Register

    “Dear Angelica” Breaks New VR Ground At Sundance

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments3160 Views
    • Image
    This image released by the Oculus Story Studio shows a scene from the virtual reality film, "Dear Angelica." The film is the first animated film experience created entirely in VR. (Oculus Story Studio via AP)

    By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer

    PARK CITY, Utah (AP) --

    The Sundance Film Festival is all about the shared experience of the theater, so imagine the surprise of realizing that one of the most moving films at this year's fest most moving films is something that can only be seen inside of an Oculus Rift headset.

    "Dear Angelica " is a 12-minute illustrated story about memory, movies and grief that premiered at the Festival last Friday. In the film, a girl, voiced by Mae Whitman, lies in bed writing a letter to Angelica (Geena Davis), a famous movie star who we also discover was her mother. We swirl around in her memories of Angelica, shifting between real life and images from movies she's been in and back again. The viewer spins around taking in all the environs with Angelica, whether she's in a shootout car chase or drifting into space. More than a few viewers shed some tears into the headset by the end.

    It's the first animated experience created entirely in VR.

    Writer and director Saschka Unseld, also the Oculus Story Studio Creative Director, wanted to tell a story about how both family and films help shape you as a person.

    Unseld, who'd wanted to do illustrative VR for a long time, had always struggled with the coldness of computer animation.

    "It's really hard to keep the human touch and texture in it," he said. "If something is directly illustrated, you feel more human touch, you feel more hand, you feel more character."

    It's why he settled on illustrator Wesley Allsbrook to create the hand painted images. They had a coder develop a custom system so that she could draw directly into the program.

    "In VR it's important to counter that tech coldness with artistry and the human touch," Unseld said.

    "Dear Angelica" is already available for free for those who have Oculus headsets. For everyone else, it'll be a little more difficult to see, but not impossible.

    "It's important to us to always be in places like Sundance or Tribeca or other place where we can show these things to people who haven't had interesting VR experiences yet," Unseld said. "It's still early times and there's a lot of preconceptions about what VR is and isn't."

    "Dear Angelica" proves that VR is not just a cool immersive experience — it's also art form that's capable of pulling at your heartstrings.

    Category:News
    Tags:Dear AngelicaOculus Story StudioSaschka UnseldSundance

    Craig Henighan Sounds Off On “Deadpool & Wolverine”

    Friday, November 15, 2024

    Hollywood lore has it that character actor Edmund Gwenn--while on his deathbed--quipped, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

    The second part of that darkly witty utterance remains all too true today as Craig Henighan--a Best Achievement in Sound Mixing Oscar nominee in 2019 for Roma--can attest in that he had to grapple with the sonic of being comic for this year’s box office hit, Deadpool & Wolverine (20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios).

    The degree of inherent difficulty was ramped up even further because Deadpool & Wolverine had to seamlessly bring together high action-adventure exploits with moments and dialogue that tickled the funny bone. There’s a mesh of humorous banter--a staple of the franchise--along with major spectacle replete with explosions, fights, an impactful score and off-the-wall musical numbers.

    Henighan explained that among the prime challenges for him from a sound perspective was having to make sure every joke landed within the construct of a superhero film. The tendency for a tentpole movie of this variety, he noted, is to gravitate towards big, loud audio spanning music, dialogue and sound effects. But the unique comedic element of Deadpool & Wolverine necessitated that re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Henighan strike a delicate balance. “You need to get out of the way for the comedy,” he related. The jokes in a superhero film become “a real dance” as Henighan had to establish a rhythm that did justice to both the comedy and the action as the narrative moves back and forth between them--and sometimes the funny and the high energy, high decibel superhero dynamic unfold simultaneously in a scene or sequence. The “sonic fabric” has to... Read More

    MySHOOT Profiles


    Add A Comment