I interviewed The First Ingredient: Tales from Soda Island – Ch. 7 director and writer Simone ‘Funi’ Fougnier , producer Peter Ariet, animator & director Dan-Franke at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 1: The Multiverse Bakery
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 2: The Neon Jungle
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 3: The Quantum Race
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 4: The Golden Record
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 5: The School Trip
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 6: Silence
- Tales from Soda Island – Chapter 7: The First Ingredient
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Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] 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 special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, This is episode number 27 of 35, as well as the 7 out of 10 of looking at the context of ideas and adventure, but also the 4th of 7 of looking at this animation series and starting to dive into some of the different quill animation that was there at the festival. So this piece is called The First Ingredient, Tales from Soda Island, Chapter 7. The director and creator, Simone Fognier, as well as the producer, Peter Ariat, and one of the directors and animators, Dan Frank. So Tales from Soda Island is really a groundbreaking series. There's seven total chapters that kind of split up in two seasons. The first season is episode one, two, and three, and then the second season of episodes four, five, six, and seven. So really over the last three years, a lot of groundbreaking innovation for the grammar of immersive storytelling and just the different techniques for a quill artist. It's been a huge inspiration for anyone that you talk to in the quill community or looking to Tales from Soda Island. So, I actually, before Venice Immersive, had a chance to watch through all the different seven chapters. There's actually corresponding Sodex chapters, so I recommend folks watch an episode of Tales from Soda Island. If you go to MediQuest and you go to MediQuest TV, you can do some searching, and I would recommend finding them and favorite them, because the recommended and discovery within MetaQuest TV is not the greatest, which we talk about that a little bit in the course of this conversation, but I would recommend going through each of these seven chapters. And then there's a corresponding Sodex, which gives a lot more information around each of the different characters where you can use to kind of like decode the different visual storytelling that's going on within this series. So this is a piece that's looking at this world that is built out of all these different characters It's about music that's embedded into it and it's really an opportunity to do this really deep world building in the context of this world and to tell a variety of different stories of characters in this world as I go through these different interactions and It's a series that takes a bit of investing into the entirety of the series and then kind of understanding what was actually happening by reading a little bit more about the Sodex. It's just got a lot of musical puns in there from the different characters and it's a whole ecosystem and world that's being created here and different stories that are being told within the context of that. And so it's very much in the overall context of adventure, but also this is a place as this kind of world building place and all the different architectural dimensions that are going into that place. So the primary center of gravity of this piece is very much into this sense of environmental presence. The world building here is top notch, really exquisite. There's also quite a lot of mental presence because you're kind of having to piece together what's happening. It's very abstract. There's no language. And so you kind of have to like go to the Sodex to decode what is happening in each of these different episodes. And then you can go back and watch it again and start to uncover lots of different clues as you're watching these pieces. But there's a lot of things that are left to digging in and have to puzzle it out what's actually happening in different aspects. And then I think at the end of the day, it's giving you a sense of emotional presence and taking on this whole epic journey of these different characters. And with the dialectic between music and silence is a theme that's going throughout the course of these different chapters. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Peter, Simone, and Dan happened on Friday, September 1st, 2023 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:50.777] Peter Ariet: Hello, I am Peter Ariat. I am the producer at Studio Syro. I have produced Tales from Soda Island, the first seven episodes, and I also helped on the production of Reimagine Vol. 1 Nisa. And currently I'm just working with the Studio Syro members to create immersive experiences in both animation and in development.
[00:04:11.040] Simone Fougnier: Hi, my name is Simone Fognier. I'm an Italian artist. I'm an illustrator. Most recently, I started working with VR. I'm the creator of Tales from South Island, which is the project we're presenting. And yeah, these are my co-workers.
[00:04:27.662] Dan Franke: I'm Dan Frank. I'm one of the directors at Studio Sairo. And yeah, I've also been a part of the Solar Island series. I directed the first three episodes and have been the main animation artist at the remaining episodes of Tales from Solar Island.
[00:04:42.567] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:04:47.003] Peter Ariet: Sure. So I started with a bachelor's in digital arts and sciences and that's when I really started to learn about computer graphics and just technical art and started to work with just an immersive media and new media just merging all different forms and how far I could take that versus moving away from my desire to do film but then I kind of found my way back into that as things evolved we started to work on music videos and then Not only that, it became from working with this 2D medium of releasing content like that, we decided to go with more full, immersive, 6DOF experiences. And really, it was the mixture of working with Quill and all these interesting programs like Unity, and then also just doing full audio production for each of the experiences, and working with these incredible members of Studio Sairo, where everyone is just a talent of their own in regards to how they are a quill artist, and then truly diving into what it means to do graphics at that level as well. and you kind of see how expansive it all can become. So my background kind of helped me find my way through discovering the just different nooks and crannies of what it takes to actually build graphic softwares like this and just how they're represented through all these new digital mediums and then at the same time through all these different headsets.
[00:06:05.540] Simone Fougnier: Myself, I come from a cinema background. I studied cinema in the Bologna University. Then I started doing illustration and for the past 15 years I've been working in the music industry. I've been doing album cover, collaborating with musicians, doing videos and live shows and all sorts of things in that regard. Then one day I saw Goro's Fujita art in Quill and it blew my mind so I went out my house, I bought a headset, I tried Quill and I haven't taken my headset off since and that led us to us creating the series basically. I started using Quill every day and then I was so fascinated by the medium, I was wondering why no one is using this, why it's not a standard. So I started looking out for other people that were using it, and just to make bigger projects and collaborating, see how the pipeline could work, working with other people and putting all our ideas together. And I found some very talented individuals and then they became part of our studio. And yeah, we worked on a music video, that led to another music video, and then that led to the series that we're presenting. And yeah, but basically my background is illustration. I've always wanted to do motion and animation, but animation is extremely complicated. I never thought I could do it, but Quill allowed me to learn it and work with people that are animator. they taught me how to do it and the way Quill is built it's much easier let's say than traditional animation or 2d animation because it's much more akin to stop-motion which is I guess simpler I know it's probably not the case like someone that makes stop-motion would We probably disagree, but in my personal experience doing animation in Quill was extremely natural and Yeah, it's easy to learn and easy to understand how it works looking at other people projects because you can really look at each frame, how they're making it. And yeah, that's been incredible to be able to be here now thinking back of what I was thinking about it when I just started it. I never thought that we could, you know, be making movies with it. And here we are in Venice. That's crazy.
[00:08:30.982] Kent Bye: Just to orient me in space and time, when did you get your headset, roughly?
[00:08:34.524] Simone Fougnier: I think it was 2017, 2016. I'm not sure about the timeline, but yeah, somewhere six years ago, seven years ago, something like that.
[00:08:44.670] Kent Bye: OK, great. And how about yourself, your background and context and journey into VR?
