in these very large productions for super massive global IP things, movies, and in order to build those things, we were in a sort of a machine that really felt like we were lacking creative output in some way. We felt like very small cogs, really. and then it was around 2015 when the DK2 started to be available to more than just a handful of people and we were looking to see how could we make this into a business, into a market or something because we found that just tinkering around with it at home was a lot of fun. So we partnered up with an animation studio at the time to take one of their IPs into it and we put on an event where we expected not many people to turn up and about 1,500 people turned up at the time and there was this two-hour queue for a three-minute experience which was quite a moment for us to say okay there is at some point this is going to work. and so in that sort of last seven or eight years since then we've been working through different parts of the medium whether it be through commercial jobs or IP creation like Madrid Noir or working in partnerships like with Aardman in order to really look at how we do progress that storytelling element within the medium. We had the technical knowledge, we had the understanding of how to create the artwork but really to explore that narrative concept in all different mediums to see how we can tell those stories most effectively and really to give people the strongest emotional experience actually that they can want to go through.
[00:08:04.043] Bram Ttwheam: Hi. As I mentioned earlier, I'm also from a VFX background, but I've been working in animation for 25, 30 years almost now. Long time. But at Aardman, I've had an opportunity to work on a variety of projects, and probably the one that was the biggest learning experience for me, moving into VR and AR, was a console game that we did to celebrate the centenary of the First World War. And it was a console game called Memories Retold, 11.11. and that was just a real baptism of fire if you like. I actually started to comprehend all the complexities of combining gameplay with narrative and like how to engage the emotions through that and how sort of tricky and ultimately rewarding those challenges can be. So that just gave me a real appetite for the whole thing. So when the opportunity came along to do some AR and now VR I just leapt at it because also like Finmar I've got like a sort of hunger for new techniques and technologies and just like to embrace that and sort of learn how this new art form can be best used really for narrative experiences.
[00:09:14.845] Kent Bye: When did you first come across VR then?
[00:09:17.324] Finbar Hawkins: Well, we had Oculus Kit came in at Aardman probably a few years ago. So we had that kind of set up, you know, the tethered set up with the cameras everywhere and we were starting to play around with looking at it and there were a few kind of stop-start attempts to try and get something off the ground and it was quite early days. But we were certainly looking at it. There were conversations going on and we felt at that time the market wasn't really mature enough. But obviously, we were just talking about this earlier, the Metas move into acquiring Oculus, effectively creating that market. So it was only a matter of time really before we were going to start having proper commercial discussions with people like Atlas. And in connection with that, obviously, No Ghost, that's how we came to all work together. And so, as Bram was saying, so the AR was probably the first thing we did. I worked on a thing called The Big Fix Up, which is another Wallace and Gromit adventure, and that allowed us to dip our toes in the water a bit, starting to play around with portals and LiDAR, things like that, how we might be able to see our characters in a mixed reality space, how we might be able to tell a story across, you know, I don't really like the term, but transmedia, in that sense, how we might be able to get an audience to follow you, maybe from a YouTube link to an app, out to a physical and augmented experience. So that was kind of fascinating. And that probably, from an experience point of view, allowed me to have a grounding in writing and directing for Wallace & Gromit and understanding their world a bit more, working closely with people like Merlin Crossingham and Nick, who are obviously the directors of the new Wallace & Gromit film. And I think that also led to, we had a better technical understanding on how we could push things for an exciting opportunity with VR. So it probably started about two and a half years ago in terms of us starting the first engagement with Atlas and No Ghost and the initial thinking about, okay, there's an opportunity here with meta. And so Merlin and myself had initial meeting with Lawrence and Luke, and it went from there in terms of, they were certainly gauging that Meta were interested in working with an IP like Wallace & Gromit. And then once we understood that there was an interesting idea, we started working on that properly. So it's similar to what we did with the big fix-up, getting in a room with Wallace & Gromit experience, a pair of hands like Merlin, who's overseen on Nick's behalf, essentially kind of almost being like the brand manager from a creative point of view for Wallace & Gromit. and sitting down and working out what that scenario would be. So we had about two or three ideas and then kind of settled on it would be amazing to get back in the rocket and almost have a throwback to the grand day out and have something that we knew the audience that would appeal to them. and immediately started to think about what would be interesting in a VR context. And then we started testing the water with Nogost to see what they thought about that. And that's how it took, really. We started putting a deck together, giving that a bit more polish, a bit more lift. And we started work like that, didn't we, really? And that was the beginning of it. So, yeah. Feels like 100 years, but two and a half years ago. In a good way.
[00:12:26.517] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a great context for how the project came about. And as I'm here at Venice Immersive talking to a number of different people who said that being from more of a European context, they grew up with Wallace and Gromit. I'm from the United States, and it wasn't something I personally grew up with. And so I wasn't as familiar with the characters of Wallace and Gromit. So for the folks who may be not familiar with Wallace and Gromit, maybe you could introduce us a little bit of who is Wallace, who is Gromit, and a little bit of history as to the series and its larger cultural impact.
