Disney premiered the VR short Myth: A Frozen Tale at the November 7th, 2019 world premiere of Frozen II at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and the creative team came to Park City during Sundance 2020 to privately screen it to industry professionals. Last year in 2019, they also rented out a space on Main Street in order to to show the first VR short Cycles, which I had a chance to see and interview the director Jeff Gipson and technical director of Jose Gomez.
Back again this year, Gipson and Gomez brought on key collaborator Brittney Lee, who headed up the amazing production design on this project. Lee would paint scenes in 2D, and then pass it along to the VR team, who would digitize the assets and then spatialize the silhouetted billboards throughout a scene creating an immersive 2.5-dimensional feel. They talk about using a Quill artist for environmental design prototyping, and so there seems to already be some workflows for helping to translate 2D representation to VR and vice versa.
The end result is a production design that provides a sort of magical realism that feels like you’re walking into a Disney Animation world. This type of billboarded silhouetted aesthetic was also used in other pieces at Sundance New Frontier such as Book of Distance, and it provides a great way for 2D illustration artists to get involved with environmental design, especially when you’re not locomoting across large distances in a scene which helps to preserve that 3D illusion without seeing behind the flat 2D billboard assets.
Disney’s first VR short Cycles was an emotionally, heart-wrenching, character-driven story of nostalgia, aging, death, loss, and grieving. Myth: A Frozen Tale was more of a story of interconnectivity, and how an ecosystem of elements interacts with each other. The bulk of this story all took place within the context of a single environment that had the elements of earth, air, fire, and water interact with corresponding elemental characters from Frozen II as well as with the environment. So while the emotional impact of this VR experiment wasn’t nearly as impactful as Cycles, Disney is streamlining their production pipeline and experimenting with expanding narratives beyond the typical character-driven arcs.
This is too brief of an experiment to judge how successful these types of environmentally-driven stories will end up being, but it’s clear that they design teams are seeing a lot of advantages to moving to a real-time production pipeline. After Sundance, on February 20th, The ILMxLab released some behind the scenes footage of the virtual production tools used on Disney-produced The Mandalorian.
VR being used in virtual production is one of the early wins for Hollywood productions and animation teams, but the lack of a critical mass market diffusion of VR technologies is holding up viable distribution plays. Disney’s first VR piece Cycles was recently converted from VR to 2D to be distributed on Disney+. Myth: A Frozen Tale starts to use more of the unique affordances of VR, which will make it harder to do a straight port to 2D. This is good because it starts to get one of the major streaming players to start to seriously consider their own virtual reality distribution strategies. Some of these early experiments have likely started more of these internal discussions as they start to think about the continued evolution and diffusion of these immersive platforms.
It’s still obviously early days, but I’m looking forward to more immersive storytelling experimentation and innovation for distributing these experiences.
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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. So continuing on in my series of looking at some of the immersive storytelling innovations coming out of Sundance 2020. Today's interview is actually with an experience that was not showing at Sundance. Disney actually rented out a whole place to be able to show their latest virtual reality experience. They did something very similar last year for Cycles. which I had a chance to interview both the director and technical director, um, Jeff Gibson and Jose Gomez. And right around that same time, when they were showing it, they were starting production on the experience that they're showing this year during Sundance and park city. They were showing a myth, a frozen tail. So it was essentially a virtual reality experience that was debuted at the frozen to premiere, which was happening on November 7th, the world premiere that was happening at the Dolby theater in Hollywood. They actually were showing the virtual reality experience there for the first time. And so they brought it out to Sundance and had a lot of different private meetings to be able to show it around to different folks as well. So I was able to go and see it and talk to the creators again, and to just get a little bit more insight into their experiential design process and to unpack what they were able to create there, which was a really beautiful production design, collaborating with a production artist, and just had a really beautiful aesthetic that they were able to create with this piece called A Myth, A Frozen Tale. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Jeff, Jose, and Brittany happened on Sunday, January 26th, 2020 during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:44.066] Jeff Gibson: My name is Jeff Gibson. I directed Myth of Frozen Tale as well as Cycles, Disney animations, VR short films.
