Baobab Studios, the VR film studio behind the likes of Bonfire and Crow: The Legend, has announced its newest film titled BABA YAGA, which the studio describes as a “contemporary portrayal of the Eastern European legend” of the same name.
Baobab Studios has been creating made-for-VR short films since 2015. The studio’s 2018 film, Crow: The Legend, was released on Oculus Rift, Go, and Gear VR, and earned Baobab two Daytime Emmy awards.
The studio is gearing up to reveal its next film, Baba Yaga which sounds like it will take the studio’s artful, Pixar-esque style in an entirely new direction.
“Baba Yaga is […] inspired by illustrative 2D pop-up animation, hand-drawn and stop-motion styles, creating a modern visual language for VR inspired by classic animation,” the studio says.
Further, the studio is teasing that the film will have a branching narrative which will be impacted by the choices of the viewer.
“Sometimes a force for evil, sometimes a force for good, the enigmatic witch Baba Yaga uses her powers to protect the forest from the villagers’ encroachment. When your mother, the village chief, falls deathly ill it is up to you and your sister Magda to do the unthinkable—enter the forest, uncover its hidden mysteries and get the cure from Baba Yaga.”
Baobab Studios, the developers behind Bonfire, Asteroids! and more, revealed that their next project is an immersive experience called ‘Baby Yaga’. A first look will be unveiled at the 2020 Annecy International Animation Festival Online in a few weeks.
Baba Yaga will be co-directed by the studio’s Co-Founder Eric Darnell and French director Mathias Chelebourg. The experience will be “a contemporary portrayal of the Eastern European legend inspired by illustrative 2D pop-up animation, hand-drawn and stop-motion styles.”
A few details of Baba Yaga’s narrative can be found on the Baobab Studios site:
It’s up to you and your sister Magda, to save your mother by entering the forest to obtain the cure from the enigmatic witch, Baba Yaga. Your choices define how this story of love and magic ends.
Due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, Annecy is one of many festivals and events to move to an online format this year. Accredited festival viewers will be able to watch a ‘Work In Progress’ presentation on Baby Yaga, which will be available for the entire two-week event starting from June 15. A live Q&A with the Baobab Studios team will also take place on June 23rd at 9am PST.
We were big fans of Baobab’s last offering, Bonfire, which starred comedian Ali Wong and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. As Jamie noted in his Bonfire review, Baobab’s learned a lot from each of their productions, getting better and better every time. We can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store next.
Baobab Studios says Baba Yaga will premiere later this year, in ‘multiple formats’.
Gloomy Eyes released a few months ago for PC VR, but has now made its way across to the Oculus Quest. The immersive story is split across three episodes, supports hand tracking and runs for somewhere around 30 minutes. Here’s our quick review.
Gloomy Eyes had a fair amount of buzz around it before release. Colin Farrell signed on to narrate and then the project won the Artistic Achievement and Audio Achievement awards at the 2019 Raindance Immersive Awards. The film was shown at distinguished film events such as the Sundance 2019 festival and the South by Southwest 2019 festival, among others. Now, Gloomy Eyes has made its standalone VR debut on the Oculus Quest.
The story is set in a world that has been overcome by darkness and follows a zombie boy named Gloomy as he falls in love with a mortal girl, Nena. In terms of animation and artistic direction, Gloomy Eyes is absolutely stunning. It feels very Tim Burton, but with even more fluid animations and intricate design. Every scene is a wonder to look at — everything is designed with care and such a high level of detail. At certain points in the story, the experience can feel quite magical.
Most of the scenes are presented almost like dioramas, floating in the darkness and only illuminated by a fireplace or other small sources of light. As the characters move around the environment and the scenes change, you’ll be naturally guided to turn to where the next diorama is about to appear. However, some of the scenes and set pieces are so stunning that you’ll wish you could pause the action and just spend a few minutes investigating everything up close.
It’s an immersive, 6DoF experience that works seamlessly most of the time. One scene in particular, involving theme park rides in episode two, makes excellent use of the VR medium and 3D space. It’s a dazzling presentation with beautiful trails of light and models moving fluidly all around you in a manner that you could only experience in VR.
In terms of story, I have mixed feelings. The world that the story is set in is intriguing and the characters are all very charming, but the actual narrative has a strange feel and pacing. While Colin Farrell has a fantastic voice for narration, sometimes his lines feel a bit redundant. Occasionally it feels warranted and used well, especially when world building and setting up necessary exposition. However many other lines fall into the classic writing trap of telling the audience something that is either already being demonstrated by the characters or could be, very easily.
The pacing of the narrative also feels off, mainly due to how the story is split across three episodes. The first episode is noticeably shorter and only really exists to set up the context and exposition for the other two episodes, where the story really begins. The second and third episodes are almost equal to each other in length, and feature more interesting set pieces, plot points and better narrative structure, since all of the boring groundwork was dumped in the first episode.