[00:08:48.738] Dan Franke: Yeah, I've done a couple of different things before I actually ended up doing film and even VR. I started out doing some TV graphics. Actually, I studied for a year just basics of animation and then, you know, went into doing some internships for TV and that was boring. I went to Porsche, doing some graphics for those guys. But as Funi said, same for me, I always wanted to make film and follow that passion. And then I started studying at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, the Animation Institute, which is super renowned in Europe and the world. And I was lucky enough on my second try to get there. And yeah, I just had the opportunity to try out so many things. I actually started out as a sculptor using ZBrush, you know, modeling some aliens and that sort of stuff, aiming for VFX later on. But throughout the studies, I noticed, like, you know, through trying out stop-motion, 3D and 2D animation, a lot of concept art and focusing more and more into like that directing passion and I noticed like that's more where I want to be. And then in my gap year I was directing a children's series called Patsy at Studio Soy which is also a super great like German animation studio. I learned so much but still for some reason during that time I noticed somehow I felt that pull towards VR. I knew like there's something with VR that's going on that I just thought I will end up there. I want to try that stuff. And well, you know, lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, an email came in from the university saying, hey, that guy, Goro Fujita, is going to come to our university and is going to hold his very first Quill Workshop ever. And I just was at the right place at the right time. I was part of the very first Quill Workshop that ever happened and for two days we learned that tool. I had known his work before, I followed it a little bit and I was super happy to be there. And a week after that workshop I did a two-minute short film within a day and noticed, yeah, this is the thing and I also never took my headset off and suddenly... Chances came in and doors opened for me that, you know, I would have never dreamt of. I mean, and then those guys came around and we founded a studio. And when we're working on our own series, you know, together with Meta and that happened even before, like, I even graduated, you know, like, so it's like, what the hell happened, you know? So, yeah. And now we've been working on that series for three years now. And yeah, it's crazy.
[00:11:13.927] Kent Bye: So what year did Goro give his first workshop?
[00:11:16.948] Dan Franke: I believe that was 2018-ish, maybe 2017, it's been a while. But actually, pretty much exactly one year after that workshop, after I became his little padawan, I was teaching together with him in Malta at Trojan Horse, was a unicorn. And we had that two or three day workshop and I was teaching with him and that was the day where he said, okay, now you're a Jedi. So yeah, it's crazy how fast things happened, yeah.
[00:11:42.464] Kent Bye: Now I've had a chance to do an interview with Goro Fujita back in like 2018. So you mentioned that there was some music videos. Was that the first catalyzing moment to bring Studio Syro together? But maybe you could get into the actual founding story of Studio Syro. What was the catalyzing moment to name it and bring everybody together?
[00:12:00.468] Simone Fougnier: Yeah so basically I think it was 2018 or 2019 maybe I had this opportunity to make a music video for Deadmau5 and back then most Quill stuff was just one scene it was a beautiful illustration with animation, but it wasn't going further than that. It was limited to one scene. And I immediately thought, why? You know, you could do much more than that. But I didn't know animation, so I started looking into Instagram and like the hashtag Quill, and I found this young artist called Felix, which is now a member of our studio. And I started talking to him, like, what do you think about using Quill to make, you know, a bigger experience, make a music video? And he was like, sure. Let me bring this other guy, because I know he's also using Quill, and he'll be able to put a virtual camera in it. Because back then, Quill didn't have a timeline yet, I think. It was only like a painting tool. There wasn't an animation timeline. There wasn't a virtual camera. So we, yeah, we started building this single scene and then we composed them with Unity and we made a virtual camera in Unity. So that's how the video was made and that video was very successful because no one has ever seen anything like it because Quill is a very unique style and I assume that caught the attention of the people that made Quill, including Goro. So... that also led to another video because then when the video was published a lot of musicians were like hey i want that i like it so we had the chance to do another video unfortunately i couldn't do that second video and since i was out the two other guys felix and sneaky nick diets they had to find someone to replace me and they called pete And they called Dan and also Nicolad, which is another amazing animator from Canada. And they made that other video. And then at that point we had two incredible media made entirely in Quill. So people that knew Quill were like, hold on, so you can do this? And that basically led to the creation of our studio, because at that point we all were extremely hyped and extremely enthusiastic about Quill. We were like, this is the thing, we're gonna do this and we're gonna keep doing it. And yeah, and then one day Meta approached us saying, hey, do you guys wanna do something? And we're like, yep. So we founded our studio and here we are.
[00:14:33.012] Kent Bye: Awesome. So it was all because you weren't available for that one project that brought everybody together. So it's amazing how these things work out sometimes. So yeah, I remember back when Dear Angelica was first coming out. Actually, it was at Oculus Connect before it was premiering at Sundance that later year where they were showing it off for the first time, a little demo scene of Dear Angelica. But before we dive into your whole series, I want to ask a little bit of a technical question around Quill because I know Indigo was at Meta, amazing graphics programmer, mathematician that just was a wizard of being able to figure out how to create this optimal experience, even to make this type of graphics program possible. And then he was there for a while, and then eventually he left. And then, I don't know if the program, of course, was a little floundering under Meta's watch, and then eventually it got transitioned out of Meta back to Smoothstep after Indigo left. And so I'd love to hear a little bit of what happened there from your perspective. because the medium is being dictated by the tool. And so you're following what the tool is able to do, and then what the capacity of the tool, now that it's back with Inigo and Smoothstep, has happened. So I'm just trying to get a sense of that arc of that story. So yeah, what happened.
[00:15:40.292] Peter Ariet: So yes, Indigo was one of the first creators of Quill, and that was when they were building Dear Angelica, and through that process, they then found that it was a pretty interesting tool for just general creators. And, you know, through the years of building out the animation side of things, they then were thinking of building the platform, which now all of these virtual reality Quill pieces are living on, and... After some time when Indigo left, they were keeping it afloat with the engineers that they still had on staff. They weren't making drastic improvements to how the program was working, mainly just fixing bugs, until finally I think they were moving in a different direction. They weren't looking for content creation tools or anything to build out in terms of... They entirely shifted their focus towards the Metaverse, which has its own type of content creation tools, but Quill, I don't think, fit in that formula. And so now with Indigo owning Quill again underneath Smoothstep, I think he has an understanding that the program is a very impressive VR creation tool on its own, and it's in a really good place where I could probably live and continue to live. without any major developments to it, but also I feel like it's very hard to develop for it. You need the funding for it. Quill is a free program, and you also need a very strong user base, and I think that is consistently growing because now people are coming to realize how much you can actually build with the program, and to the extent of the experiences that we've built, it's quite impressive. So I think there's more encouragement towards what Quill can do and how it'll evolve, which we're trying to get his attention, we're trying to get him excited so that he can continue to be like, alright, great, this is what I need to support. I agree it's in a good place where it may need some tweaks, some things. and make it a little better for its user experience, but it's still super impressive where it's at, and I don't know if it needs to go any further for the moment. I know everyone would disagree with me that it actually uses the program, but... I can speak to that.