[00:12:55.200] Finbar Hawkins: So Wallace and Gromit, well, Wallace is a hapless British inventor who's always coming up with schemes. Sometimes there may be a kind of money-making aspect attached to it, some way that he can get a business off the ground. And he's got his faithful hound, Gromit, who's really kind of the brains of the operation. They're both very technically adept, but Gromit generally is the person that gets Wallace out of scrapes and situations that invariably he gets himself into, often of his own doing. And so they started their adventures in a film called The Grand Day Out, which was Nick Park's kind of debut piece, which he'd started when he was at the National Film School and was discovered by Nick Park and David Sproxton, who were the founders of Aardman. And they kind of famously found him as he was trying to finish this film, but they realised it would probably take him about 15 years to do that. So they thought, well, why don't you come on board with Aardman and we'll help you finish the film and you can help us as well in getting involved with the commercials, things like that. So Grand Ayat was a hit and it was a claymation stop-motion piece. It was all models created in clay and then animated in a stop-motion point of view. And it was a short but there was definitely an appetite to see more from this duo. and they are very iconically British. They probably exist in a almost a kind of 50s, 60s idyll sense of Britain. You know, a better Britain in those days. But there's always something that is very warm and charming about that world. and we recognise that the audience also love the texture and the detail that goes into that world. So probably a lot of things drawn from Nick Park's childhood and the things that he loved and he wanted to express. So you're kind of stepping into this meta-reality, alternate reality, I guess, where Wallace and Gromit exist. And they have certain rules, I guess, from an animation and storytelling point of view, that are always very interesting to explore and push. And yeah, and then since The Grand Day Out, there've been The Wrong Trousers, which won the Oscar. There's been A Matter of Loath and Death. There's been the film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, my personal favorite. And then there's the new films in development now, so they'll be coming out in a couple of years, I think. So yeah, they are basically legends, English legends, I would call them, yeah.
[00:15:08.940] Kent Bye: What's the general timeframe for when the first film had come out?
[00:15:11.921] Finbar Hawkins: The first one, when it came out, it was 1985. It was a long time ago.
[00:15:17.304] Bram Ttwheam: But I think The Wrong Trousers then followed in 1991, something like that, wasn't it? But they seem to speed up from there. And the films typically have a sort of a real cinematic reference, which is something that we've been relishing playing with. You know, there's lots of pastiches of famous sort of Hollywood films and more sort of in the British vein, things like Hammer films quite often referenced. So it's a joy to play with them.
[00:15:43.677] Lawrence Benett: really. I suppose also to explain the the breadth of everybody knowing it as Finbar said it's a very British and English especially thing where even though almost everybody you know I know at least from Britain knows Wallace and Gromit and everybody in the sort of within maybe three or four generations because it's been running for so long now sort of 35 years or more there have been films coming out so it's been something that almost everybody grew up with at this point so there was two films already just by the time I was sort of aware of life and then they have been continuing ever since so they've very much become things that people look forward to not only for the nostalgic thing but because they're really incredibly consistent. The characters always do different things but they are always the characters that you know and it's partly just the things that are buried within the films and the different pieces of work. You can watch them again and again and there's always jokes that you haven't seen that are placed around on the walls and part of the environment but also in the way that they talk to each other and just the way they're animated and the way they look at each other is something that's really unique, I think, in the way that the comic value of it. And it really is just that thing that everybody grew up with and everybody has this sort of like shared love for it, which is very nice. And there's never been really anyone being like, I don't like this one. They're all sort of loved in their own way.
[00:17:00.354] Kent Bye: And so they've traditionally been claymation. And so with the move into virtual reality, you have more of a CGI animation look and feel. And so with the AR experiences, was that the first time that you started to do more of a digital representation? Or was that claymation? And is this the first experimentation of doing this translation from the claymation aesthetic into more of a CGI and try to mimic that in the computer-generated as well?
[00:17:23.070] Bram Ttwheam: The AR was probably the first CG incarnation, but we did have a more traditional rendering process there, so we were able to perhaps rely a bit more on not real-time render engines. So, you know, the shading is a bit more refined for that, because they were pre-rendered basically. But there are certain rules that you can apply from stop frame animation into CG animation. For instance, on Wallace, you sort of take into account how the puppets are built, practically. His tank top, for instance, it's always cast as a solid piece. So typically CG animation is very squashy and stretchy and twisty, whereas for the animation, when we went to CG, we deliberately keep the sort of less is more aesthetic and try to move them in quite a bulky sort of way. And frame rates are also very important, so we try and stick to a sort of 12 frames a second frame rate. So the animation is very stepped, so it still retains some of the quality of the stop frame animation itself. And wherever possible, we also try and employ animators who've worked with the practical puppets who also do CG animation so that they inhabit these characters on a deeper level and they can bring that experience over into the CG.
[00:18:41.978] Kent Bye: You mentioned the rules earlier that you kind of have to stick to. Is that what you meant by that there's a certain rules of how you're telling a story?