It’s a strange decision to compartmentalize the story into ‘episodes’, with each one taking you back to the main menu after it finishes. One large story, with several auto-save checkpoints, would probably have helped avoid the strange narrative pacing. Nonetheless, despite the minor gripes, it’s still an enjoyable narrative and the animation and visual design keep you enthralled throughout.
It’s also important to note while playing on the Oculus Quest, you may get some minor blur and ghosting when moving, which can be distracting. This is, sadly, an unavoidable result of displaying such dark content with pockets of light on the Quest’s OLED screen. Upon comparing the PC VR version of the title (via Oculus Link) and the native Quest version, there may also be some minor graphic downgrades on the latter to accommodate for the standalone system, but they’re not overly noticeable or important.
The Quest version also technically supports hand tracking, but the experience isn’t interactive at all. Using your hands amounts solely to selecting a language and an episode while in the menu, and nothing else. It’s definitely still a plus, but also not a game changer.
Overall, the few minor gripes shouldn’t take away from just how captivating Gloomy Eyes is. It masterfully commands a mysterious yet gorgeous art style and pairs it with brilliant animation. The level of detail is so high, and the world so beautiful, that I can see myself revisiting the experience more than once, just to get a better look at things. People of all ages, even with little VR experience, should enjoy Gloomy Eyes, and it’s short enough that they may as well give it a try.
Gloomy Eyes is available on Steam,Viveport and the Oculus Store for PC VR and on the Oculus Store for Quest. This review was conducted on the Oculus Quest primarily, supplemented by the Rift version using Oculus Link for comparison.
Studio Syro, an indie VR animation studio, released the first installment of their short film series called Tales from Soda Island yesterday. Built entirely in the Oculus Quill, the series kicks off with one of the most charming VR experiences you’ve probably ever seen.
The first episode is called ‘The Multiverse Bakery’, and is now available on Oculus Quest via the Oculus TV app and Quill Theater on Rift. A second episode is said to arrive soon.
The sub 10-minute short mashes up 3D animation—created in the Quill creation app—and brings it to life with spatial audio and special effects.
The story follows a curious character called ‘The Baker’ who is busy assembling all sorts of ingredients for something special.
Without spoiling the story further, suffice it to say Studio Syro has taken many of the hard-won VR design concepts and applied it to Tales From Soda Island. Transitions are cinematic without being immersion-breaking, intense visuals deftly grab your attention, and audio (best with headphones) makes the short feel like a living, breathing world.
“The creative process is way more efficient and fun than traditional workflows,” artist Dan Franke says in an Oculus blog post. “In Quill, you can jump straight into doodling a character in 3D space and designing a scene with easy and super fast iterations. The duplication workflow also speeds up the process a whole lot. With the modeled assets, you can freely move in the space and search for interesting angles, where to place the viewer. But other than designing a composition for the traditional 2D output in VR, you have to be mindful of space and build the scene all around the viewer.”
Quill is a 3D creation tool that lets you physically paint or sculpt in VR. Since its release in 2016, it’s been a creation platform for loads of talented artists, however thanks an update in early 2018 that lets you animate 3D VR paintings, its attracted even more talent.
Thanks to the publishing platforms Oculus TV on Quest and Quill Theater on Rift, you can watch high-quality animated experiences from creators; we suggest checking out the work of Goro Fujita, Daniel Martin Peixe, Liz Edwards, and Nikolai Lockertsen for a start.
The start of every year sees a flurry of cinematic content thanks to film festivals around the world. Sundance has just ended while March will see the return of the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival to San Jose and Redwood City, California. Once again virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will have a presence with the world premiere of VR film LIFE-GIVER taking place.
Produced by Snowcloud Films, Film i Väst and StudioV, LIFE-GIVER is an animated movie directed by Petter Lindblad and Alexander Rönnberg, following a mother’s struggle to save herself and her two daughters.
“2068 – the environmental crisis is in full effect. It has completely destroyed our planet and shattered humanity into a chaotic fight to survive. A plan was made to evacuate the planet before it became completely uninhabitable, but there was not enough room on the evacuation ships. A special travel pass was handed out to only the most privileged people. The rest were placed in internment camps. And now the last ship is about to leave,” explains the synopsis.
Set in an abandoned Stockholm, she has managed to acquire these sought after passes but to get to the evacuation ship they must cross the dangerous militarized zone, and time is running out. The film is told from the viewpoint of the youngest daughter’s memory, as she is now an old woman far out among the stars in the future.