[00:01:49.911] Jose Gomez: I'm Jose Gomez. I'm software engineer at Disney animation and I'm the VR AR lead.
[00:01:55.398] Brittney Lee: I'm Brittany Lee, and I was the production designer on Myth of Frozen Tale.
[00:01:59.421] Kent Bye: Great. So I'm wondering if you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the immersive space.
[00:02:07.073] Jeff Gibson: So I started at Disney Animation in 2013. I was a lighting artist on Frozen and worked on all the feature films up to Ralph 2, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and then pitched the idea of directing a VR short film at Disney Animation. And then after that, Jan Lee was interested in exploring the world of Frozen. And so I started working on Myth of Frozen Tale about this time last year. And here we are again.
[00:02:29.761] Jose Gomez: Yeah, I mean, I'm software engineer. We introduced ourselves last year in your podcast, too. But yeah, I've been doing virtual production and working with VR for the last four years. First, we were doing internal tools for our artists. And then when Jeff pitch cycles, I jump in to help him. And we've been in this like two, three years working on software for VR.
[00:02:53.766] Brittney Lee: And I'm kind of new to this. I've been at Disney Animation for about 10 years doing visual development, working on Frozen and Frozen 2, and so Jeff and Nick came to our department to pitch Myth to the team, and the pitch of something being evocative of a storybook or a pop-up book that might have silhouettes was very compelling to me, and I would like to be inside of a space like that, so I thought that it would be a good chance to try something new, and I knew nothing, so these guys helped me along the way.
[00:03:24.385] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give the pitch. What was the pitch that you gave to kind of describe what this experience would be?
[00:03:31.190] Jeff Gibson: So it was basically thinking about storybooks and bedtime stories. Specifically a bedtime story my family told me growing up and it's a story. My family lived about a day's horse ride out of Kansas City, Missouri and it was the 1860s. and we owned a ranch and we'd do chores on the ranch. My great-great-grandpa, you know, it was how we made our living. And so after chores, after working on the ranch, they'd go and play this river. And so my great-great-great-grandfather and his friend go down to this river, they're hanging out, and it was still the Wild West then. So if you saw two people on the distance, there was a hesitance to them. So sure enough, they see two riders out in the distance, and these riders come closer and closer. And they're 10-year-old young boys, and they're like, oh my gosh, holy crap. So they go and hide in the willows. And sure enough, the riders come closer and closer, and they come over to where the boys had their horses tied. And the guys take off their saddles, bridle up, take over the other saddles, and take off with my family's horses and ride off. And the boys are just scared. And so they run over, and they actually see that the horses are better. They've been ridden hard, but they're better horses. And there's also a note that says, thanks for the horses, boys. JJ. And the only J.J. around Kansas City at that time was Jesse James. And I just remember being told that story as a young boy before bed, and just how I felt. This thing of legends and myths. And so when I watched Frozen II, those elemental spirits were something that was really powerful. And so I almost pitched it as a, if you grew up in Arendelle, you were told this bedtime story about these spirits. And it's such a cool thing because bedtime stories have the quality of where you're told this, you imagine what happens. You make your own version of it. And VR has that capability to where you can dive into this world, this storybook world and that's where kind of Brittany came in and her pop-up inspired artwork and these graphic shapes and so that's kind of how the pitch was with some images and things too but
[00:05:10.747] Kent Bye: Nice, let's make that. So yeah, so you, for the past year, have been working on this. And I think the visual aesthetic, I think, is probably one of the most striking things of this experience, because it is so unique from what else I see out in the virtual reality world. I mean, I'm starting to see more and more people taking a little bit more of an illustrative 2D, these billboards, that you start to get a spatial experience of that. but just the colors and the shapes and everything. Maybe you could just talk about your design process and what was it like to go from maybe working in 2D mediums and starting to work into this spatial medium.
