I interviewed Pepitos: the Beak Saga director Ruxandra Popescu at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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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. So continuing on my series of looking at different immersive experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, This is episode number 28 of 35, and it's the 7th of 10 of looking at the context of ideas and adventure, and also the 4th of 7 of a mini-series of looking at animation and diving in more into aspects of the Quill animation now. So this piece is called Pepitos, the Beak Saga by Roxandru Popescu, and it's a short and sweet story that features these different characters as they are trying to dig into the different aspects of the beak, and they kind of go on this grand adventure. and it's using the Quill animation and painting around all these different scenes and it's got a very much a cinematic quality because it's mostly a 180 type of experience and then there's also later on the piece where animation is used to tell this broader visual story so yeah it should be available on the animation player in the context of MediQuest TV here at some point as there's a total of like 30 of these different animation projects that has been funded by META over the last number of years. And I had a whole conversation that I get into with Ryan Genji Thomas later on in episode number 1300, where we dig into some of META's funding and some of the other contexts for some of these different projects that have been funded by META over the last three or four years or so. So the primary center of gravity of the context is very much of this kind of like hero's journey, also exploring different aspects of identity. And then this primary center of gravity I think is very much just an emotional presence, very much a narrative driven linear experience. And that also different aspects of the environmental presence as you're taking through these different scenes in these animated worlds. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Alexandra happened on Friday, September 1st, 2023 at the Venice Immersive Festival in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:14.588] Ruxandra Popescu: I'm Roxandra Popescu and I work mainly as a Quill artist now and an XR director. So I'm super interested in creating experiences, not just for VR, but for extended reality, you know. So I would like to work with Mozilla Hubs as a platform with VRChat. And obviously at the base, I always kind of start with Quill because it's just a fantastic tool.
[00:02:35.433] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:02:40.468] Ruxandra Popescu: All right so I guess I kind of started in fine arts so that's where my artistic education began and it was all traditional sculpture and like very traditional fine arts so it was a much different style than what I would be doing right now and from there I transitioned into digital animation. And I obviously learned those programs, Maya, Blender, all of those. And while I was learning those pipelines, I kept finding myself a little bit restricted by the pipelines, by the workflows, by the software itself. So you could always find workarounds to create whatever you were looking for, but it always felt like you were fighting against the software. And it just happened that I was looking for new software that I could be incorporating within my workflows and I came across Quill. And I thought, well, this is amazing, you know, I bought the gear, I tried it out and there was no question about it. I mean, it immediately convinced me this is what I should be doing going forward.
[00:03:39.744] Kent Bye: And when was that?
[00:03:41.222] Ruxandra Popescu: So that was in 2019. I was doing another short animation, it was called The Lost Forest, and I kind of started that project specifically with this idea in mind that I would combine different software in ways that maybe wouldn't have been done before. The story itself had an element of traditionality, I suppose, in terms of artistic approach that I knew I could not achieve through the traditional pipeline that I was using. So Quill came in perfectly because it allowed me to recreate this kind of gestural sort of painting but in 3D and it really helped tell the story. It was very important for the story that it would have those elements.
[00:04:26.784] Kent Bye: So yeah, you're here now at Venice Immersive 2023 with a project called Pepitos, The Beak Saga. But before you worked on this piece and are here, what was the next step from going from Quill into starting to work within Quill to produce these types of immersive stories? Where did you go from the very beginning?
[00:04:45.876] Ruxandra Popescu: So it actually kind of all started with Pepitas, to be honest, because the project was commissioned in 2021 and it kind of was finished in 2022, you know, in September. There is a reason for the delay, you know, obviously you are aware of what's been happening with meta I don't want to go into it, but it did affect our production and it's unfortunate because you know We had amazing people on it and it was mostly the sound team that got affected by the layoffs and I was very sad to see them go and also it left us in a Tight spot, you know where we kind of had to make do but we did I mean it turned out I think the sounding that just an extraordinary job with creating the sound and just the composition of the whole piece.
[00:05:35.439] Kent Bye: It's extraordinary Just to clarify when you say it was commissioned Does that mean that meta had paid for the initial development and then had to sort of break it off at some point?
[00:05:45.900] Ruxandra Popescu: So it all got funded by Meta. And yeah, we did have an original schedule that had to be a little bit altered throughout the production because of the changes that were happening at Meta. But they never retracted their involvement, so they stuck with it. And they were very keen, just as I was, to get it done and introduce the world to Pepitos.