[00:17:42.897] Dan Franke: I mean, yeah, in the same way that he is a genius, Inigo, he is mysterious and he's a little bit of a ghost, and, you know, you've got to search, look out for him, but yeah, I mean, Quill, as it stands, is the perfect tool when it comes to immediate content generation. If you have an idea, you just scribble it out and basically in real time you can animate something and just communicate your idea as fast as possible. But at a certain stage, when you get to 10, 15, 20 minute experiences that you want to build like we do, then it gets a little bit tricky. Like a cut, and I usually do all the major editing in our episodes, a cut that takes five seconds in Premiere, you cut something, you move everything, Over that takes literally like half an hour in quill just because there's so many little layers. It's not like drag-and-drop Yeah, there's a little bit of quality of life that you know for the user could be enhanced But still we can do those types of your experiences right now And you can do that stuff and for let's say the general user who are doing smaller scale experiences It's perfect as it is
[00:18:46.977] Kent Bye: And did Tales from Soda Island, did it start when Quill was still under meta, or was that after it was in Smoothstep and things had changed?
[00:18:55.479] Peter Ariet: Tales from Soda Island started while it was still underneath meta, but Indigo had already left. He had already transitioned out, but they were still building the platform in which things could be exported on, because that uses a unique file format called the IMM, which is the Immersive Media format. which is open source and I encourage everybody to go develop for it because we need to continue to expand on this file format so that things like Quill and other immersive media can continue to use this because it's the best way that things can be streamed to these headsets because otherwise it's just not pragmatic. Otherwise you have to build things in Unity and build APKs and then go through those pipelines when we technically have a platform where things can live on like that. But yeah, during that time.
[00:19:38.824] Kent Bye: Okay, so yeah, I guess what I'm wondering is if there was developments to Quill and advancements that happened after it went from meta back to smooth step if there was a Flourishing of new features and development or if it had pretty much just stayed the same between that transition. I
[00:19:53.826] Peter Ariet: It pretty much stayed the same. There were things that he had to do to make sure it wouldn't fall apart since Meta has so much software that they have built in the back end for all their technology, which they just can't hand over. So then he has to kind of stitch that all together. Okay.
[00:20:09.287] Kent Bye: And when did the immersive media player come about? Because they have a cool player that is embedded into the MetaQuest platform, which is really great, actually, to be able to just play through all these different experiences. And when did that get launched? Was that before or after the first episode of Tales from Soda Island?
[00:20:26.746] Peter Ariet: It was actually launched with the meta quest TV But it was just called the oculus TV at the time because that was before they did the rebrand everything was oculus and That's when they still own the IP for quill So it was the quill player and then once they had changed the branding it turned into the virtual animation player and that lives on the meta quest TV Okay
[00:20:46.313] Kent Bye: So I think just going through all these questions, because I think that distribution, you know, having a way to actually get these works out is a big part that actually catalyzes the projects like this, because you can actually get them and to have people see them. And because virtual reality is a new medium, and especially as we're at these festivals, like at both Tribeca and at Venice Immersive, there's three cool projects that are here. So you get a lot of Innovation that I'm seeing at each of the different film festivals new crops of different stories that are being told in Quill so but yeah, maybe let's pivot into talking about the tales from Soda Island because you know this is a Series that came out I guess it was in some ways sort of a pandemic project of all throughout the last three years that you're producing this and that you'd have an episode that would come out and then You'd have like a Sodex which would have like a little bit of decoding of what's happening with who are these characters? What is this world? And so maybe we'll start with If you had mapped out that this was going to be like a seven episode arc or if this was like an iterative like, hey, let's create some characters and then each episode were new characters or like, yeah, just talk about the creative process of the world building and storytelling that happens in the Tales from Soda Island.
[00:21:53.810] Simone Fougnier: So yeah, South Island is kind of an anomaly because it started way before Quill even existed. So South Island started in 2015 as a music collective. It was literally just a collective of young musicians making music and releasing it for free under the South Island name. And I was the visual artist for the project. And when I heard their music and the fact that all these young producers were coming from different experiences in different countries, I wanted to do more than just brand it and do an album cover. So I created an alter ego for each one of them and I created this island. And then just listening to the music inspired me to create all these different biome and creatures and stories. But I didn't know that all these were going to become a series. So that's how it started. And then, you know, these producer kids, they grew up. Some of them became, like, real musicians. Some of them, they just changed their careers. Some of them are architects now. So the project went to, let's say, to sleep for a few years. And then when we had the opportunity to pitch something to Meta, my studio co-worker, they were like, well, how about that Soda Island project that you've been working in the past? Like, that would be perfect for it. Because I had this sketchbook that was filled with Yeah, ideas and concepts, they were just concepts, they were just sketches on a notepad. I made them many years prior, but I didn't know why, I was just compelled to do it. And yeah, we took all that material and we were like, how do we turn this into a linear narrative series? I initially wanted to do a more, like, National Geographic approach. Yeah, I wanted the series to be more like a documentary style, because back then we had no idea what we could actually do with Quill. Like, how long are these episodes going to be? How many characters can we have? How much music can we put in the software? So the first episode was very simple compared to the other ones, and then, yeah, each episode we became more... you know, we wanted to put more and tell more things and had more characters and make the episode longer and so yeah, that's how it started basically. Back then it was just a music project and then with Quill it allows us to turn it into something way more complicated than we ever expected.
[00:24:12.695] Dan Franke: I remember the first time when, you know, you were pitching that idea basically internally and saying, hey, you know, look at this stuff that I've been doing. And then I was basically flipping through the PDF pages of that encyclopedia, that little notebook that you had, pages of pages of pages of crazy stuff, crazy ideas, fantastical creatures. I was like, what the hell? This is already there. And I mean, basically, it feels like everything that you've seen in the series, all the creatures, all the worlds, it's basically like a tenth of all the crazy stuff that Fournier has been thinking about. It's endless, the creativity that's already there and that we could just use for those little stories. I came on to the studio as an animator in the beginning, but we quickly realized that I could do a little bit more of the directing since I've done that in university. And when we started thinking of, okay, this is going to be a VR series, I didn't even approach VR in a way that I was watching a lot of VR stuff. I wanted to be that fool that comes along and just does something without knowing if it's possible. I went in there and we kind of created our own style in the way we handle VR. Very much like 2D compositions, when you look straight ahead you have these compositions and then there's very fine-tuning where the viewer should look and guiding the viewer. during crazy transitions, doing some fun stuff with cuts and everything. So yeah, and then as we said, like every episode, starting from the first one, which was very steady, where the environment changes, going to that second episode where the camera moves a little bit more, the viewer sort of slowly moves across the island, going to the third episode where we just had a race in, you know, crazy quantum space. So yeah, we kind of stepped it up every time. not knowing what is possible with Quill itself, like pushing the boundaries of the tool, but also pushing what our storytelling is for us. So yeah, that was a fun ride.
[00:26:02.273] Kent Bye: Yeah, and what about your entry point into this project of the Tales from Sword Island?