[00:05:42.395] Brittney Lee: Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, we were looking at a lot of silhouetted pieces and sort of trying to figure out where we wanted to go stylistically. And Frozen, which I'd been immersed in for a long time, was very much inspired by artwork by Evan Earle and Mary Blair, which is very graphic and flat. And so I guess we sort of realized initially right away that there was this desire to do something that had a little bit more of a compressed, not fully 3D, not fully realized forest to go into and how would we chase that and how would it feel in a VR space and so that was something that we tested in artwork so basically I did a bunch of paintings and the team went and tried to build the paintings based on what was happening in the paintings and spatially placing things where we thought it would look right and we ended up changing our minds a bit about how we wanted to feel in the space and how we wanted to build it around the viewer to make it a forest and we ultimately came to the decision of that in this space in the forest versus the space that you see in the cabin in the beginning we wanted it to have a handmade feel and so it is a little bit, the scales are brought down a little bit from what we had initially been chasing and that we did compress things based on layers like I would compose a piece that's made out of cut paper and so, but it's sort of a hybrid of what we would normally do in 3D versus a 2D piece of artwork.
[00:07:17.238] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that comes to mind is the difference between, like, architecture that is doing that spatial design in, like, a 2D painting is that you have a perspective painting and that you're sort of flattening it. But here it's almost like you're taking those objects and shapes and putting them into that spatialized space. And it feels like, sounds like there's a little bit of a dialogue between you doing that concept art and then doing the spatialization. So were you doing, like, 2D just paintings and then they would spatialize it?
[00:07:42.967] Brittney Lee: Yeah, I was doing paintings and we would get a sort of rough model of what the paintings looked like in very sort of bare bones of, okay, does this space feel like it should? And then we'd go in in VR and look at it and see whether or not it evoked the feelings of the paintings and we would, Jeff and I, would get in the headset at the same time and we'd sort of do this most like scouting of the set where we would pull things closer, pull things farther away, build trees and try to almost in this way like set design build the viewing space so that we had windows to view through and sort of try to anticipate where the audience would want to look and engineer the whole experience of tracking the viewer's gaze throughout the piece and yeah it was iterative constantly we would build and scrap and build and scrap and and pull in and pull out and try to get to the sweet spot and ultimately I think we did at least for us that was what we were feeling
[00:08:46.662] Jose Gomez: I think also it's worth to mention that it was also a third part which was the story, right? How they were designing for the story, so creating these spaces where the story was going to take place, almost like three little stages inside. So it was the art, it was the technology and the story all together.
[00:09:04.610] Kent Bye: Yeah, because there's these four different pillars representing the four elements of the air, fire, water, and earth, and so maybe you could talk a bit about how to translate these elemental qualities into a spatialized, not only environment, but also characters and story.
[00:09:20.216] Jeff Gibson: So we really leaned heavily on the design of these characters that are in Frozen 2. So all those characters, models, we started as a base from the feature model and then had to optimize and do our own look and our own take to fit into this stylized world. But I think what's great about those characters is they have this aspect of the fire trail with the salamander or Gale, the way the wind and the ribbons kind of help guide you in VR and almost play within that space. What's cool about them too is their scale. The horse is real scale of this majestic horse. The earth giants are huge and the salamander is tiny so it's cool that they have this varying scale that really is fun to work with in VR.
[00:09:56.647] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the other things that I noticed as I was watching this is from cycles last year there was things that I didn't notice originally but then notice this time like this time I was paying more attention to the clothes and just how fluid it looks but also the fact that most of the animation that you producing a 2d movie is focusing on rendering and but here you're doing more real-time, so you have to maybe do a little bit more real-time graphics and shaders and stuff like that. And I noticed specifically on the horse that there was a lot of flair that was like, oh, well, that's something that's probably, you know, that has to run in real-time, and it still has to, like, be able to be optimized and run at that speed, but also have a certain look and feel and be able to not drop frames. So maybe you could talk a bit about that process of how you approach that in terms of looking at the technological limitations of real-time versus the rendered. and then working with the artists to kind of come up with that aesthetic?