[00:06:08.964] Kent Bye: So maybe you could give a back story of this story of this world that you created of Pepitos, the beak saga.
[00:06:15.071] Ruxandra Popescu: Right, so Pepitos the Big Saga encompasses all of the things that I personally love in other mediums and I don't mean just in VR experiences and animation and stuff like that but like games as well so I thought a lot about it whenever I was thinking about the story. And I really wanted to bring all of these elements in. So we have elements that are borrowed from JRPGs. So you see this in the overall art of it, where you start off as a small character in a little bubble living a small, uneventful life, right? And then you get introduced to someone or something that opens the whole world to you. And you realize that your presence on this planet and in this universe puts it into perspective, right? Because you think of your life in a certain way, but then we all have this in our lives when we meet people who just open us to a completely new way of living or completely new issues that exist in the world. And this is basically what happens in Pepitos and what triggers it all. So it's kind of a coming of age story, I suppose, with a lot of magic.
[00:07:23.527] Kent Bye: Yeah, in your video for the Venice Biennale, you had talked about how the series of different characters that were being inspired by different shapes, with a little bit more angular shapes, more smooth shapes. And after I had watched that video, I actually had a chance to see the piece, and I noticed that you had subtly embedded throughout the course of the piece, like the more angular features of the robot had squares in the background, and the more circular features had circles in the background and then another character had triangles and so maybe you could talk a bit about the use of shapes and how that was driving some of the characters that you're creating within the story.
[00:07:59.581] Ruxandra Popescu: Okay, yeah, so I actually thought about those shapes as I was developing their personalities because I did think a lot about how they would each exist within this world and how they would be different from each other, of course, because we do need them to conflict at times, we need them to work together, so I did need them to be very separate entities. And that was deliberately done. So, for example, Pri and Pepitos are deliberately made to look almost identical, you know, like the same sort of creature, I suppose, because I wanted to highlight the fact that their choices make them, in terms of personality, very different, right? And I also wanted to highlight that through the use of the shapes. So Pepitos is very soft. He's living in this idealized sort of world, protected from harm and from everything else in the world, you know. And he's also a perfectionist. He loves himself. He's a little bit vain. He loves soft shapes. He loves comfortable kind of life. And that's why his shape is a circle, right? Then you have Pri, who is the driving force of this whole piece, and that's why I chose the triangle to represent her, because it's a very powerful, dynamic kind of shape. Whereas Robo-Beak, for example, is represented by the square shape because he is immovable. It takes a lot for him to change, but whenever the change happens, you know, it turns dramatically.
[00:09:19.205] Kent Bye: Nice. And I guess throughout the course of this piece, you know, you have the whole arc of the story. And the thing that I was really struck by was these different moments where you're kind of illustrating in this motion graphic, but in an animated way, like trying to visually represent different things that are happening. And so I had a conversation with Curtis Sickman, who wrote a book recently, it's called Hyperreality. And he's talking about how there's this more Mimetic form of storytelling which is much more like representation and trying to do more of the visual storytelling without much speaking or talking and then the more diegetic process which is much more of like Speaking and using dialogue with characters and so there is dialogue in characters but there are certain moments where you transition into this more trying to visually represent some of these different moments by using the animation as a medium in a spatial context to try to communicate the next beat of the story. So I'd love to hear about your process of having this blend between the dialogue that's happening with the characters, but then the interstitial transitions between some of these different scenes that are moving into this more memetic form of visualizations or representations, and just your process of understanding those different transitions.
[00:10:30.724] Ruxandra Popescu: Right, okay, so I think from the very beginning I approached it with this in mind, that we would have these elements of the story that would be kind of not realistic, so in a way a little bit more abstract, right? And that was purposely done to bring out that I suppose that storybook kind of feel to it right so I wanted those moments where they really argue with each other to stand alone separate from all of the other interactions and separate from the whole adventure because you do go into this experience and you're immersed in these 360 you know 6DOF environments so you are almost as if you're walking into a different world and that's great that's what I wanted but whenever you have these tension moments and those moments were the most important beats of the story happen. We do have the abstract approach because it just simmers it down to the most essential things, right? So you're not distracted by the background, you're not distracted by anything else around you that might be intruding into how the story is going at that point and you're solely focused on how these characters are interacting with each other and you do see them basically fighting each other to get the next spotlight, the next spotlight.