[00:26:07.853] Peter Ariet: Sure, so when, you know, we were coming together, we were getting ready to pitch to Metta, which kind of came about because Nick Diaz, who kind of originally brought me in when we were working on the music videos, he actually had met Goro at Comic-Con in San Jose, and was kind of talking to him about Quill, and then they were like, hey, you know what, you guys should come do this really cool thing with Quill, and we're gonna see, can you pitch a series together? We're speaking with Funi. Funi's like, you know, we can come up with something original. I have Soda Island here. And we're like, Soda Island, what's that? Started checking it out. And Funi's style is so unique. And it's a perfect translation to Quill. How Quill works is like a technical program. The way you use the strokes, the way you have to shade because there is no lighting in Quill. And so just how you can represent lighting and how you can just build those worlds as simple shapes and just kind of have like this low poly aesthetic. And so we started to work towards building a pitch. And Soda Island is a musical island. It has to do with a lot of musical production ideas that are just transformed into more narrative ideas and just different spots on this island. And so we kept that a part of the main idea that we wanted to keep going with, where we were doing something more exploratory with different experiences rather than something that had a linear story. But then there was still that drive to tell stories. And so we kind of kept that alive after this first episode, like Dan was describing, with this static understanding of how we're going to treat a VR experience. Our entryway, because before we were just doing 2D, so then if you have to immerse a viewer and actually carry them in something that's fully immersive, how do you actually want to lead them through? and seeing that evolve and just having general creative input on how we can treat VR and how we can tell new stories rather than doing something that's fully immersive and interactive. This is a very passive experience. You have to do your own exploration and we let them do it. And, based on Funi's style, the worlds are so overpopulated with details. You can check out any general area and find yourself looking at something and just general your exploration. But then, based on the direction work that Dan had done and Funi had done, how we bring the viewer's attention back to where they actually need to focus to pay attention to the story. Which also encourages replayability. There's just this general, go back and watch it. You're gonna find something new. And, depending on if you're watching the main story, you can go to the depths that we've added to each story. Which, it's an anthology. So, each episode not only was us improving on our production and just our general pipeline for animation in VR, but how we were telling stories in VR. and I was just reading Phunny scripts, going back and forth with the artist, what's possible in a technical capacity, what's possible in a technique, and how new techniques were being developed with Quill, because it's a brand new software. So then, just generally watching these incredible artists pick up the software and be like, oh, wait, we can do this? Oh, wait, we can do this? You know, there's also a virtual animation community of Quill artists, where we basically would finish an episode, and we would come with this bag of tricks, and we'd be like, hey guys, Do you know you guys can do this? And then they'd be like, would you guys know you could do this? And it's just this stacking. And then it was incredible because you could see then all the other cool experiences also improve greatly just based on just this sharing of this community. And I've been kind of an observer how everyone's been kind of interacting with each other and generally helping put these stories together, build this team, and make sure that we have the pipeline that we currently have for just how you can treat a Quill experience, which is just as similar as some game or film pipelines, but with the added bonus that you have to treat VR as a special medium, and just generally how you need to think of the user and the user experience of what's important for them, and also the accessibility component, because there's still so much you can do with a camera, you have to keep it quite limited and constrained. So you can keep the viewer at a pretty balanced level without throwing them off, because you can do locomotion, but you can't do it quite crazy, which are just things that need to be solved in general. So my general experience was just looking at things through a technical perspective, because keeping the pipeline alive, handling these files, which are too massive, and not wanting to delete anything because you feel like you have some form of history that you want to keep alive. but it's just a matter of making sure everything was flowing smoothly amongst this international team. No one is based in an office, we have everybody spread out. Funi's in Italy, Dan's in Germany, Nicolad is in Canada, Nick Diaz is in Miami, Felix Stief is in Austria, Lucas Smarter is in California, just this entire global company all coming together and sharing these really large files on servers and, you know, the same technical problems that almost all productions have to deal with, but for us was still fairly new and so I was figuring out those systems and how we could all work well together and of course just general communication platforms which shout out to Gather which is a really fun little 8-bit office space platform that we could go to each other's desks and build pixel art and just kind of explore that area because that would definitely help us maintain our production and keep things in line. And then the occasional thing that Nick Saunders would develop, which is just more actual virtual offices, where then we could do networked office events and actually appear in virtual reality with each other. And that was also, you know, we were messing with metaverse ideas and just social ideas before it was extremely popular in regards to actually networking, social interaction. And we explored that with the development projects and galleries that we made for a college in Montreal. But yeah, overall just generally helping these productions, helping these creative individuals just actually get their ideas concrete and how it can all work in tandem with one another.
[00:31:52.164] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's fascinating to hear how this all came about because it's also like in the middle of the pandemic as well. So like a lot of things are shutting down and you already have to deal with creating a virtual remote work production studio that's making immersive storage content but also using the tools to actually do that process. So fascinating to hear all that. I do want to get a little bit of a clarifying note just in terms of the evolution and timeline because At some point you go to Meta and you get Greenlit to produce this. Did they say you can produce seven episodes? They say, can you produce one episode at a time? What was that process of like, you know, what the agreement was going on this venture, which ended up being seven episodes, seven chapters, if that was what they knew, if there was going to be that at the beginning, or if it was kind of like, hey, let's wait and see how each one of these go. So yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit about that process.
[00:32:38.874] Peter Ariet: Sure. So we, originally it was, okay, give us three different ideas you really want to do. And we came out at more of this anthology approach and actually telling three stories. And in our mind, we really wanted to keep up some representation and make sure that we had some decent cadence in terms of our production. We tried to do everything in a year and doing three episodes in a year. You know, we really didn't understand the undertaking of just what that meant, because originally the idea was to do five-minute episodes. So we did one five-minute episode, and we were like, wow, that was really cool, but now we want to tell larger stories. And then we turned in a ten-minute episode, and then we were like, whoa, why is this ten minutes? And then we did a 15-minute episode. And they were like, well, why is this 50 minutes? And we were also asking why it was 50 minutes. And I'm looking at Funi. I'm like, Funi, you got to make these stories smaller, man, so that we can actually contain this production. But we learned so much that we could continue to evolve the length of each piece and tell some deeper stories. So then the production kind of evolved into telling longer narratives. where then once we got to, I would say, halfway in the third episode's production, Ryan reached out and said, hey, what are you guys thinking for more? Would you like to pitch more episodes or any other experiences? And so then we were thinking, OK, well, we could write some more episodes. And then we wrote four more episodes. And that's when there was a pivotal moment of understanding the intensity of the production of the past three, where we couldn't possibly keep the same cadence of now doing four episodes within a year, and also keep up with the 15-minute long episodes. So we kind of extended our timelines so that we could do richer stories. Because the first story that we did in, let's call it the second season, was the Golden Record. And that was probably one of our strongest narratives versus more of just a general VR experience. And from that point, then doing the fifth, which is the school trip, sixth, which is silence, and seventh, which is here at Venice, the first ingredient. That was more of Funi having the intention of writing multiple episodes, which we have more in mind. It's just a matter of when do they come to life. but generally wants to keep it in a decent scope without going overboard, but as Ambition has it, you start to take on additional productions and that's when things get even more complicated because you never know how virtual reality is going to work and the technical complications and then also the team because Quill in general has a limited amount of artists, a limited amount of people that have the knowledge of how it works in and out. They're very talented generalists until they become specialized in animation. So then finding those individuals that could then assist you and take it further. I think we brought on Lucas Smarker and Tyler Friel and at that time that was when we were trying to do much more with the last two episodes. There was far more complicated animations. brought in these stories that had multiple characters, and then occasionally multiple limbs, and by doing that you're complicating the animation, you have to do quite more. Or crowds. Crowds is also a very challenging thing, and I think it's funny, you see the parallels of all the technical and complicated ideas that have happened in the history of film in regards to VFX, and we're kind of just experiencing it in a hand-drawn approach, but it's just very cool how that coincides, and then of course the same gripes everybody has with audio production and how things were compressed for video games, we experience that as well. But overall, just the progression of those three episodes and them being extremely impressed what we were actually able to achieve with Quill and the excitement for what more could be done alongside also this push for other Quill content, which was absolutely incredible because the artist community that has been creating things with Quill for MetaQuest is unbelievable.