”We’re very happy to have been chosen to have our world premiere in the heart of Silicon Valley. It seems a fitting place to show our first VR-film at such a melting pot of technical and creative achievements. We’re looking forward to the screenings and networking with other filmmakers and distributors of VR-projects at the festival,” says producer Petter Lindblad in a statement.
After its premiere at the festival, Nordic Entertainment Group’s 360-platform Viareal will release LIFE-GIVER to the Nordic market at the end of 2020. LIFE-GIVER is slated for release on Oculus Store and SteamVR this year. Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival takes place from 3rd-15th March 2020, with the VR-programme running between 5th-8th March. For further updates keep reading VRFocus.
Perhaps noproject to date shows the potential of Quill—Oculus’ VR illustration and animation tool—quite like The Remedy. Created by veteran animator Daniel Martin Peixe, The Remedy is a roughly 10 minute long story which establishes a very effective comic book-like experience by stringing together various Quill scenes to tell a complete narrative. Peixie shared with us a glimpse inside of the production process which brought the film to life.
Guest Article by Daniel Martin Peixe
Daniel Martin Peixe is a character animator and illustrator at Walt Disney Animation Studios. With twenty years of experience in 2D and CGI animation, his recent work can be seen in critically-acclaimed films like Tangled (2010), Zootopia (2016), and Moana (2016). Peixe has been a mentor for the professional online animation workshop Animsquad since 2017. He is the writer, director, and creator of the VR short film The Remedy (2019), created entirely within the Quill VR illustration tool.
How to Watch The Remedy
If you haven’t had a chance to watch ‘The Remedy’, we recommend doing so for context. The short is available in Quill Theater on Oculus Quest, here’s how to find it:
Ensure your Oculus Quest is running firmware 12.0 or later
In Oculus TV, you’ll find ‘The Remedy’ under “An animated Story Created in Quill”.
The Remedy project started with the idea of using Quill illustrations as if they were comic book panels. Looking at my own Quill illustrations, I kept thinking, ‘I wish I could press a button and see what happens next!’ I also wanted to experiment using traditional cinema editing in VR, mostly for action scenes. I pitched this idea to the Quill team and to my surprise they were already thinking of ways to expand the timeline toolset in the next update, aiming to make Quill a full fledged VR storytelling suite!
Soon after, I was officially commissioned to work on this project—a short story in VR using the latest Quill 2.0 beta with the timeline tools—I was over the Moon! It was an amazing learning experience; this turned out to be my rough production workflow, which I’ll talk about in more detail below:
Pre-production
Script writing
Rough storyboard thumbnails in 2D
3D storyboarding with in VR, layout and staging
Editing storyboards in VR, using transitions, cuts and adjusting timing
Organizing layers and labeling each one
Adding ‘stops’
Sending the rough assembly to the Music and Audio team
Production
Visual development, research reference photos
Final in-film text dialogue rendered in Photoshop and exported as PNG
2D color reference sketches before painting key scenes in VR
Drawn and build sets and characters, speech bubbles and panels in VR
Frame by frame animation
Adjust final timing and transitions
Adding special animated effects
Send to Music and Audio team
Final audio mix
Optimization pass
Technical checks for Quill Theater playback on Oculus Quest
As I started writing the story, I focused on something simple with a minimal number of characters. Also, I knew I wanted exciting action scenes but before writing those I tried to make sure there’s an emotional connection with the main character and clear motivations for the heroine to go on an adventure.
I did many different drafts of the script until I landed with something I was happy with and moved on to storyboarding. Some storyboards started as 2D sketches I did on my phone; the small screen allowed me to quickly put down any ideas I had for camera angles, scene staging etc. With these little scribbles as a reference, it was much easier later to do the VR sketching in Quill.
Preliminary 2D Sketches
1 of 5
During this process it was important to start establishing the scale of the scenes in relation to the viewer, as well as the staging and planning for the ‘focal point’ of each scene to make sure that when there’s a ‘cut’ people don’t get lost or disoriented. I wanted the audience to be their own ‘cameraman’ in some scenes, like the one where the wagon leaves the house and you see the title. Planning all this with rough sketches was crucial, to make sure that some of the more experimental scenes would work before I jumped in and began modeling the assets.
The transform keys in Quill allow you to create smooth animations and fade in and outs, setting a couple of keyframes on the group layers. This was super useful for adding ‘camera moves’ which I did by moving entire sets instead of moving the actual Quill camera. Like the ‘escape from the volcano’ scene where the character is on a static layer animated jumping from one platform to the other and the set moves toward the audience, giving the impression that the audience is moving forward.
The ‘stops’ (where viewer input is required to continue the story) were a new concept that we weren’t sure that would work, but I had the feeling that it would make it feel more like a comic book where viewers could take in the scene around them before continuing.