[00:11:44.698] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's also, I guess, some elements of magical realism that you're able to start to introduce into this experience that you're a lot of times representing scenes that could just as well be happening in physical reality of our world, but there's also these other elements that are getting into the more magical, realistic, or imaginal space of this unique world that has these other components of the logic of the world, I guess, that is different than our world. I'd love to hear about this world building process of the differences between our physical reality and what this more magical realm is all about.
[00:12:20.412] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, so I purposely done it in the way that you do start in an environment that kind of feels like our reality, right? So you have these beautiful green sceneries and whatnot and sunshine and stuff. So it does feel like you could be somewhere on Earth in a way. And as you progress through the story, it gets a little bit more magical and more different from our world because we do travel to other planets and also we see other planets. We don't necessarily travel to all of them and each of them had to be part of this fantasy universe, right? So I didn't want them to look like something that could exist within our galaxy. They needed to be standalone, they needed to bring out that sort of magical fantasy to the forefront, especially because I love working with colors, you know, because of my traditional background in fine art where It was mostly, you know, darker color palettes, very limited color palettes. It was, I suppose, we didn't used to really work with colors as much, right? It's a completely different approach. So whenever I transitioned into animation and I did start working with other software and with digital tools, I wanted to embrace the whole spectrum of the colors, right? So in this experience, in Pepitos, the big saga, I wanted to bring those elements in there and I wanted to really focus on how those colors tell the story as well of each planet and you will see them that they do have different color schemes as well to kind of emphasize that they themselves are different so you're not still in the same space.
[00:13:53.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, you mentioned that your background in fine arts was informing some of the different decisions and techniques that you were using within this piece and I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate on if there's specific color mood boards or color theory that you're drawing from your fine arts background and maybe just elaborate on that point a little bit.
[00:14:11.848] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, so definitely I would have considered, you know, the color theory and how the colors harmonize with each other and how they stand out as well, how I can use those different palettes to build the different worlds. I guess my fine art background influences the way that I approach it in terms of technicality, so it's something that I will always be grateful to have done because otherwise It would have been easy to struggle with having to do so many different backgrounds and so many different characters and spaces, so I will always be recommending to any artist to really think about those basic techniques that you normally learn whenever you go through that kind of education.
[00:14:53.215] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I've talked to a lot of immersive creators over the years, I've found that there's a deep iterative process where, in this case, you're working with Quill, but you're also doing a story, and so I'm wondering how that worked with you, since you're also getting support from meta, like at what point you got to getting the pitch together, that iterative process of if you had the story first, or if you started to build out the characters first, and then had the story evolve from that. So, yeah, I'd love to hear where you began with Pepitos, the Beak Saga.
[00:15:21.959] Ruxandra Popescu: I started thinking about Pepitas before I started talking with Mera, so it was something that was already floating in my mind. And whenever we did start talking about a collaboration, I immediately brought it to them. Obviously, it was a very simple idea at the time, because it was just in the first weeks of conceiving the story, so it was still very rough, unfinished. I guess I would have had a slightly different approach without META's funding. I would have had to go through other channels that would have meant that a lot of it would have been cut down. So whenever I did start collaborating with META, they were fantastic because I had the time to sit down and really go through what I wanted to bring out through this story and bring them the script. And then I worked with Eleanor Thibault, who is part of their team. She recently got promoted to audio director, just now. She's amazing and she was fantastic to work with as well. She wrote the screenplay so I gave her the elements that I had and what I envisioned for the story itself. So I gave her what I had written and she moved everything around and wrote the dialogue in a way that we extended this experience to a big adventure.
[00:16:40.553] Kent Bye: And so as you were handing over these materials, had you already been doing like quill concept art on top of that as well as some of the rough sketches of the characters and the outline of the story?
[00:16:50.212] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, I did. So part of the pitch was that I had to put together a pitch deck and it contained some initial concept sketches and maybe color palettes as well that I was thinking of working with. So rough elements were there to begin with. And after the production timeline was set, then I could go back to those sketches and, you know, really expand on them and really spend some time bringing out the best out of all of these different elements.