[00:10:45.077] Jose Gomez: Yeah, I mean, it's all that you have said. Basically, we decided on the look. It was never like, oh, let's go for this look because it will be easier, faster, because it wasn't easier. But we have really great artists at Disney. And I mean, in terms of the textures, we were working with Mitch Snerry and Ian Butterfield. And they did an amazing job. They were looking into the graphical and trying to strip whatever is not that are important, I mean they are used to work with like super high quality assets for our movies, and here it was like let's take the essence, let's take what is important. Then also for the forest we have Mike Anderson, our head of environments, and he designed this beautiful way of having like standard textures. I don't know if, I mean standard for our movie, I don't know if you notice that each element has its own color, so we work on a way that we can affect the color of the full stage without having to do it with lights which are expensive in VR so we also have Ed Robbins which is our head of characters he did an excellent job optimizing all the assets and so it's a team of people and just mentioning people I want to say also Ian Cooney is our head of effects and they were also designing this stylized effect They are super heavy, so we were all the time trying to marry design, the story, the technology, so working all together. I think one important thing she hinted before is the way that we can work in real time, which is very different to how we work in our movies, where we do something, then we have a review. then the next day we do changes and then the next day we have another review. Here we were working real-time so they were doing reviews and we were using Unreal Engine and it has some capabilities to do multi-user sessions so we were in the same set. They both were in VR with a laser pointer like saying I want these three bigger or shorter and then we had an artist in a station doing those changes in real time so obviously the engine helped us a lot and also having great people made it possible.
[00:12:48.255] Kent Bye: So in other words you're doing some virtual production within VR using some of the workflow that could be used for other experiences as well.
[00:12:55.324] Jose Gomez: Yes and that's the goal I mean we are Obviously experimenting and we are trying to see what VR means for storytelling. We try to finish a product, this is not an experiment. I mean, we are experimenting and the same way all the techniques that we are experimenting, we are trying to take it to our movies. So we come from the movies, we do these things and then we hope to bring back this technology to the movies that we are producing currently.
[00:13:21.459] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm wondering if you two could talk about this dialogue between the story and the spatial design, the production design, because you are in a site-specific scene. It's one place that is changing and evolving with characters moving through it. So maybe you could talk about this dialogue between the story elements and how to sort of represent that spatially and lay everything out.
[00:13:41.997] Jeff Gibson: So the story's all about the balance of all these elements and how they affect one another. So for me, I wanted it to be one long shot. So that environment had to be designed in a way that we could compose each story moment, but also have it transform with that balance. So when the forest fire happens, there's a rain that comes down. And just having these colors, so Brittany designed a beautiful color palette that kind of helps hit those story beats, but even also the score was a big piece. When I pitched this, another big part of it was how can we bring some of the Disney heritage, some of like Fantasia, into this where it's very musically driven. So each one of these characters has its own piece of music. And our composer, Joe Trapanese, actually came on right when Brittany did. And our animators had score to actually animate to, which rarely happens when we work on a feature, but this was a cool kind of process of how do we bring in that heritage, as well as 2D animation. There's a lot of 2D animation that really lent itself to Brittany's stylizing, graphic, kind of shape language. And so it was a really good workflow between all of us, all on top of each other, and it was nice being real-time, really iterative, fast, because we're on such a tight schedule.
[00:14:41.861] Brittney Lee: Jeff made it very easy and in the initial even pitch phase right when I came on had the story pretty well laid out and had at that point we had Josie Trinidad had boards, storyboards of the piece and sort of really honed in on the fact that we were illustrating that the each spirit had two sides and that there needed to be a balance with all of them and so when we entered in to the project and started figuring out the production design it was really easy because I had those parameters and those rules of okay we need to see both sides of the elements and they need to transition into one another and so basically it was really a conversation of which way are they moving through the space, what do they need to lead into and what visual cues do we need to see in order to make that happen and sometimes we had to come up with creative solves later in the process because we would go in and we would see oh, there's a gap here where we don't necessarily know where to look for a second or two. So we would pull some things in, some effects or a little bit more of Gale, the wind spirit here or there. But it was really pretty organic the way that it flowed and so that let me have time to play on what they would look like and how to visualize something that's a little bit of a hybrid and get time to spend with the 2D artists who were doing all of the effects and sort of make it all sing together. So yeah, it just felt like it sort of naturally grew based on the foundation that was there.