[00:18:49.205] Finbar Hawkins: Again from a narrative point of view and their universe essentially and how that works So and there was a learning curve for me working the big fix-up kind of sticking closely to Merlin and I'm learning that really learning the kind of craft of it. There's a appreciation again being a fan and and seeing it you're kind of by process of osmosis and seeing these films you know as Lawrence saying they never change then that's what's great about it you want that but it's also how that's threaded through the narrative as well so that from a very simplistic point of view again I mentioned you know that Gromit is always the person that's going to realize what's going on and that will be his particular arc, and he'll be the one that will get Wallace out of trouble. Invariably, it's Wallace that will be the person that is the victim of his own haplessness, and in a very endearing way. And he can be quite kind of brusque sometimes, and not quite getting it, but in the vein of the classic kind of mad professor, essentially, because he's blinkered, perhaps. He's thinking in one context too thoroughly, whereas Gromit's canine senses are more aware of the world and what's going on. there's obviously clear things like, you know, Gromit doesn't talk. So he has a direct line back to silent comedies like Buster Keaton. I think Nick would put his hands up gladly to saying that Buster Keaton was an influence on the way that Gromit expresses himself through his eyebrows and a look to camera. So that, you know, there's a degree of breaking the fourth wall and that we've got a direct correlation with Gromit in that sense. So that's clever. It brings you into the narrative and Yeah, there's things like, and also just simply is the fact that making as much as we possibly can, every frame, inverted commas, if you know what I mean, which certainly becomes a different kettle of fish when you're thinking about it from 180 or 360 in terms of VR, that's very important to get as many gags, as many bits of loving reference in there as possible, either by a scene or the way that a line is delivered. or just as simply as some lettering on a side of a box or something that you'd see in a scene, so that all of that is really important to pack the universe, so that when the audience comes back to, and we know that they do, very importantly, to re-watch these films, I'm still discovering things, and we've known them for years, and that's integral, that you're always finding new things about that story that also are teasing little things out about that narrative. It's really interesting how far you can go with it. And, you know, there's nothing like good old slapstick. I mean, again, going back to kind of the original silent comedies and the chaplains and things like that, that's all in there. as part of that whole generation. So you've got this kit of parts, essentially. It's not necessarily a rule set. There are such established characters, but once you start working with them in that way, or from a writing point of view, keeping Wallace learning his speech patterns, things like that. And now it's almost difficult for me to put it into a, I just learnt it, you know, by toing and froing and various different drafts of scripts that I'd work on with Merlin. And you go, well, this is landing right. This isn't very Wallace-y, the way that you're delivering this line. it's difficult for me to kind of explain it. I mean, you kind of start to pick it up and less is more. I think the same from what Bram was saying from an animation point of view, again, getting that into the lines, but making them, is that funny enough? Is that the way that Wallace would think about it and land it? So yeah, you constantly have your kit of parts of going back to And I think also they are very classic adventure structure in terms of the stories. You know, invariably you'll find that there's the inciting incident, something happens at the beginning, or prior to that everything's fine and the world is rosy and the birds are tweeting, right? Then something happens, which generally will have Wallace's hands involved in it or some mess that he's made. It will take you off into the woods, right? Into the kilter, the kind of second act where stuff happens. And at some point Gromit's going to play a part in order to get him out of that so that you can bring everybody back safely to home. So there's, you see all of the films and they all play to that. And people like the fact that that's the way it's structured in a very kind of classical way. So we adhered to that in the big fix-up as we've done with the grand getaway as well. It was really important to get that very classic adventure structure into it.
[00:23:15.427] Lawrence Benett: I think it's also some of the recognisable elements of the films and I suppose the world and the IP in general, is what people come in expecting to it, which actually for us ended up affecting the way that we built the experience and the interactions in the way that you actually, yeah, in how you're working with the world. One of those sort of rules being that in a Wallace and Gromit thing you need to see Wallace and Gromit doing stuff together. So the idea is if you embodied one of them the entire time, it would be quite sad to be honest to see just one of them on their own without anybody to bounce off and not seeing the way that Gromit sort of rolls his eyes at Wallace constantly and Wallace gives Gromit unreasonable orders and it really wouldn't feel like a Wallace and Gromit thing which is one of the reasons that we have other characters in there specifically in this case the Auto Caddy who's not only involved in the story but who you can be when we need to see them interacting with each other in order to build the narrative that people come to recognise, which is these adventures and the way that these two characters, one bumbles through it and one really sort of sorts it out. So that whole process really did define a lot of the way that the gameplay is created and organised. Other things like having enough fingers on your hands. So Gromit only has three fingers because he's a dog. Dogs only have three fingers. So as soon as you put it on controllers or hand tracking, you have Gromit's hands but with five fingers. You're not Gromit anymore, you're somebody else. So in order to do that, we took away one of the fingers so that any movement from that moves one of Gromit's three. And it actually became very quickly quite natural to just have the three. You don't really notice, but for the people who know the world and know the characters, instantly they know who they are because they've now got three fingers, a little paw instead of having the big, wide, five-fingered hands of Wallace or the gloved hands of the Auto Caddy.
[00:25:09.031] Kent Bye: Yeah, so there's kind of like this robot caddy for golf and you're embodying the caddy but you're also embodying Gromit at some point as you're saying the classic structure where Wallace has got himself in trouble and Gromit has to come save the day. So in this adventure in some ways you are embodying Gromit at certain points to be able to come in and actually you're the protagonist who is, I guess you're sort of the sidekick to the protagonist but also the protagonist in some ways, the dual protagonist but You're more the sidekick from the caddy watching it and participating. But sometimes you become the hero in the course of this piece as well. So you're trying to create that adventure structure, but allow you to embody one of the main characters. And you can see the other character, usually in the scene as well, that is also another indicator. So yeah, just any reflections on this decision to actually do a first-person perspective on one of the main characters?