[00:36:33.653] Kent Bye: Yeah. It sounds like it was basically like two seasons, but three chapters in the first and then four chapters in the second. And so, so you get green lit for like what you know is going to be three episodes. I'm just curious if you could take me back to the pandemic times of having this big, vast project that you're basically, you know, everything's in lockdown during the pandemic. I'd love to hear about this thing that you've been cooking for the last like three years.
[00:36:57.135] Peter Ariet: It's interesting, I think everyone was working fairly remote, or at least I was working remote for two years before that, so when the pandemic hit, I think everyone else was having a harder time adjusting. Not our team, I think our team was already very virtual, but I think just the general world was having a hard time with it, where COVID was happening, but we were heads down making Soda Island, and we were completely consumed by it. It was one of the most incredible experiences of just general creativity and just discovery. And it was incredible, which we felt that we also, we got the benefit of people being, you know, interested of what else there was to discover. And we felt like we were also, the type of content that we were making was beneficial to be watched during that time, which was just a nice aspect of what was going on. And then soon after things started to change, I think that we really kept it very similar in just terms of our approach. There was no need to do much else in regards to what else was happening in the world.
[00:37:59.527] Dan Franke: I remember when I was with Goro in Malta and I was teaching with him, that was end of 2019. And he told me, hey, next year, if you're invited to my place, you can meet the meta guys and everything. I was super excited. And then COVID came and that never happened. And yeah, we basically founded a virtual studio three months before COVID hit. Speaking of the right place at the right time, nothing changed for us. And the cool thing is that throughout that learning by doing process of making our series and just also seeing other little projects, little Quill projects popping up everywhere, that the community just grew. Even though we couldn't meet each other, we were building that Discord community and teaching each other, learning from another. we were doing streams like basically every Saturday where we showed each other the little tips and tricks that we found out and yeah we were really developing this whole what are we doing with this tool and then what sort of little things we can do with this because we'll by definition it is just a very simple small tool and you know it is somewhat limited in its functionality and how you use it and you for sometimes very simple things you have to find those workarounds to make it work and even using the timeline the funky little timeline that it has there are certain things that you just have to work around and find your techniques that like basically every single day you're inventing a new thing and you're doing pioneering work by just using your controller, maybe doing a weird little hand movement by accident, and suddenly, oh, I could use this to make a spiral and to do a crazy animation, whatever. For our third episode, for example, that quantum race, we had to find a way to sit in a cockpit of a car or a flying saucer and being able to fly through space freely, and that was a thing that just didn't exist in Quill, you couldn't do that. And I had done a previous little personal project before where I had this little accident where I was kind of parented myself to a camera and I did a little hand movement and suddenly my whole camera just spinned around like crazy but I noticed, I remembered in that moment where we wanted to figure out how we do this that there was this happy accident that I had back then and what if you could control that little glitch that happened and you know I sat down and got my controller and just super slightly moved it and basically using it as a joystick in the cockpit. And that way we could actually fly through space just using a glitch and quill. And that is the only way we could have done this whole episode. And yeah, that's just those little happy accidents that happen and that are really rare nowadays, like with Maya or any other 3D programs, it's kind of solved. There are tutorials out there, there are little things that you might be able to do in new ways or little plugins that you might add, but Quill is just a tool where you have to really think about how you can reinvent what it means to do VR art. And that's just a funny, rewarding thing that you get on the side.
[00:40:52.565] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear your perspective of creating this whole world of the Soda Island in the context of this band. And then once it gets greenlit, now you have an opportunity to take those 2D drawings and all this imaginal world building that you've done and actually start to build it out. So what was that like for you to actually start building out the Soda Island?
[00:41:11.584] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, it was it was weird because well first of all I have never wrote anything before so I didn't even know if I was able to do it and that's why I was more oriented towards doing a documentary style like National Geographic. We're just gonna put the camera in there and we're gonna have see just the behavior of this creature and then you know without having a voiceover we knew we wanted to do just visual storytelling but yeah I was more oriented towards that but then obviously working with these guys we realized maybe it's more interesting if we put a narrative to it and I remember when we released this before Tales from South Island, when South Island was still just a musical project, we made an album and I wanted to make a second album and I had an idea for like a concept album where silence was the antagonist. in a way, like it was about the relationship between music and silence already back then. And I still was churning and thinking about that idea and I was like what if we use that as a general story plot that we are going to develop, even though each episode will have its own like self-conclusive story, we want to have something that ties all the episodes together. So I started thinking about that and how to represent silence, how to integrate this idea, this dichotomy between music and silence. And also I'm a huge Carl Sagan fan and I remember when I saw Cosmos the first time and the famous quote, if you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. And I thought, I want to make an episode where there's someone that actually makes universes from scratch in order to bake pies. And that's how the first episode came to be. The Multiverse Bakery, I remember having a sketch of that. It was very different because I didn't know that that was going to become like a 3D series, right? A 3D episode. So we did some tweaks and tests. We changed the design of this Multiverse Baker. We just took those ideas and we discussed them. And yeah, that's how it happened. Yeah, each episode we wanted to use a different style, maybe explore different genres. You know, the first episode, as we said, we didn't know how to approach, how to do it, because we didn't have any reference point back then. The only Quill experience that was available was The Remedy by Daniel Pikesy, which was mind-blowing, but also very different, because it was more of an animated comic book. It wasn't fully animated like we wanted to. And when we finished the Multiverse Bakery, we were like, OK, now what do we do? We made an aesthetic episode. Let's find a way to tell a story where we move throughout more environments and we see more things. Because this island, there's so many things to see. We want to show them. So we started to make episodes bigger with more sets, more creatures, more music. And yeah, we kind of just lost control. But yeah. We were like, oh, we want to tell this story. We have no idea how we're going to do it. Like the race episode, for example, that I was mentioning. I was like, oh, I want to do an episode that's a reference to old video games like Wipeout and F-Zero. How are we going to do it? No idea. You guys think about it. I'll just take care of the concept art, but you guys figure it out. And then, yeah, we figured it out. And then when season two became a reality, I had this other idea for the Golden Record that I always thought about it, that also comes from Sagan and Cosmos, the idea of the golden record going into space. I always wonder what would happen if someone actually found the record, like, would they be able to understand anything about humanity? And we were like, okay, maybe the record falls on the island and someone finds it and what would they be able to, yeah, understand about humanity, how they react to hurt music, So yeah, it was just random ideas that we were intrigued in and discussing between us. And that's basically the hard process. It was just controlled chaos.