[00:17:20.144] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear a little bit more context what was happening as you were entering into the community of Quill around 2019 or so. I just had an opportunity to talk to the folks behind Studio Syro and their whole process and so they were there from, you know, even earlier from when you came on board and They called it a niche within a niche within a niche. You have VR, then you have animation, then you have quill animation, so you have all these layers of this passionate community of makers and creators. I'd love to hear, as you're doing this Google search or some sort of search and discovering it, how you entered into the broader community to get bootstrapped into how to use this tool.
[00:17:57.392] Ruxandra Popescu: Right, that's very interesting that you brought it up because I often think back about that time, right, and I could have easily chosen something else to work with but Quill was definitely the most developed tool at the time and it had, even back then, it had the ability to let you animate even though it didn't have the animation timeline the way we have it right now. But I knew it was possible, so straight off the bat, while I was looking at immersive software that I would be implementing into my projects, I did come across other ones, you know, like Tilt Brush or... I forget them.
[00:18:31.891] Kent Bye: Gravity Sketch?
[00:18:33.015] Ruxandra Popescu: GravitySketch, yeah, as well. I wasn't so keen on GravitySketch at the time because the kind of style that I was looking for would have been just as difficult to achieve in GravitySketch as it would have been through what I was using at the time. AnimVR was another software. Yeah, so there were a lot of them floating about at the time, and I think that was about at the height of them being advertised online, so you could very easily see a lot of them. Quill, I think, was a little bit more difficult to find and it was just random luck that I came across quill art and it just seemed like an incredibly good tool to use. So I started doing that, I suppose, sort of separate from the community because I wasn't so aware of it. But I immediately found the Facebook group they had set up and I joined it and it just felt like such a helpful, inviting community. It was just amazing to be there, you know. And whenever the pandemic hit in 2020, they set up the Discord group and I immediately joined there as well. So much easier to share information and projects in a Discord server like that. I was just very keen on getting involved so I was doing all of this work on my own but I loved what was going on there and I was discovering a lot of things in my own work as well that I wanted to share and I just found such a wholesome incredible community and that's what made me so passionate about it as well and I started doing tutorials and exploring different uses for Quill as well and implementing it with different platforms and I always share that with anyone who would be interested and you know I do get messages from people who ask me how to maybe do something with Quill and different software so like in certain pipelines that maybe they're struggling with or they're interested in doing themselves you know and they don't know where to start from and you know it's work that I actually enjoy because it does bring us all together and oh we also yeah so I would have also worked with Goro Fujita to organize community events those were my favorite things to do because you know anyone whether they were new in the community or more experienced they could all join in right and then we could take all of this work created by different artists and like really make it work together. So that would have been a bit more technical on my part I suppose because I would have had to sit there and optimize things and you know you do work with limited resources whenever you export to the Quest so it would have been a different kind of approach. So what I would do I would make a template that would be quite simple and that would allow people to fill out that template with their own work and really put the focus on that kind of work, you know, and I was just fantastic. Anytime I have time off, I do like organizing those.
[00:21:21.461] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so when you were first getting into the community and found the tool, did you already have a VR headset at that point? And was a Quill player even launched? Were you able to see pieces that helped you make the decision? Or is this something that you were already had the VR headset and using it and knew that this is going to work? So yeah, I'd love to hear about the decision making process and what were some of the different things that tipped you over to go the direction of VR and Quill.
[00:21:44.070] Ruxandra Popescu: Yes, so the Quill Theater didn't exist at the time and it doesn't exist now anymore either. It only existed for a brief but glorious time. So we were all kind of working within our own spaces, kind of separate from each other. We wouldn't really see each other's work unless, you know, it was recorded and then shared within the community.
[00:22:02.226] Kent Bye: Like a CD video or something like that?
[00:22:04.658] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, like a 2D video, right? But it's not the same. And I think Quill Theatre actually launched pretty soon after I joined the community, so it would have been maybe midway through 2019, I think it was, if I remember that correctly. And that was great because immediately you could jump into people's work, you know, and it was such a completely different experience just from seeing it on a 2D flat screen, you know. It was just beautiful but that didn't exist whenever I decided to pick up Quill. What made me decide to pick it up was just the extensive toolkit that it had. So I didn't have a headset. I bought the headset specifically to be able to access Quill and I did start working on the original Rift because I wanted to feel comfortable and I had read that it was one of the most comfortable headsets out there and I didn't really know much about it at the time either, and I already knew about the original Rift. I had tried it at my university, so I was familiar with it. I knew it had the ability to let you work with the software, whether it be Quill or Tilt Brush or whatever had you at the time.