[00:25:58.975] Finbar Hawkins: It's quite early that we just liked the idea of wouldn't it be, and I think we had that kind of almost the first five minutes of starting to work together, of wouldn't it be cool to be able to, it's a VR medium. So A, it's the first problem, who are you? So that was the kind of open discussion. We had it as that very first kind of concept deck of B, Wallace and Gromit. I'm pleased that would have adhered to that. And I went back to dig out the deck and coming here and all these bits and pieces. They're going, okay, we're still kind of hitting those beats. And that was the keeping it very broad, but that in terms of starting to, what can we do with this medium? How can we push it? How can we have fun with it? And it's a bit of a rod for own backs as well, because you've got Gromit, who is the doer. He's the dog of action, right? And Wallace is hapless. He's in his own little world. So in terms of a degree of agency in driving the story forward, he's not the best. You can have a lot of fun with him, so we went into that and there's certain scenes where you're Wallace and you're not sure what's going on, but it's okay. You've got Wallace's voice playing through and you can be him in those certain scenes. But you do need an agent through it. But as Lawrence is saying as well, you need to see your double act. You know, they are like Lauren and Hardy and we need to see them in situ together and bouncing off each other. So that's why Autocaddy came about, because it was a couple of things. When we started working on the concept, Nick had had some very, very early sketches for an idea for perhaps another film where he's a golf nut, Nick, which I didn't know. I mean, it was news to us when we started in this development. It's interesting. And so he dug out some sketches he'd made of a golfing contraption. And so we're thinking, hello, OK, there's something in this. A, it would tie itself really nicely to the story. So we started to think, well, what about, you know, he's going on, they're going on vacation. But something happens. but also it would lend itself perfectly to us to allow us to have that viewpoint so that we could, yes great, we want the challenge of being able to embody Wallace and Gromit separately and then therefore you playing out emotionally different things that they're doing. and then therefore connecting with that other character, as you are Gromit, and then seeing Wallace in the scene. Also importantly, Autocaddy would give us that kind of through line. And we could introduce a new contraption into this. We already knew that we needed Beryl. That was an early decision because she'd been so useful to us in Big Fix Up, which is where she made her debut. So we thought, OK, she's going to be great. A is we know we're going to need a narrator at times, because Gromit doesn't talk, and Wallace doesn't really know what's going on, and he thinks he's on holiday, right? So we're giving ourselves quite a lot of problems here in trying to tell the story. So we know we needed a kind of auntie presence, basically, which is what Beryl's role is, played by the amazing Miriam Margulies. So she flies around, she can be your support, she can be your guide, you know, look at this, that kind of stuff, nudging you, and therefore it played well then as a spine in with you embodying the autocaddy contraption. but also you're going to be needing to do certain things, you know, fire golf balls or even indeed alien babies when it comes to it, even though it seems very surreal to do that, but it all makes sense in the story, folks. So yeah, that's why I did, and it was early discussions with Lawrence, and he was very clear on You're going to need somebody in this. It's not just going to be Wallace and Gromit. And I remember those early discussions about it. You're like, no, you really are going to need somebody in that situation.
[00:29:24.894] Lawrence Benett: I remember it was in the first sort of big creative meeting we had about it. And we were all sat in Bristol in this big room next to a big ship. And I came to that meeting with it because we had obviously worked on this sort of early level deck to pitch for funding. And it had always been the one to embody Wallace and Gromit as well. And I came with this very sort of laser-focused, I'm going to make sure by the end of this, Finbar knows we need this extra character. And yeah, and it really did take a lot of discussion about it, really, didn't it? Because it was something that was different, not really been done before. The idea of giving you really agency is anyone in Wallace & Gormley, other than the main two characters. Because there have been games before from Aardman on console, but they were very much third-person, moving the characters around. and then big fix-up, you sort of became somebody in the situation, didn't you? It wasn't fully definite exactly, you weren't embodied, let's say. Then the caddy existed as a character, but not an embodied character, and then as soon as we realised, oh, that's how we're going to see these two main characters together all the time and how we're going to tell the story, He really started developing from there into what it has become now, which is you know extendable arms golf ball firing mouth Scanning abilities like all these different things being able to fly all of that came from this necessity for us to give you access to ridiculous sort of gameplay. So Finbar touched on it just then, which is each section of gameplay when you're embodying different characters is designed specifically to lean into their sort of narrative context. So when you're Gromit you are fixing things, you're making things happen, you're turning levers, you're screwing things. When you're Wallace it's whimsical, you're playing around, you're exploring. And then when you're the Auto Caddy, you're helping out a bit, but you also get more into this sort of gamey gameplay, where there's some things that are sort of recognisable as funfair games. That's definitely an influence that we started to realise pretty early on, we wanted to get in there. Again, recognisable things that people can say, it might be dressed up differently, it might be on an alien world, but it's like, oh, okay, this is a shooting gallery, or this is a musical instrument, whatever it may be. so that people could instantly say, oh, OK, I know how to do this. And that's one of the ideas there, is just for like that, try and get some instant gratification for people to feel, oh, I've got to try and play around and sort of invite them into the gameplay, rather than try and obfuscate it too much. And that splitting actually happened quite naturally of the gameplay. We decided on it, but the more we said, OK, this is the character in this scene, this is who you're going to be in this scene, that became something that actually helped to sort of guide the narrative in the end, didn't it, to really define that.