[00:45:18.563] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I wanted to ask because, you know, when I look at the rough timeline of when things were published, it looked like you would publish the first episode and then do a whole Sodex, which is like a decoding of the visual storytelling because you have all these characters in this whole world, but, you know, how do you set a broader context? And I felt like having this book, and you had mentioned looking through Phony's notebook and seeing all these, this codex of this world of Soda Island, and you have the codex of Soda Island of the Sodex, the complimentary Sodex chapters. I had heard of the Soda Island from Michaela Tarnescu-Harlan, who had mentioned it in the interview when we were talking about Reimagine, Episode 1, Nisa, working with Studio Saira, which at some point comes into the timeline, but I'd mostly been focusing on the virtual film festivals and the selections, and so I hadn't seen any of the previous episodes because I don't know if that was Meta just wanting to publish it rather than submitting it or whatever that happened. I didn't come across it until hearing from Michaela and then having it selected here, I was like, well, this is episode seven. I really should go back to like watch all chapters and get a broader sense of how this developed. And then like, it's like, oh my God, this is like a whole immersive world. This is amazing. This is incredible. How did I not hear about this? And then there's also the Sodex. And so, yeah, there's all these sort of associated behind the scenes or Addendum, I don't know how you start to think about how these two play together But it's just a totally abstract visual story that you kind of get a sense But then when you read the deeper context, then there's a whole other layer of what this world so there's this using the language and the writing to do additional world building that isn't a crucial but I think it actually helps to have a deeper appreciation as to who these characters are and what's happening in the world. So I'd love to hear about that dialectic between the pure experience of each of the episodes and then the Sodex unpacking of that and how that idea came about.
[00:47:08.230] Peter Ariet: So, I mean, there was the general stories that we had and just the intention that we had them. I think the Neon Jungle is just a pretty good example where we wanted to tell a story of this creature that only lives for the duration of what their mission was. But then to actually understand the little Easter eggs that we put in there, you know, I would hate to spoil it, but I feel like I kind of have to. is when the journey is done of this, like, tadpole-like creature, they explore the neon jungle and they meet some friends along the way, but their main goal is to deliver this package. But then at the end of the story, they bloom into a flower. And you wouldn't know anything about that actual understanding unless you actually dug deeper into the Sodex and understood the various ideas, and then once you actually start to recognize that flower, you start to actually pinpoint it everywhere else that's happening in that story. And so it's just those details that we decided to fully expand on were technically already expanded on, because Fooney was taking things to almost a molecular level when he was discussing what Soda Island is, because it was the play of sound and play on sound frequencies and music production where you really can just dig into all sorts of things. but then you need to explain it at some level and just bring that appreciation to it. So we would just pick singular elements to truly expand on that we found was necessary, especially like the characters. I think we discussed the tadpole, we discussed the pie, we discussed silence eventually, but just if you wanted more, if you needed more, you can have it, but each story can live on its own without any of that additional context. It was there for you to explore if that was something that you truly wanted to do.
[00:48:46.332] Simone Fougnier: There were two forces fighting against each other, so I wanted to create questions and my team wanted to provide answers. But I like to leave stuff up for interpretation, which feels like a cop-out, but that's the media that I like, is the one that you have to... interpret and think about it and you don't have a you know a simple solution or an answer for the question there that you witness but yeah the fact that we were discussing this stuff we find this compromise which was okay we are going to do the episodes that are providing questions but then we're going to give some actual answers in the Sodex so For the people that want to know more and they require a simpler explanation, we're gonna literally write it down in a book so they can understand better what we're talking about, really.
[00:49:37.414] Dan Franke: One of the funniest and coolest aspects about Funi's world is all the puns that he put in there. Every single creature or even the biomes are music-related puns based on music-related things. For example, the metronome is a gnome figure that's also a metronome. It's just a blue pyramid with eyes and a beard and a ticking metronome as a nose. Stuff like those names of those characters that you wouldn't get by watching the episode. Just the fun behind them you get by reading the Sodex and that's just part of it. Yes, you get all the knowledge, a little bit of fun Easter egg info about it, but also on the other side we had other stuff where we could actually look behind the scenes and see how it was made. Like for viewers to actually see how Quill sort of functions, like how we built the bakery step-by-step, and even having those meditative scenes where you can stay in those biomes as long as you want. And those are nice little additional experiences that you put out, you know, just for free, basically, because you've already done the episode. So, yes, you get the knowledge as a viewer, but also of the episode and all the characters, but also how it's made. And maybe that drives people to explore more, like, what is this Quill thing? And I want to do the same. So, yeah.
[00:50:51.597] Kent Bye: So it's really a great architecture for people that they can just watch all the episodes and not look at it But if people do want to dive deeper like I wanted to actually came across the Sodex first because the search Functionality isn't always the best of trying to find stuff and I had to like make a playlist and yeah It was a little bit of a nightmare of trying to like I was like, why can't I just like watch them like YouTube? Like what's next you know and like with the recommendations? I think there's a lot of work that could be done to make it easier. So I ended up reading through all the different Sodex episodes. Before I saw the longer episodes, I was like, OK, I need to watch. And then I went back and read the Sodex again. So there's a bit of an iterative process there. But I feel like there's a better way to seamlessly watch the experience and send people one link. And they could watch the whole thing. would be a feature request I would have. But I had an amazing time just being able to watch the whole thing and go back and forth and discover this world and understand the depth that it is. And it sounds like I could probably do another viewing and see even more stuff that there's a lot of these things that are for many layers. But I did want to ask about the distribution aspect. Were you submitting these to festivals and just not getting in? Or was it that these were sort of like weird, abstract, episodic things that maybe didn't have enough context to be a self-standing thing. I'm really glad that Venice Immersive was able to select this episode, in some ways the finale of the second season, to see this full arc. I'm just curious if that was a meta decision or if that was just a curatorial decision in the broader industry.