[00:23:13.032] Kent Bye: Is it even possible now to create a Quill piece with, like, a Quest 2, or do you have to author all these experiences on, like, a PC VR?
[00:23:23.616] Ruxandra Popescu: You do actually still need a computer. You can access Quill pieces on Quest 2 standalone, but you cannot create unless you do have a connection to a computer because the software itself is pretty bulky.
[00:23:37.921] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's what I had figured. So, okay. And so, what were some of the different Quill pieces that have come out that you feel like have been an inspiration for some of your work within Quill?
[00:23:50.136] Ruxandra Popescu: Oh gosh, okay. The work that's been coming out of Studio Syro has been absolutely influential. I will say that because they were the first ones to really go into Quill and make these extended sort of experiences and at the time, what was it, their first release was the Multiverse Bakery and it came out Just as I had finished the project that I was working on, The Lost Forest, and at that point I hadn't made a standalone VR piece like that, so in my project I just kind of implemented it in the workflow that I already had. As soon as the Quill Theater launched, I started experimenting with it and uploading to it as well. And after I've made a few uploads and a few tests, that's when the Multiverse Bakery came out. And I saw it and it just blew my mind. I was like, this is amazing. I should be striving to make more elaborate things as well. And I was trying to, and then the cool timeline came in. And that was just a complete game changer, right? As soon as it came in, it immediately enabled you to do animation so much quicker, so much easier. And because of that, I started doing more complex experiences too. So I would have put together these sort of VR rides, I guess I would call them, right? So you just start in a point and something transports you through different environments and there's things happening around you like little creatures or little creatures are going about their business or they're introducing you to something or they're helping you transition to the next space and just doing that really helped me understand, I don't want to say limitations of Quill but let's say the optimization requirements for uploading a more complex piece to Quill Theater as it was called then and now it is the virtual animation player.
[00:25:40.573] Kent Bye: Yeah, just getting some of the history from the folks from Studio Syro, they were talking about this real rich collaborative environment where they called the stacking of innovation where they would show something about how to do a tip or trick and then other people would share information and then So, yeah, I'd love to hear your own experience of being in this community innovation that is trying to discover all these new tips and tricks and techniques and styles that's been happening over the last three years. And you've had a bit of a front seat of watching that as these releases have been coming out. And so, yeah, I'd love to just hear your experience of this co-evolution of the grammar of storytelling within the context of Coil.
[00:26:19.926] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually have a specific channel dedicated to tips and tricks in our VR community where we post all of the things that we find whenever we work with Quill and maybe we come across, sometimes accidentally, over something that's quite useful. So I actually came across something like that when I started animating the dialogue on Pepitas. I can't remember how it happened, I just accidentally pressed two buttons at the same time and I've seen something that no one else has talked about and I realized immediately that it would help me animate dialogue much easier. So in Quill basically you start and stop the animation and that's how you would do it to watch back the dialogue that you would have been animating, right? but the thing is that whenever you do it over and over and over again sometimes it can mess up with the audio for a split second and that throws you off you know and you kind of have to start from the beginning so the button combination that I discovered it would just move you one frame at a time and depending on how long you would hold it it would move you very precisely throughout the timeline and that was for me it was mind-blowing and I'm still to this day not sure if that's a glitch or a feature. No one's confirmed if it's a glitch or a feature, but I'm just going to call it a feature. And I share that, you know, I found it useful in my work and I knew that other people were doing dialogue scenes and I asked and I shared about it and indeed, yeah, others weren't using this technique but, and I don't know if they are now, but I can tell you that for me it was incredibly useful having to animate, you know, three characters doing dialogue on a short timeline. It's a task and a half.
[00:28:01.686] Kent Bye: And what was it like for you to watch a series like Tales from Soda Island? And I'm just curious, because I just had an opportunity to watch through all the different episodes. And so but you were watching it as they were coming out. So yeah, I'd love to hear. Yeah, just to kind of be a part of the inner circle of folks who are kind of watching this unfold in real time. And yeah, just some of your reactions to that series.