[00:32:04.813] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've been having some discussions with Quill artists who are using the VR native animation program to be able to create these animated pieces. There's three pieces that are here at Venice Immersive. And yeah, just talking about this genre of animation as a way of doing visual storytelling, I think has been really advancing this more abstract ways to push the expression to be able to amplify, let's say, characters expression or to represent things in a visual way that goes beyond what filming people can do. And so as you go from 2D into 3D, I'd love to hear any reflections on the new grammar of starting to build spaces, the world building aspect, the architectural aspect, but also what is the spatial dimension and embodied dimension start to give you as animators that can start to take your craft of animation and the insights that you have of visual storytelling and start to translate that into VR. Love to hear some reflections on that.
[00:33:02.607] Bram Ttwheam: Not actually used Quill myself but I'm very curious about it and I've seen a few sort of YouTube videos etc and it seems really exciting. I imagine that there's a wealth of things that we could explore there but I think we've touched on it numerous times so far in this conversation. I think Lawrence you mentioned it. One of the things that I'm really relishing is the environmental storytelling and the way that we can seed bits of narrative actually in the environment and the way that you play with the environment and can explore the environment really opens that up so much more than a traditional media would. So you do have all of that craft within the films and those little jokes sort of dotted around. But the fact that you can actually go around, pick things up, read the spines of books, etc, etc. It's just a whole new thing and it really underscores the joy of VR, I think. So I can't speak to the animation process yet but I imagine the whole blocking of things and just sort of layout of environments is just a joy. One of the things we did experience right in the early stages, the use of gravity sketch to sort of lay out our scenes and sort of plan things out and it was really good because it's a co-production and consequently there are people dotted around. various parts of Europe and London and Bristol, of course. So we were able to have these virtual meetings and literally scribble things in front of each other and say, what about this? What about that? How big should this be? How big should the aliens be? What can you do with them? And it's just a fantastic way. It's so much more fluid than I ever expected it to be.
[00:34:39.412] Finbar Hawkins: Yes, I'd agree with that. I mean, there was a mind-blowing moment of when we all joined in a remote Gravity Sketch meeting, me being kind of the aged dad going, where are you now? Where are you now? And going, what controls do I use? You know, that kind of stuff. But appreciating that, oh my God, you know, we can actually plan things in a 3D. set here, you know, we can get scale right, we can start to think about placements of gameplay as it's molded with the story, and where would it be natural for Wallace to be placed, and all that went through many different iterations. I started to be a little less shit at being in Gravity's sketch. But yeah, I completely agree with Bram, and that for me was kind of a spine-tingling moment of like, oh, okay, yeah, this is really interesting, and this is only going to get better, you know, in terms of the way that we can manipulate those sets, and then the way that we're perhaps going to start dropping test animations into them and everything else. That was a real kind of lightbulb moment for me in terms of experiencing a connective VR situation and what the possibilities were for it. So, yeah.
[00:35:50.131] Lawrence Benett: I think Gravity Sketch was amazing for that. Like you say, I remember the first time you guys came into it, but we ended up using it, you know, I've got a sweaty face just thinking about it, is how many hours we spent in there together and exactly that as a studio that's used to using tools like that, being able to bring somebody in, quickly and talk in these full environments that they may just be blocked at the time and talk about positions that we're going to take as the characters, where bits of gameplay might happen, how we're going to tell the story across these environments. It was invaluable, wasn't it? I really think we couldn't have got where we are without it. I think also, maybe not to speak for you guys, but The characters have generally been in these 2D formats and the characters as you identified Kent is that animation allows you to sort of stretch things outside of possibility whether emotionally or just for recognizability and Wallace is a character we have always seen on this screen and actually his proportions are huge he has massive hands like so the first time we put Wallace's hands just onto your hands they're sort of not just one dinner plate but three and then that obviously feels insane for somebody playing it and that would make it very hard to interact so there was things we had to adjust there but also knowing that there are times when we wouldn't want Wallace to come right up close to you because there's also a certain, we're running it on a standalone headset and so there is a certain fidelity bar we can push it to and the characters again are loved and known and they have got to have some tangibility to them so to bring somebody with such large proportions up close to you would very quickly lose that illusion of life that you're getting from it and that illusion that Bram mentioned of the stepped animation these they might not be perfectly rendered like a piece of plasticine, but they move exactly like they do. And whilst that is, I suppose a lot of people's initial thinking is, oh we've got to make it look just like plasticine. And we have pushed it to a certain point where it has a tangibility to it in the shaders. But actually, what really people recognize is the movement of them. It wouldn't feel right if they were moving at 30 or 60 FPS. I've seen it, and it's weird. They're becoming very fluid. But as soon as you lock them back, even if the experience is running at 72, down to 12 frames per second, ah, that's Wallace. That's Gromit there. And then they suddenly, you have the full character without them being totally realistic or totally plasticine tangible as well.
[00:38:13.662] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd love to hear any reflections of your journey from VFX, and then Madrid Noir was very cinematic and going through these worlds and then starting to have some characters and then now moving into Wallace & Gromit, your evolution of understanding the affordances of using the medium of VR to go beyond the 2D into the 3D and what that affords you when you are looking at both characters but also environments.