[00:52:19.587] Peter Ariet: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think it comes down to some lack of experience, but at the same time, just the overwhelming attention to the production. We had a very small attention to the actual marketing of what we were doing. We actually had a larger expectation of how Meta would actually market these experiences, seeing how they were supporting the entire development of them. So when it came down to submitting, you know, we submitted for an Emmy. We were thinking that it was of exceptional immersive choice because when you see the immersive category, in our minds we're thinking, more VR or something or some new form of media where, you know, I think the Emmy went to more of a social media marketing idea that spanned, which could be considered some form of immersive media in some context, but we were thinking more of actual something like Dear Angelica because we knew that had garnered that type of attention. And we were up for the accreditation, so it was not the full nomination. So we didn't get that. We tried to submit to Sundance. Sundance, I guess, didn't see what they thought was fitting within what they had selected for that year. So we kind of stayed away from trying to go through submitting to festivals. We just found that it was slightly distracting from what we were trying to do. Where we've kind of found an interesting community just following our work in general and stuck with that. Then when it came to even now, we finished chapter 7 in December and I think we were kind of overcooked in regards to just doing the series for so long and didn't really know how we wanted to distribute it any further. There is the aspect of the technical regard in which you were just discussing in regards to how Meta's platform actually works, where it's being hidden within this complex friction process of, can I search this title? Can I find it on these shelves? And I think Gor and Ryan have done everything that they can to optimize that to their ability, but at the same time, I think it's just a matter of attention to immersive media on the platforms and their agenda in regards to what they think VR should be focused on, which there is also the hope of distributing it on maybe its own application, but there are too many technical restraints in terms of building out specifically the type of content that Quill is, where it goes back to that media format that I was discussing earlier, where there have been unique solutions that people have found to make sure that it lives off in either games or other types of experiences, but We're trying to solve those answers because I would love to have the 360 versions of these pieces live on something like YouTube or just be able to be more accessed. We want to build that accessibility or maybe build a mobile viewing experience of some form. But I think that also takes away from the 6DOF experience and truly what the impression you get from actually being in the world. It's really great to show somebody an experience and then have them watch the monitor on the TV but then we tell them, hey, you know, you need to go in the headset. You need to actually see and experience it for what it is. So, you know, any other medium outside the 6DOF one is really not something I'd like to encourage for the project. But at the same time, I'd love for more people to get invited to actually see what's happening with it. But then it comes down to what are our technical solutions for that and then general our redistribution of what we want the series for or the next chapters that we have planned. So it's kind of a mixture of technical problems and then general finding the attention for VR media outside of interactive games which find much more popularity.
[00:55:57.448] Kent Bye: I'm grateful for Liz and Michelle to have the best of selection at Venice to be able to select the seventh chapter. Because in a lot of ways, this experience has been flying underneath the radar of a lot of folks in the XR industry, including myself, that it was a bit of a delightful surprise to discover the depth of this work that you've been in your distributed format, slowly chipping away at building out these really impressive immersive worlds. And so just to be able to see the whole arc of this immersive series, it was a joy to be able to see each of those episodes. And I was like, how did this go under the radar? Like, this is amazing. And so again, grateful for Liz and Michelle for selecting it here. So what's it been like to be here at Venice and to participate in this festival side of being able to show your project?
[00:56:41.447] Simone Fougnier: incredible, honestly. I mean, as an Italian, the Biennale is like top-tier festival and I came here I think 12, 13 years ago to see The Fountain by Aronofsky, which is one of my favorite director, and I never thought that, you know, one day I would be here presenting my own movie, so it's been incredible and like you said, yeah, it's incredible platform for people to see our work because not many people know it exists. It's like we are a niche within a niche within another niche. So being here and see all these different immersive projects and people that know what we're doing and yeah, it's just surreal and at the same time we are extremely grateful for the opportunity and yeah, it's fantastic. I am speechless.
[00:57:28.251] Dan Franke: I've been here for two days now and have only been able to watch one VR experience. You really gotta be fast and quick to sneak in there and get those slots. But that also tells you that everybody wants to watch these and there's so much stuff here. The cool thing is that you really feel like, even though it's such a big film festival, it's also VR. our little niche is taken really seriously and more serious than like everywhere else right so we have our own little island which is funny we show our solar island series on an island which is cool but also kind of tricky because we're kind of secluded and people who want to watch the big films they don't just bump into the VR stuff but Then again, it's all sold out and people really come here and they know that this thing's here. So yeah, it's been crazy to be here. And the funny thing is, since we founded the studio, we have seen each other only two times. Like the first time after three years of working on a series together in Turin last year, end of last year, we seen each other the first time. And it was also in Italy. And now we're here again in Italy. So it seems to be our spot, you know, somehow, yeah, it just happens.
[00:58:34.448] Peter Ariet: Yeah, this entire experience, it's kind of shocking just in general to see the collection of immersive media and how it's being approached in terms of the installation, the worlds, the animations, just the overall attempts at telling a story in a new way and how it's being received by the user because I think we're all trying to reach for kind of the same ideas in terms of how we're getting across these ideas using this medium. where you can kind of see how everyone wants to execute their ideas and just how being immersed has that impact that's unlike traditional media. It's taking it just a step further, which is very encouraging in terms of just how many different ways you can go about it. And I think the diverse selection has shown me that our method is definitely very interesting because we've taken more of a film approach and I think that it fits the film idea that's here. But then at the same time, it also encourages all the different types of things that we could also build and potentially bring in the future to other festivals or various things. And overall, it's just entirely encouraging. Everyone is just unbelievable. Everyone's just an amazing creator. And it's inspiring, inspiring to just be amongst all of the various projects that are here.
[00:59:50.217] Kent Bye: And so as you're working on Tales from Soda Island, you also at some point start working with other projects like a reimagined series with first episode of Nisa. So I'd love to hear how that came about in the midst of, you know, if that was after you'd wrapped production on all the episodes or if that was in the middle of everything.
[01:00:07.356] Dan Franke: That was basically the main reason why I stopped directing the Solar Island series. After the first season, I went over to Tunisia and started not directing that, but being the main quill artist there and helping to shape it from the ground up. That was a totally different project, totally different style. We were working with different filmmakers and just getting in the groove of telling a different story and bringing on new artists that were helping us out. Yeah, that was a totally different project for me to work on. Then, you know, I came back and then was mainly animating on the rest of the Sword Island series.
[01:00:45.544] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I wanted to ask because I've, you know, over the years of going to different film festivals and seeing different projects from like Lustration and Yihong Zhang, Carving with Memories and with the Reimagined series with Episode One with Reimagined and then Mahal. And then we hear at Venice Immersive, you have Zoe with her project of Perennials, you have Roxandra with Pepitos, and you have Tales from Soda Island. So I've seen Quill becoming more of a prominent place at least one or two or three projects at these big festivals and that there is like a grammar of storytelling and visual storytelling that has been evolving and maybe it was always there from 2D and it's being ported over or yeah love to just hear any thoughts that you see of like the existing grammar that has come from the 2D animated world and if you see that there's an evolution of the different techniques that you're discovering and prototyping with these whole projects.
[01:01:37.964] Dan Franke: It's certainly amazing to see that there are three Quill experiences here and we're super excited for Zorii and Roxandra. I think it really shows all the people that we talked to. As you said, there's been this thing, Quill, that's been under the radar a little bit. You've heard it, there's this painting tool in VR, but there's just a handful of people who really used it and have seen the potential of this small tool. part of what we want to get out there. Not only the series and the creative stuff that we've been doing, but also we are standing here as the Quill Avengers and we want to get people to know that there's this tool out there and that you can really use to not only make VR experiences fast and independently, but also any 3D studio out there could use this tool to just work effectively. If you have one Quill artist in every studio, that would save so much time in the early process. You could do animatics entirely in Quill and it would be so much faster than anything else. And I'm teaching Quill to a lot of students and universities around Europe and started doing it again after COVID. That's part of my mission, to just get the knowledge out there. And even though it's a small tool that doesn't have that much development, it is perfect as it is for many different purposes, not only VR or film, but also game development. And it's versatile, and it's cool to see that more and more experiences are being shown and more people slowly, gradually get to know it. So, yeah, we're hopeful.