[00:28:22.202] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, so I was eagerly waiting for each episode to come out and of course they couldn't talk about it, you know, so we didn't really know when they were going to be coming out. We knew they were in development all the time, that they were in development, but there were no exact dates, so you kind of knew about it maybe a few days in advance, you know, but I would always get excited for it, you know, and I would make sure that I have the free time to actually sit down as soon as it releases and watch it and which is fantastic I mean those episodes are incredible it's something that you can re-watch all the time and from the very beginning I've been a very big fan of their series and I've always said you know that they should get the proper recognition for it because they've been doing something amazing and I mean they've inspired me to do something very complex and fun as well that has a place in this world now.
[00:29:16.202] Kent Bye: First of all, I want to just sort of plus one that that series is incredible. I'm so glad it's being shown here. And hopefully in the conversation that I had with them will help just like bring awareness to the work to get more folks watching it and also to help grow the community because it does seem to be a really robust and powerful tool that I've seen a lot of storytelling and visual storytelling and just the blending of animation with 3D. And really pushing forward, I'd say the grammar of immersive storytelling. So yeah, it's been really great to see how Quill is in a lot of ways on the frontiers of the cultivation of that grammar of that storytelling language. So I'd love to hear any of your thoughts on that sort of grammar and what you've taken from other aspects of the grammar of like 2D animation, the grammar of storytelling and film, and how there may be unique twists of the grammar of spatial storytelling.
[00:30:04.587] Ruxandra Popescu: Yes, so whenever you create in VR and for VR, you always have to consider the fact that you cannot predict where the viewer is going to look, right? So you have to give visual cues for someone coming in, maybe even for the first time, because VR is still very new as a medium, right? So a lot of people would be coming into these experiences as their first VR experience, you know, so you cannot predict how they're gonna be reacting or exactly where they're gonna be looking. So you have to make it as easy as possible for them to feel comfortable and to not cause nausea, right? And there are things that make it easier. So for example, there's certain camera movements that you want to avoid, definitely. So in the before Quill times, It was believed that you could not make camera cuts in VR because it's not a thing that works. And I think it was Daniel Peixe in his piece where this was first done, where the camera sort of cuts. So his piece was, I suppose you could call it a storybook as well, a more comic book type of approach to storytelling. But he does have a few action scenes where the camera feels very dynamic like that. He was the first to do it, right? it showed that you could do it very successfully if you directed the viewer's eyes carefully and you curated the space in a way that it kind of forced you to look in a certain direction, right? And I guess otherwise the same cinematic techniques apply to VR as well, so I've explored a lot of that myself doing the Pepitos piece too, where I would have been thinking back at maybe animations that I would have watched before and you know, maybe camera movements that I would have liked or just the layout of something that I would have liked before and I would have wanted to implement into this piece as well. And I found to my surprise, you know, that it works very, very well. So you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you always consider the continuity. So whenever you go from one scene to another, the point of interest has to match, right? Just to make it easy and just because otherwise it doesn't look well put together. That's a pretty basic technique.
[00:32:15.350] Kent Bye: So yeah, I just I wanted to ask around the distribution aspect because when I was trying to watch the Tales from Soda Island I actually found it was like way more difficult than I thought it should have been to be able to just watch the series and you know, I ended up having to like after watching episode go back and kind of rediscover where the next one is and then create a playlist and then go back and manually click through I was like, wow, this is like a lot of friction to be able to like actually discover this as a project and actually Play the project all the way through and so I know that meta had been funding a lot of these different projects But then at the same time they had a lot of focus on gaming and then they went through the layoffs and everything So but yeah, I'd love to just hear any reflections you have on the distribution aspect that, you know, it's great that there's a player, but the discoverability and the friction that's involved still seems like a little bit higher than it needs to be. Maybe that's something that's being worked on or just any reflections you have on that distribution aspect of these Quill experiences.
[00:33:10.782] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, it's definitely something that all of us are pushing for, and we're all very vocal about it, that we want a little bit more ease and discoverability, because, you know, we have this amazing opportunity, right? MEDA has put their money into these very indie, I suppose, productions, right? With all of us, all of us artists, and what they've got back is some very unique experiences that don't exist in that kind of way anywhere, right? It would be a shame for all of that effort and all of those funds to have been used in vain, you know. So yeah, obviously we all want a little bit more ease and discoverability.
[00:33:49.555] Kent Bye: So what's next for Pepitos, the big saga?
[00:33:53.076] Ruxandra Popescu: So Pepitos will be moving into the game world soon. And when I say soon, I mean production will be starting soon. It's not a finished product.