[00:38:35.440] Lawrence Benett: Yeah, so I think that is, even though I've just talked about not bringing characters close, that was one of our first big discoveries of going from VFX into VR was the intimacy that you could create. Madrid Noir was a very focused experience between one character and you, and the idea that you could not only frame her in the same way that you would in a 2D film, you know, if you want somebody to feel sad and alone, you make them nice and small on the screen, but you could do the same things there, but you could also have them break the boundary between the user and themselves. So, the closer somebody gets, there is a certain level of, you start to feel a little bit uncomfortable, or at least you feel like they are confiding in you. That spatial exploration of where the characters are was a massive jump for us. We attempted it, it seemed to work pretty well and it has really continued from there. The thing between Madrid Noir and Grand Getaway is that we're always looking to find this, and a lot of people are in the industry, is to find this sweet spot between a passive experience and a full game. And we're aiming to sort of every project we push the slider one way and then we maybe push it back a little the other way. and maybe we've gone too far and we push it a bit. So we're constantly trying to develop this methodology really of how to tell these stories but also involve people in them. So I think one of the big things that we discovered from Madrid Noir that was brought over to the Grand Getaway was this idea of having however minimal, but a director. So Madrid Noir was a spotlight, so it was based in a theatrical setting, so we could use this spotlight that really people are already pretty switched on to follow a spotlight. People know that's what you do with it. And that allowed us to tell the story and make sure that people looked in the right places and followed the action. And then with Wallace and Gromit, not only was it the characters themselves, we have Beryl, who floats around a lot of the time, calls you out over here. And so that has become really a core part of our thinking when we work on these narrative heavy and sort of like slightly to some extent interactive projects is to make sure that people have a director that there's something to tell them this is where you should be going because especially if you look in something like Wallace and Gromit the world is rich there's lots to look at some people stand there at the beginning and just look at everything for a few minutes so it's quite easy for people to get a bit lost so to bring you back we have to have something that catches your attention says maybe try this in order to move on. And that's really been our, yeah, as you say, from VFX, which was totally passive, to where we are now, we've sort of been getting, actually been getting more and more interactive. We have yet to go back on the interactive scale, but I think the grand getaway has been the sum of all those other projects. It's also been a story that's much more complex, has more characters than we've approached before, and it is a lot longer. It's, yes, it's more than double the length of our last project. We always planned something that was going to be over an hour, but the sort of speed at which it, not expanded, but each scene became, how obvious each scene, how deep each one was going to have to be was a surprise. But it was something that it felt natural to have these scenes where you could do lots of different things. There was lots of things to look at, but there was also action going on around you. Especially as Finbar mentioned earlier, these alien babies start to come in. Suddenly there's a lot of characters going around and there's noises going off everywhere. And again, things like we've spent a lot of time, and you'll recognize this in our older projects as well, is lighting design. So making sure that lighting is there to focus your attention. And this isn't just talking about spotlights, but Bram spends a lot of time taking our scenes, drawing over them, and saying, okay, this is how we sort of want to make it look, and we want to focus on this bit, and then we go into Engine and replicate that lighting, and maybe amp up a few areas to make sure that people are focusing in certain places as well. So it's definitely been a constant back and forward between us three the entire time of the project. And actually that was a huge difference to the work I've done in the past. The level of collaboration and also the level of respect and kindness that Aardman has shown to us throughout the whole process has been amazing. We sort of turned up at that first meeting obviously very excited, a lot of pressure to work on something that was so beloved by all of us and everybody we knew, but then to find them so firstly welcoming but appreciative of what we were bringing to the table in terms of understanding of the medium was fantastic. I couldn't have asked for a better partner.
[00:43:02.674] Bram Ttwheam: I should just like to say from the other side of the fence actually viewing Madrid Noir was a real learning experience for me because it really alerted me to the sense of choreography that you need within VR and attention direction is such a tricky thing to balance and that was like a master class really. I learned a lot I think we all did and we've definitely tried to push beyond that and you know it's just a great experience.
[00:43:30.285] Kent Bye: Yeah and in this piece you have a nice blend of all the different elements of presence from, like, you have the narrative and the character, very character-driven, but also there's an adventure narrative that's on top of this character-driven interactions that you have, and then you have different moments of interactivity and gaming and interaction, but also embodied gameplay, where you're really using your body and different experiences, but then there's different puzzles you have to solve at certain points, and then there's this loop between a narrative context and then some sort of interaction that you have to do, and then the reward being, in some ways, a new environment and a new world to start to discover. So you have this sense of environmental design that is really quite exquisite throughout the course of this piece. And I had a chance to play through an early demo of the entire experience, and where it kind of ends up, I feel like it's a very satisfying arc of going through each of these different scenes and each of these different loops. But how did you start to think about this, you know, in gaming you have this gameplay loop where you have this thing leads to this, leads to this. Is that a structure that you had for each of these different scenes? Because there's different scenes that you have, but how did you start to conceive of like how to break down and plan each of those different scenes?