[01:03:09.167] Simone Fougnier: Yeah, there's not many people that uses Quill, but those few people are extremely dedicated to it. Quill might look simple, it might look almost childish, the interface. I don't know, but it's like, you know, the red, green and blue color is just your color, but you can do every other color with it. And that's how I feel about it. Like, it looks simple, but that's its strength. Like, you pick it up, you can learn it in one day, honestly, and you can do everything with it. And it has so many applications, like Dan was saying, you can use it at any stage of production. I'm currently using it to build a live show for musicians. I sometimes use it to build 3D illustrations and I render them out in 2D and I make album covers. It's the greatest thing ever, honestly.
[01:03:54.965] Peter Ariet: I think the usage of Quill, you know, we've taken more of a film approach in terms of how we're handling our experiences. I think a lot of projects have started to do that just because of how it feels to actually sit into a Quill experience and understand, like, where the cuts are coming from or how you're handling your cuts. I think that's one of the most interesting things. How did they transition their scenes? How did they bring me from one place to another place? And technically, how did they do it? Because we sometimes don't even know. But in regards to the grammar, you know, when it first started with the Remedy, there was more of like a comic book style to it and kind of like the pacing of stops and the interactive of page turning and more of the storybook format, where then we decided to go with just more full fluid animation. which becomes quite complicated. You need the animators and then it also takes up a lot of space on just the headset itself. So then people were coming up with different methods of just transforming information or objects and characters, which I think changes the actual type of animation that's happening. Instead of something happening on twos, they're happening on threes, or they're just entirely static, which still follows like an anime approach or just general animation just to preserve what's actually on screen for a long enough period of time and then actually adding the motion and taking it to a whole new place. But really just expanding on how compositions are being done, how you're viewing the entire experience, I think that there's still a lot to be tapped into. I think that we're still very young in regards to just how things are going to be expressed, but there's just so many different ways that people have come up with framing and just how each scene is just evolving or being taken from you and just truly embodying the feelings that are being told in all these stories. And so it's exciting to see how these stories are unfolding here, especially at this festival. Both Zoe's piece and Roxandra's piece and our piece, you get to see not only the visual style and how they've changed just because of the individual artists that are working on it, but how they're treating set-to-set their character animations. And really it's just quite interesting. So I definitely think over time, as people start to come into that medium, we'll start to see some really, really interesting pieces.
[01:05:56.354] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and animation and what those two might be able to enable.
[01:06:07.508] Simone Fougnier: That's a great question. I'm not sure. I just want to see more of it. I want to see movies, like two hours experience. It might sound weird or scary. I don't know if people are already, you know, used to staying in VR that long, but we've been spending eight to ten hours. working in VR. I did eye laser surgery to be able to work with a headset without wearing glasses just for it. So I just want to see movies or entire series like we did, but just keep going with it. I will need to think about that, honestly.
[01:06:46.574] Dan Franke: Yeah, as I said, I came into the VR space when we started the project intentionally not having seen that much VR stuff. Stupidly enough, I was playing VR games where I trained myself to never feel sick when I do loopings or anything, so I'm totally the wrong person to say, oh, our camera is fine, nobody's gonna feel sick. But it was kind of a backwards thought by me. But yeah, I haven't seen that many VR experiences and really just throughout the process, I have played a couple here and there. So I'm actually very much looking forward to the next couple of days seeing what else has been going on and seeing all the other experiences, getting some inspiration and maybe having a better understanding of what else could be done and where to maybe utilize Quill in certain aspects and where that sort of own style and that 2D and then stop-motion type of storytelling and animation could come handy. in VR storytelling, so yeah, I'm excited to kind of, maybe that question in a couple days will be answered, we'll see.
[01:07:48.775] Peter Ariet: I think in just terms of evolution, depending on how long in the future we're speaking to, I think it's going to invite the traditional animation medium more over, because they're technically just building out the same worlds, they're just not running in a real-time engine. So I think it's only a matter of time until it gains more recognition as a proper format, and hopefully VR in general will become more accessible over time, and just seen as a way to consume media. But that really comes down to just the user base and understanding who actually understands the need of having it. And I think we have found the full potential of what VR can do based on being productive with it. It's our creative tool. The artists are spending time creating these worlds in VR, and it doesn't leave VR. It's not like working on a traditional computer. So I think that it's a matter of when it becomes part of more an everyday life. But then also just the animation itself, that medium, is very impactful. Whether you're choosing to do something more stylized or hyper realistic just when you have something unfolding in such a visual style It's so impactful, and I think that it's It's only a matter of time until everything starts to gravitate towards VR, but I also would hope that it's following some sort of not a social idea, but more of like a community where people can watch things together or just build some sort of, you know, check this out sort of thing, because I think it's still too, do you have a VR headset? Oh, I have a VR headset. Oh, you have to check this out. You really, it doesn't live outside of this medium. So the accessibility thing, even just for the format, I think is super important. And I think that's also just a hurdle in general that we'll probably overcome in time.
[01:09:31.420] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:09:37.202] Simone Fougnier: I just want people to know that Quill exists and they should use it because it's the best thing ever made.
[01:09:42.264] Dan Franke: Have fun and keep doing what you're doing. We need you. Let people know that this Quill thing is out there. Try it for yourselves.
[01:09:53.296] Peter Ariet: Yeah, as a producer, I have to plug, you know, Tales of Soda Island. Watch all the episodes just because it's truly unbelievable. And of course, I'm biased because I was a part of the production. But of course, I love my team and they're absolutely incredible. The art is absolutely incredible. And I think it's just a good experience for anybody to have if you're looking to just have a better day. I promise if you were to watch a Soda Island episode, you will have a better day. VR artists continue to just flourish and explore and meet others like you. If you are interested in Quill, join the virtual animation community. Look it up on YouTube. You'll find just a bunch of inspiring creative individuals that are all sharing Quill-related projects. And the coolest part about working with Quill is if you do want to export it, it will go on the MetaQuest and you can show everybody that has a MetaQuest. and it's really neat that way. Also just continue to expand on how we can do all sorts of this new crazy immersive media.
[01:10:52.065] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I can definitely attest after having a chance to watch all seven episodes ahead of Venice Immersive 2023 that it's quite an epic adventure and lots of innovations of visual storytelling and with the complimentary like additional context of the Sodex that people can dive into much more details and lots of different Easter eggs and yeah, real masterclass in both world building and character development, but also being able to tie everything together. And so, yeah, Congratulations of being able to show it here. And thanks for taking the time to help break it all down, give a bit more context to this quilt and evolution of that in your studio, Syro. So thank you. Thank you.
[01:11:26.097] Peter Ariet: Thank you. Thank you so much.
[01:11:27.770] 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.