[00:16:08.027] Jeff Gibson: And we did a lot of quill storyboarding as well. We did that in cycles and that was a really cool technique for us to quickly see how the flow was, what the proximity of the characters was, how we would lead the audience around the space. And then we also did some quill vis-dev pieces. So based on Brittany's paintings, Danny Pesce, our quill artist, would come in and he would do some of these paintings and it was an early experiment of how do we flatten out a space and I think we learned there's this kind of dark proscenium almost like a stage around us in this film and that was a discovery from some of the Quill paintings. We felt like before we had that the space seemed so vast but we wanted it to almost feel a little bit intimate so you've got that canopy of trees over you that's kind of this black silhouetted forest and so that came about by just early experiments and testing so it was a cool process.
[00:16:51.532] Kent Bye: Yeah, the actual pieces of art, the thing that I was noticing when I was watching it was there's an abstraction or simplification, you know, it's not trying to be photorealistic in any way, but maybe you could talk about that process of trying to capture the essence of a shape.
[00:17:05.585] Brittney Lee: Well, we were really inspired, I was really inspired early on by the silhouette inspirations, early animation, silhouetted animations, and sort of stage tricks, you know. We don't often see fully executed water in a stage show, so what do we do instead? Oh, we use fabric. And so those kind of cues that you don't necessarily have to do, the fully rendered, fully realistic thing in order for it to evoke the feeling of water, we definitely use that with with the Nox mane. It's more of a piece of fabric than it is real water. So we kind of wanted to push as hard as we could on things like that. We did it with the fire where they're kind of gels. There's no real fully 3D executed fire in the piece. And we wanted to keep all of those elements consistent throughout. So we were trying to find creative solves for each of the four spirits in order for them to all feel of the same world but not quite our world and not quite the world of Arendelle to hopefully tell the viewer you're in this fairytale mythic space.
[00:18:10.462] Jose Gomez: Something that is really cool in that world is, I mean, we are so lucky to work at Disney Animation that we could pull some of the effects animators, the 2D animators that have been working forever at Disney. And I mean, I hope you notice there is a lot of 2D effects and 2D drawings with that Disney magic. And it was great that we could connect the traditional with a new technology.
[00:18:32.758] Kent Bye: Yeah, the last scene where I'm looking out the window and there's these lights coming in, I really noticed that there's a quality of that light that seemed different than what I'm used to seeing. So maybe you could just talk a bit about the lighting considerations and especially that scene of how to create that effect.
[00:18:48.526] Jeff Gibson: Yeah, so part of that was kind of grounding you or like a call to action in a way. There's, you know, the fifth spirit and I don't want to give away the film, but some of that was to play back on the viewer. And so the idea with the Northern Lights is all the four colors are represented in those Northern Lights that represent those four spirits that we saw throughout the story. But then having that light come through you and past you, you know, this kind of volumetric magic is something that was a challenge because that was one of the things I really fought for because it was really difficult to produce. But our effects artist, Debbie Carlson, yeah, she's amazing. She actually did the effect, but it was very heavy and hard to run. And I had to arm wrestle with Jose a bit to get it to go.
[00:19:27.397] Kent Bye: Yeah, I haven't seen anything like that. So congratulations for pulling that. It's probably a good reason why I haven't seen much rainbow color light like that. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling and what it might be able to enable?
[00:19:43.517] Brittney Lee: Oh, really? Me first? Thank you so much. I mean, coming into this not having really any experience working in VR, I see so much value even just to just inform the pipeline, inform the way that we work on movies, because we do work so linearly and we work sort of here's a stage, here's a stage, here's a stage, but this was a way of working that allowed us to be more collaborative, creative for a longer period of time and really figure out the things that we wanted to have in the piece. and also bring all of the elements of the piece to the same level of quality at the same time, which sometimes we don't have the opportunity to do on a film based on timeline. So, I mean, I see tons of potential and I have no idea where it will go because I feel like there are so many different outlets for using real-time engines and VR to inform how we make films.