[00:34:02.132] Kent Bye: So I guess that you have the finished quill piece. Was that going to be released as well? Or this sounds like a separate project or is it the same project?
[00:34:09.235] Ruxandra Popescu: Yes. So the project will be releasing soon. I'm hoping for close to the end of this year. What I've mentioned before, it's just an extension of the IP. Could I mention something? Because I did want to talk about it earlier when we were discussing Studio Saira, right? So we actually started working together as I was approaching the end of production with Pepitas. And I just wanted to say that it was just a fantastic work experience because It just embodied everything that I love about the animation industry at its best, which is collaboration. And I think they do that very well within their studio. It's something that I always aspire to do in all of my productions as well, wherever I go or whoever I choose to collaborate with. And I think it's super important that you do your talent justice and you do your best to collaborate with others.
[00:35:02.211] Kent Bye: So did you mention earlier that you're able to like export different aspects from a cool experience and actually put it into an Interactive game engine like unity or unreal engine and start to actually kind of develop it out further
[00:35:14.192] Ruxandra Popescu: Yeah, you absolutely can do that. So that's another one of my favorite things to do, to take quill scenes or quill bits and pieces and to bring them into other software, like Unity. You can do it with Unreal as well, Unity. Mozilla Hubs has a bit of a, well, it's a bit of a different approach, right, because you don't have so much interactivity there, but It does allow you to take your art onto a different platform where the interactivity is sort of in-built. So you don't really do much there. I suppose you don't have much control. But in Unity, yes. In VRChat as well. So to create VRChat worlds using Quill, basically you set it all up in Quill the way that you would like it. It's fantastic, right, because whenever you export to Unity, it allows you to instance objects, so the workflow is a little bit different whenever you would want to be building bigger worlds, but it's just as satisfying, and that allows you to open up, like you said, interactivity, right, because it allows you to bring that in. So you work with the APK, it has a lot of options, it has a lot of customizability, and it's great.
[00:36:19.545] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and animation and immersive storytelling might be, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:36:30.843] Ruxandra Popescu: I think VR is still, you know, maybe, I don't know if we can still call it the early days, but it definitely has so much more potential than what it's got so far. And I think that's just because of resistance and adoption, right? And I think that also might be maybe country specific, because you do go to other countries and they love the advancement of technology, they love the advancement of VR, they're hungry for it, they're keen for it, you know, so I guess it's just a matter of people seeing the beauty of it, right, because a lot of the resistance comes from maybe some bad press that they read, I don't know, a while ago and it kind of formed their idea of what VR is and whenever I would have talked to people who did not like VR and I sat down with them, you know, and I introduced them to the medium itself and those experiences that are coming out of Quill, you know, their opinions would immediately change, you know, they would see it as a completely different thing and I think that's where everything that's been coming out on the Quest 2, for example, I think that's where it's shining, you know, where you basically just need to bring the product to the people, right? You need to let them see what you have. That's it. It's just the barrier of entry should be a bit easier.
[00:37:48.111] Kent Bye: Yeah, and is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:37:56.645] Ruxandra Popescu: Well, I would like to say thank you for everyone who's watched the experience and who's watched all of the Quill experiences. I mean, a win for any of us is a win for all of us. That's how I only see it. And also any artist who's interested in joining our community and working with VR tools, you are very welcome and you will be helped and encouraged.
[00:38:17.262] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I'm really excited to see where this community continues to go, because I think that, you know, we have the virtual reality as a technology, but you also have the tool set and the ways of expressing yourself beyond the existing game engines, which are very driven by, like, an object-oriented 3D model, existing 3D pipelines. And I feel like that this is a whole VR-first and VR-native way of creating content that also has its own distribution platform and a potential to have this loop of new technology, new possibilities, new tools, artists creating, distributing it out to audiences, audiences watching it and creating this virtuous cycle of innovation and creativity that I've been seeing a lot more on the film festival circuit over the last number of years. So yeah, I'm excited to see where the tool continues to go and also to see how you've been using that more abstract way of communicating some of these different Aspects of your story within the pitos piece and yeah, just really enjoyed the the sweet story. That's well told as well So yeah, thanks again for taking the time to help break it all down.
[00:39:16.107] Ruxandra Popescu: Thank you so much Kent
[00:39:17.607] 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.