[00:44:37.651] Finbar Hawkins: a lot of kind of the things you'd expect in terms of right we need to get in front of a whiteboard and get some bow stits and start breaking it down and it was bigger I mean Lawrence talks about it being it's long and there's a lot in there that's driven by a lot of what we want to do we want to pack it right but also we need to be practical So I think the thing that was powerful was that Wallace is going to a completely different universe, literally, and therefore he thinks he's on holiday. So that was lovely. We could play up to that and get lots of gags out of it. But importantly, come on team, you know, driven by Beryl being the kind of the authorial aunt, in a nice way, but chivvying you along. Come on, Gromit, essentially, and AutoCaddy, we need your help to get out of here. We're on Mars. So that started to dictate scenes for us to start thinking about, and some fell away. We started drafting scripts. I don't know how many drafts of scripts we did, but quite a few. And also we're greyboxing as we're scripting and doing bits of animation and all that sort of stuff and doing tests. So we felt our way there with it. We knew, as I said earlier, that you're going to have that soft beginning. But hey, we know we're going to have a dining room and we know they're going to come back to it. We thought, well, we know we're going to use the rocket. And with that, in fact, became our vertical slice in terms of that was the good scene to work on to then show Meta what we were up for and how we could bring the characters into that scene and all the kind of fun bits of very Wallace and Gromit gags and silliness that we get into the interaction, into the gameplay. The gameplay has to be Wallace and Gromit-y. It may have a structure and all those sort of things in the same way the story has to, but ultimately has to be silly and has to make you, as much as possible, make you laugh, smile wryly, all that kind of stuff, right? and make you feel warm about it. So all of those things, those kind of truisms are always going through when we were planning it, going into each scene. So we'd go, okay, we know we've got the rocket now, so that's like, if something happens to the rocket, because we need them to crash land on Mars. So that was kind of early thinking as well, they're going to fly into an asteroid. Wouldn't it be amazing to do that and be in an asteroid field and be whacking them? And again, because it's silly and it's kind of mad because it allow us to have some contraction aspect to it on the top of the rocket and and then also led to low gravity situation so we could have some fun with it be Wallace there not really knowing where he is and that was an early scene we knew we wanted that just in terms of that kind of concept wouldn't it be fun and it kind a lot of that gameplay and story thinking came from what would be the most fun but also we're being informed by the possibilities of VR thinking about depth of scale and the kind of impact of that and making people go oh you know looking all around or looking down and and therefore you've got this wonderful palette with Mars. On Mars, you know you're going to find some aliens, right? Everybody knows that. So they started to inform the story as well, and some of the gameplay. So it was a bit of a melting pot, but fairly soon, after a bit of redrafting, we thought, okay, it still needs to tighten, but we've got a framework here, and then now we can take each of those scenes and run at them. Because if you're saying yourself, in terms of one scene opening up to the next, once you know that Wallace has got to go to one scene and thinks he's playing crazy golf, that generates the alien babies, of course, because they're hanging out in the forest. And that allowed us to... Crazy golf, essentially, in inverted commas, was the overall concept for that scene. And how can we make that interesting, but also odd and Martian and strange and play up to those nice cinema tropes and stuff? From that, you know that once you come back, you've got these babies you've got to deal with, but they're going to bond themselves to the story in some way. You're going to be able to use them as a tool. They can help you. So that should step up in a way in terms of starting to inform some of the gameplay. So it was a real melting pot, keeping all those things. How does it power the narrative? What would be interesting gameplay without us? I wanted to spend the next five years building a console game because it isn't a console game. There's playful narrative that's going on in that. But tropes that people would play. We all play games, right? And that you would react to. So yes, there are a few puzzles in there and things like that. But we wanted to be able to then, how can we bring story out in that? If you go back and replay it, how can you see something different? So there was a lot of, again, they were too baggy, thinking, OK, we've got too many situations here. We need to bring it back. And originally, we kind of wanted it to be that you'd start at the hub, and then you'd have to go away and come back. So we had kind of bigger loops, didn't we? So you'd have to perhaps, there was something you still needed to get from another scenario. Perhaps you needed to go back to the scrapyard to then get something else to then come back to the hub and that would be the piece you'd, but it was fighting it too much. No, it wasn't just a question of schedule and budget. It didn't feel Wallace and Gromity enough. You needed it to come back to the kind of that nice adventure structure again, keeping it quite linear so that in each scene there's a kind of self-contained thing to do, which is also bonded to the narrative. So yeah.
[00:49:42.141] Lawrence Benett: I suppose we've talked about this analogy before, like the Wallace and Gormit adventure or any lovely sort of classic adventure is like you're riding a boat down a river that's taking you on that journey. And we found that the more we started to deviate from that idea of, well, at least the way that we were telling the story, it was almost like the boat had been stuck in the side of the bank. It didn't feel like you were flowing on the adventure anymore. And I think there was a few, there was considerations, obviously, it's chapterised as well, not only for segmenting each scene, but also for comfort limits, right? This is the reason that we know that people, a lot of people can, probably you are one of the only people that might do this, is watch the whole thing straight through in one go. Yeah, I did, yeah. Yeah, so that people may want to watch two or three chapters in a day or in a session and then move on. And so not only that, but also to make sure that you weren't, under a huge barrage of stuff the whole time. Again, Wallace and Gromit stuff is always, whilst fun, it's always comfortable and warm. So we didn't want you to be having to constantly do things and then not have any time to break. We needed a little moment for you to be able to look around. and we do use the hub as that to just see a bit of story, calm down for a moment and then maybe go out and solve a puzzle or play something that's quite intense. We see this as something that is meant, it's aimed at mainstream audiences, so it's something that if we put too much complexity, intensity to the whole thing, people will be turned off quite quickly, whereas if we can reel them in with the characters and the story and grow that complexity a bit as we go through, then it's more likely to hit those larger sections of the audience.
