Award-winning virtual reality (VR) studio and distributor Wevr has collaborated with Tippett Studio on the release of Mad God, a VR stop motion animation that originally premiered at the Kaleidoscope World Tour earlier this year.
This is a VR version of Tippett’s 2013 short film Mad God, a dystopian subterranean netherworld featuring delightfully grotesque characters.
In a Wevr blog post Mike Breymann of Kaleidoscope VR explained about the projects creation: “I really liked the concept of bringing an art form that has been around for a hundred years and matching it up with this new accelerated world that we’re in. It allows for discussions around ways of experiencing art and virtual reality. There’s this notion that game engines, rapid advancements in hardware, accelerated graphics and all this technology is somehow carrying us forward artistically, and this experience is in some ways calling all that into question.”
Tippett then goes on to reveal how they went about creating the VR version: We replaced the sky and the ground digitally,” Tippett says. “And then we had twenty something of these characters we call the shit men. They’re small six inch stop motion characters that are made out of foam rubber with articulated skeletons and they are covered, I took cat hair from my vacuum cleaner at home and put that on their surface so every time an animator touched them it would disturb the cat hair. So the contour of the characters crawling all the time creates the kind of otherworldly distance.”
Tippett Studio may sound familiar to VRFocus readers as its helmed by Phil Tippett, 2-time Academy Award winning Visual Effects Supervisor and Director who’s worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, Robocop and The Force Awakens. Earlier this year Tippett Studio launched a successful Kickstarter campaign of augmented reality (AR) game HoloGrid: Monster Battle, inspired by the Holo Chess scene in Star Wars.
Wevr co-founder and EVP Anthony Batt added “We have long admired Phil Tippett’s brilliance and were honoured to help introduce his unique vision into VR. Mad God is an experience unlike anything else out there. It redefines what is possible.”
Mad God is available through the Wevr Transport app which supports the Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive headsets. For all the latest VR news, keep reading VRFocus.