[00:20:37.785] Jeff Gibson: I think one thing that I love about it is it brings audiences with our characters or into our worlds. And I think that's what's really exciting for us as a studio and why our executives are so curious and fascinated about this technology is that thinking about all of our characters. And every time we show Myth or one of the films to someone who's never been in VR, they get so excited. And there's this, like, wow, I'm in this world with these characters. And just thinking about that, of how special it is to have that experience. And I'm not sure where the future goes, but it's cool.
[00:21:07.972] Jose Gomez: Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked before, I think for sure all the tools that we can make to make our movies will really improve with this technology. I also like how VR takes you to different places and there's always this debate like, oh, AR will replace VR. I think they are totally different. I think VR is here to stay and just the possibility to take you somewhere else. I mean, you're here in Park City, you put the headset in, in two minutes you are in this magical forest. It doesn't matter where you are. So I think that possibility of being somewhere totally different, where you can bend the rules, I mean, it doesn't have to have the physical rules. I think there's so many things to discover in VR that I'm really looking forward.
[00:21:51.130] Kent Bye: And just one quick follow-up, just to wrap up things, because this is a piece, you're showing it here at Sundance, it sounds like you were showing it at the different premieres and showings, more of a location-based type of experience, and you have Disney Plus that just launched for the last year, so I'm just curious, like, where you showed it and what future plans may be for people to potentially see it?
[00:22:11.117] Jeff Gibson: So we premiered Myth of Frozen Tale with Frozen 2 at Dolby Theatre in Hollywood when the film came out. And we've showed it at various other events, including here at Sundance. But now we're looking forward to more events, but also hopefully working on some things to where people will be able to download this and have it at home. But even Cycles now, the flat version of Cycles is now on Disney+, which is amazing. It launched a couple days ago. So maybe down the line, Myth will be on that. But right now, focusing on how do we get this VR piece out to a broad audience. More to come, hopefully, soon.
[00:22:40.838] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, for me, as covering the space, I'm just happy to see that Disney is continuing to push the technology forward. There's lots of virtual production uses and really enjoyed the story and looking forward to what comes next. So thank you all for joining me today. So thank you.
[00:22:52.245] Jeff Gibson: Thank you so much.
[00:22:53.366] Kent Bye: Thank you so much.
[00:22:54.746] Jeff Gibson: Thanks.
[00:22:56.347] Kent Bye: So that was Jeff Gibson. He's the director of Myth, A Frozen Tale, as well as Cycles. And Jose Gomez, he's a software engineer and the VR AR lead. And then Brittany Lee, she's the production designer on Myth, A Frozen Tale. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, first, I think it's amazing that Disney is continue to iterate and create different virtual reality experiences because Jose is working on a lot of their virtual production tools. Just recently, there was a video that came out. with the virtual production that was going on in Mandalorian in collaboration with the team at IOMLX Lab and all sorts of other folks. They have this whole 207 degree immersive LED stage. Just absolutely amazing what they were able to do in terms of the virtual production behind the scenes of the Mandalorian. Not sure if Jose is directly involved with that initiative at all, because that's like the IMLX lab. But I know Disney in general has been using virtual reality to be able to think about how to change their production pipeline, even on some of the animation films that they were doing here. And so just working with the team that was working on Frozen 2 and to be able to produce a companion piece that was going to be showing at the premiere of Frozen 2, which happened on November 7th. At this point too, they don't necessarily have a good distribution mechanism for the virtual reality experiences, which is good that they're creating them. Cause it's like creating this demand. Okay. Like now what do we do with these and how do we get them out to our audience? What they did do with cycles, which was the premier that they had last year is they actually created a 2d version of that and just recently came out on Disney plus. So whether or not they're going to do the same thing on this experience, I think there's something to be said where you're actually immersed into this type of experience. You know, when I think about this compared to cycles, cycles I came out of and I was just like crying. It was so emotionally moving, such a powerful story, so intimate, just really beautifully told. When I came out of this experience, my first reaction was, wow, that looked amazing. but it wasn't the same emotional pull as a story. You know, I think it was still doing different innovations, but it was more of the technological innovations that I was more interested in rather than feeling deeply connected to the story that was being told. Now that said, and when I hear the pitch from Jeff and hear what he was trying to do, I really feel like he was trying to, you