[00:51:20.440] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, animation, immersive storytelling, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:51:31.500] Bram Ttwheam: Gosh, that's a big question. When I'm feeling optimistic I like to think it's potentially like the latest art form comparable to the way cinema was the art form of the 20th century. I like to think that this is the 21st century's high art and we can take it anywhere we want really and because it's such early days the language is still developing and that seems like a really exciting moment to get involved. I don't know where to go beyond that, but it just seems like the potential is limitless. And the more that people can become part of the adventure and part of the story, and the more we develop that language, the more rewarding the whole thing is going to be.
[00:52:18.130] Finbar Hawkins: Well, I go back to the kid in me again, in terms of the pace of what's been happening with VR. We were talking about this on the way here, that it's gone from things that are quite clunky and cumbersome to things that are getting pretty tidy and neat, and it's the pace of that technology. that is being driven by the market, right? Driven by the people that are involved and the audience need. So all of those things are coalescing, I think, to make VR a really exciting space, whether it's connectivity, again, that Gravity Sketch Road to Damascus experience I was talking about, thinking, my God, I can create in this space, and I can communicate with people, and I don't have to move, and we can come up with ideas as a collaboration. And you can only do that in a VR context. And then you've got Apple, obviously, entering the market. They don't say it's VR. but it obviously is playing to that market and they're tapping into something else, right? So I think that to me is, I go back to, you know, I've got my original clunky Game Boy and my first iPod and now we've got smaller and tinier and faster devices and some of those almost slowly disappearing, right? You know, eventually it'd be nice not to have a phone and will that be some kind of, we've got a wearable that everyone will have and that you'll be able to play out something in that or use your hands to be able to navigate something. We're all being driven by the science fiction stories that have influenced engineers. Nobody's going to rest until the warp drive exists, all that kind of stuff. That for me is the power of it. It's allowing lots of different markets, I guess, and industries to all come into this space and start to push it. And it's also, in turn, driving the hardware and the efficiency of that. Because not everybody wants to be occluded, and people have problems with it. or they start to feel nauseous, and that needs to go away. That needs to get better. And I think Aardman's role as a content creator in that situation is to play our part in pushing it and saying this has to be better and that we think we can take things further and we can go back to playing with it more, really. So I think the power of VR is its growth for me, is its excitement and where it's going to go next.
[00:54:32.734] Lawrence Benett: As one of the founders of an immersive studio, I have many answers obviously to this question, but really for me, I suppose in the current era, for me it's about the democratisation of experience, which is, I've always been obviously an avid fan of cinema and games, but I've always been a big proponent of theatre as well. I haven't been there but I know this is the case in New York and in London that theatre is sort of moving beyond the affordability of a lot of people and I feel like virtual reality can bring these things for realistically a much more affordable cost because to experience the sort of thing you get in a theatre, in an installation, even in a physical art gallery, Those things really are becoming more and more expensive the whole time and also they are location based So you see the new punch trunk thing you'd either have to go at the moment to New York or to London But there's a lot of people around the world who aren't going to be able to make it there and they might miss it so this idea of being able to bring any experience or a large amount of experiences to people wherever they are in the world and there are theatre tickets out there that are more expensive than a Quest 2. So being able to experience so much for that, I suppose, lower investment really is a massive thing. It's such an important thing to get experiences, stories out to people for really to create just a better human connection between people, to understand people's situations, to really expand people's horizons. I really believe that is what VR is going to do, is doing, and is better at than anything else, is allowing people to go into these super immersive experiences, see things that they'd never seen, see stories told in ways that they would never, can only now comprehend, or would never dream was possible, and to see that potentially in your own living room, down at your local library, wherever, is a truly amazing thing and I think the more headsets that are out there, obviously prices will change on them but it's still, there's more and more every year and more and more people engaging with it and I really think that we have a bit of a responsibility to make sure that everybody can see these things and that the stories we tell are important to get out there and really do just delight people. The moments of joy that you can get out of these sorts of experiences are so strong. We were discussing it last night at dinner this dopamine hit you can get when something really happens in this medium is just wild and you know a lot of people I suppose as well get a bit of feeling of escapism out of it which is great I think there is a healthy amount of escapism to be done and these devices and these experiences absolutely do that in a safe way and in a glorious and as I say totally affordable way as well so really it is for me its power is to get those deep emotional and soul-changing experiences out to as many people as possible.
[00:57:18.985] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Yeah, well, this piece has been my introduction to the characters of Wallace and Gromit, and I felt like it was a very satisfying overall arc, having had a chance to play through the entire experience. And I'm sure that people who are much more familiar with Wallace and Gromit legacy and history and cultural impact will be able to read a whole other areas of inside jokes and other aspects of these characters and certain dynamics that I may have not been noticing or appreciating. But having this conversation certainly gave it a lot more context for at least me to learn more about the history and legacy of this intellectual property. Yeah, I really enjoyed playing the game and really appreciated having a chance to talk to you all about both your process and journey and experiences and insights for creating this piece. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:57:59.747] Finbar Hawkins: Thank you. Thank you, Ken. Thanks, Ken.
[00:58:02.900] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this interview from Fitness Immersive 2023. You can go check out the Critics Roundtable in episode 1305 to get more breakdown in each of these different experiences. And I hope to be posting more information on my Patreon at some point. There's a lot to digest here. I'm going to be giving some presentations here over the next couple of months and tune into my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR, since there's certainly a lot of digest about the structures and patterns of immersive storytelling, some of the different emerging grammar that we're starting to develop, as well as the underlying patterns of experiential design. So, that's all I have for today, and thanks for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And again, if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
