Blue Zoo: Mind over matter
3D World journeys into uncharted territory with Blue Zoo and their new VR short film, The Beast
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The award-winning animation studio shares the details on their unique and inspiring VR short film
BAFTA award-winning London animation studio Blue Zoo recently teamed up with Oculus and Facebook Reality Labs to create The Beast, the new VR short film for the Oculus Quest and Rift. The film is the first Blue Zoo has created entirely in Quill VR. A story of extraordinary willpower in the face of a challenging journey, The Beast follows a lone cyclist powering up the side of a giant snow-capped mountain.
“The creative was inspired by the saying ‘mind over matter’,” says co-director Grant Berry, explaining The Beast’s origins. “It’s about trying to overcome your demons, and adventurers trying to conquer their dreams.
We liked the idea of allowing viewers to fill the gaps, leaving them to conclude the story for themselves. We felt the VR experience really lent itself to putting the viewer at the heart of the storm and inside the mind of the cyclist as he faces challenges and questions himself.”
To find out more about the making of The Beast, 3D World spoke to Blue Zoo’s Dane Winn, an experienced 3D generalist who co-directed with Berry.
How did you get to grips with working in Quill?
We worked with talented artist Michal Firkowski to bring the idea to life in Quill. The storytelling process took some time to figure out; we began with traditional storyboards and animatics, then dabbled with 360 videos of those animatics and some previz in Maya. Working with familiar tools to plan and edit was a good start, but so much changed once we got into virtual reality.
Michal started off loosely recreating the boards in a 3D layout, and we suddenly got a lot of answers to things we were unsure about in ways that we just couldn’t visualise before. Goro Fujita was on hand to advise us with his in-depth knowledge. One of the big lessons was to think about it less like film and more like immersive theatre. We started thinking a bit differently about how to stage the action and lead the eye, with a
real focus on scale and spatial awareness, and the piece gradually took shape.
How did working in virtual reality change things?
VR as a medium is brand new, it’s fresh out the box and artists have only really scratched the surface with what this new toolset can do. We set out to make something that felt cinematic and drew on the understanding of film grammar we knew, but as we developed the different shots, we started to find new ways to tell action and reveal information.
We thought about sounds in new ways too; where they are placed and how you react to them. The viewer is the camera
“WE THOUGHT OF IT LESS LIKE FILM AND MORE LIKE IMMERSIVE THEATRE” Dane Winn, The Beast co-director, Blue Zoo
now, so this new layer of filmmaking really opened up whole new possibilities in terms of how to communicate.
How did you make the experience as immersive as possible?
We tried to keep shots long and avoid cutting so the viewer is along for the ride and has time to take things in. We had a sort of guide for the action and where we wanted the viewer to look, but we didn’t want to rely on that, so as events occur, we tried to make sure there was something at all angles that would reinforce it or guide you back to where you should look. We played with sound quite a bit. Initially,
there was no voice-over, but our sound designer Paul Gorman suggested that it would support the story and once we added it and could hear his voice over our shoulder, it felt very immersive and personal, which got us excited.
There’s a scene where we fall through the ground and reach an empty void with floating eyes that surround us. That was a chance to play with space a bit more and how detached you can feel when you’re in control of the camera. It was a lot of fun to experiment and see where it led.
What were the most challenging aspects of The Beast to realise?
One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to show the story we wanted. We had an idea, but things changed a lot once we got into the space and timings evolved. We started off slowing things down to spend time in the space, then after 50 viewings, started speeding things up because it felt like we were dragging shots out. It’s a very new medium to us so it felt like we were in the honeymoon stage for a while, but once we got used to it we could hone in on what was most important. We had beautiful designs by Grant Berry and they worked really well in Quill, but Quill’s draw call cap to ensure optimal playback on the Oculus Quest meant we had to tailor our designs for peak performance on the VR headset. We had to come up with solutions to get as much of that detail in and use more smoke and mirrors to cut the fat where we could. It took a lot of incrementation before we got a good balance.
Why should the CG art community at large be excited about Quill?
It breaks a lot of barriers! Once you get to grips with the toolset and drawing in 3D space, you suddenly find you can tell stories with characters and cameras in ways that would take weeks or months with a traditional 3D pipeline. Using Quill you can draw characters and bring them to life quickly without elaborate rigging or extensive knowledge of UV mapping, and you get a lovely hand-drawn charm because it is drawn by hand, just not on paper. It is constantly evolving with new tools and you can export your work back into a 3D program on your desktop and continue working it up or rendering it more traditionally if you choose.
Will Blue Zoo look to continue pushing boundaries with VR?
Yes, I think so. Figuring out how to use VR and what projects it is right for is a huge part of how we use it going forward. Using it as a tool for our traditional pipeline is something that interests me a lot, because of the speed you can work. I think we’ll be doing more VR projects as clients start to take more interest and now that the Oculus Quest 2 is so affordable, it could become much more mainstream. I certainly hope we keep exploring and I get the chance to work with it in future.
“WE FELT THE VR EXPERIENCE REALLY LENT ITSELF TO PUTTING THE VIEWER AT THE HEART OF THE STORM” Grant Berry, The Beast co-director, Blue Zoo