know, give you the sense of like, this would be the different types of myths that were being told within this world of the frozen two. And, you know, they were also trying to tell the story with you standing in one spot and then having all of these things that are happening and changing and evolving through this environment. But the production design I think was absolutely beautiful and had a lot of really great innovations. It sounds like what they were doing with Brittany Lee, she would go off and she would paint a scene and then they would take those paintings and then convert them into these 2D assets and then kind of space them out into the world where it had like this illustration effect. So it felt like kind of like this 2.5D world in some sense where You still got this sense of spatial relationships of these objects relative to each other. And you still had these parallax effects and whatnot, but it still felt like this illustrative world that felt abstracted out in the sense that it did feel like coming from Disney animation team. It does have that artistic stylization more. It just looks like you're stepping into a Disney world of an animation scene rather than, you know, in a photorealistic world, which I think actually worked super well and has a great aesthetic and. I loved just hearing about their production process and kind of unpacking their workflow and to hear how they would bring out a Quill artist and do Quill storyboarding. And then Quill was very much intimately integrated into their visual development process. And, you know, they were learning different things about the proscenium and how to, you know, spatialize things out and trying to capture the essence of the shape and use this silhouetted inspiration for both Brittany and the creation and the translation of this into the virtual reality environment. So because this was one scene with lots of things unfolding, they would have different characters come in and out. It felt a little bit like a dream, to be honest, just like, you know, you're kind of watching these different scenes unfold. You know, you see the family at the beginning and the end, but there wasn't necessarily like a singular character that you're following, but it's really trying to give you this sense of how this whole world is connected and how you go from one element to the next element and trying to feel this holistic interconnection between The elements and the world around you and how they're all related to each other which I think in terms of storytelling That's like a whole other different type of story to be told but I think in virtual reality They're able to convey that in a way that I think would be lost if you were just watched a 2d version But at the same time it feels like a little bit of a different storytelling mode and so how do you create this sense of tension and release and connection to these different characters and and you know, how can you project yourself into the story in different ways? I think from that it felt like more of me standing in the world and watching this spectacle unfold around me and to see how they're able to tie together all these different parts of this environment architecturally and to really space that out in specific ways and how to focus my attention different ways. And so I think there's a lot of things from more the architectural and production design aspect in that sense that I think were interesting for folks generally if you do get a chance to see this and if it does get out there somehow to kind of have this experience and see what you pay attention to and then especially at the end they had this like light that was coming through and it's all about focusing on you as an individual and try to integrate all these different elements within yourself and just to have the light have this volumetric colors like a rainbow within one light that's coming through. I've never seen that in my life. It's just like kind of, kind of like physically impossible in some ways to be able to see how you have a light that's diffused out. But you know, within the horizontal breakdown of the light, you have these different colors. So it was just like a really amazing effect. And I'm glad that they put in the extra effort to be able to actually pull that off. So again, I'm glad that Disney is continuing to push forward and I hope that they're already working on their next virtual reality experience so that we can see at next year's Sundance, but just to see how they're continuing to experiment and push together their production pipeline and to get different creatives involved in this creative process. I know Bruce Wright at SIGGRAPH was debuting an experience that he was working on. And so they've been using both SIGGRAPH as well as Sundance to be able to premiere different experiments of. of virtual reality animation. So hope to see that they're continuing to push forward. And, you know, there's lots of stuff on the virtual production side that haven't necessarily been talked about a lot either, but I know that Jose has been working on that and you start to get a little bit of a glimpse of where they're going in terms of, you know, having these virtual reality technologies completely revolutionize how TV shows like The Mandalorian are produced. And so, yeah, I think the virtual reality in terms of the production process is going to continue to have a huge impact and change the way that a lot of these different types of experiences are created. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.