Picking where to put the stops was a natural choice in some cases, for example, the establishing shot where the heroine is in front of the volcano temple entrance. The audience might feel like spending a bit more time taking in the environment. Just like a double page in a comic book, it is a big featured moment, and you are invited to explore all the details until you’re ready to move on. In other cases the stops are helpful in case you want to spend more time reading the speech bubbles. And then in other cases I chose to not have any stop or pause, because I wanted the audience to feel the thrill of the action.
Once all the story scenes were sketched out I adjusted the timing and made sure I was happy with that because it was time to deliver the project to the audio and music team so they could get started.
The next step for me was cleaning up scene by scene and adding the color, details etc. For the key scenes I did a 2D color key sketch outside of VR. That was super helpful in order to establish a clear goal for the scene in terms of mood, color palette, and lighting.
2D Color Keys
1 of 4
While most of the scenes in The Remedy are viewed from a third-person perspective, there were several scenes which I thought would be especially powerful in first-person. Thanks to VR, that perspective truly puts the audience in the shoes of the character. The ‘book’ scene—where the main character pages through an old book that sets up some important elements of the story—was important to me because being in a first person view it acts as a close-up shot, and the audience is welcome to lean in closer to explore the details of the book. In the ‘plant temple’ scene—where the main character finds the objective of her quest—I used first-person so that the audience could feel the same as the protagonist, admiring all the magical healing plants still growing on that orchard, and the sense of awe exploring how big is the temple. At the very end I included another first-person scene where I put the audience in the skin of the bad guy, looking up at the heroine as she holds onto the satchel—and his fate. Many of these shots would also work in 2D cinema, but in VR they become much more impactful!
When modelling assets I tried to keep an eye to the stroke count and the general density of the detail, since I knew there could be a chance for this project to run on Oculus Quest. Using the straight line tool as a base for most structures was the way to go. And also being smart about where to add detail and where to leave things more simplified. In most scenes there isn’t even a set or background, just the characters and a color gradient. This was completely intentional since I wanted the audience to focus on them and not be distracted by detail in the background.
I knew that I wanted most of the animation to be simple from the start. I didn’t plan to do full animation for this project, but I realized the action scenes needed some extra detail to really sell them. The most complex animations were achieved with a rough sketch first, with the timing and most in-betweens drawn.
Then I posed the character by constructing it from separate, previously drawn parts. I grabbed each part, and using the rough anim as a guide, I positioned them on each frame.
This allows for a very traditional animation approach, and with the use of Grab tool I was able to duplicate and deform the pieces seamlessly. The animation also becomes layered or what was known as ‘limited’ animation in certain parts, meaning that I would divide the character and while some parts of the character are still moving other parts remain still, on a separate layer.
The whole team at Oculus became really excited to learn that The Remedy, would be playable on Quest! The Quill team lead engineer was able to squeeze the whole project into a small size, and he ran some extra optimizations to make sure it would play well.
The last stretch of work was very exciting because we started to hear the amazing musical score from Facebook’s sound designer coming to life. Due to the ‘stops’ feature, sound engineers had to come up with two types of scores: the first was timed with an average guess of the time it takes to read the speech bubbles and to progress through the story—that way if you wait for too long in a paused moment, the music continues and slowly fades into the atmosphere sound effect—the second type of score was for the more linear moments with a fixed timing.
As I was finishing the last scenes, sound design was catching up with me finishing up the music. The team did an incredible job with the sound effects that make everything feel much more grounded.
This has been an amazing learning experience. I wore many hats and learned a lot in terms of storytelling, visual development, color, writing, and staging. But also huge learning in how to make the most out of Quill’s amazing toolset. I loved working on The Remedy and I cannot wait to create my next VR film with Quill!
At least, he doesn’t appear as such when I find him battling jet lag atop an offensively pink pillow just a stroll along from central London’s Southbank Centre. His long hair is neatly tied back in a bun and he rests his crossed arms on his knees as if ready to dive into impromptu meditation at a moment’s notice. Between stifled yawns from an early morning flight from Barcelona, he seems generally amiss on his first day at the Raindance Film Festival.
At first sight, it’s not what I expected from the co-director of Battlescar (seen below in our VR Culture Show). It’s a searing, explosive VR feature that thrusts you into the disgruntled spirit of the late 1970’s New York punk scene. Blink and you’ll miss it, and you’ll get no apologies from its creators.
“Actually, the first episode [of Battlescar] the producers were like “this is too fast, people need more time to see the scenarios,”” he says. “And Nico and I were like “Actually all the VR is very boring because it’s very slow.””
Well, that’s a bit more like it.
In Allais’ defense, Battlescar, which he created alongside longtime friend Nico Casavecchia, does give a lot of other VR experiences the appearance of having training wheels. Despite its lengthy 30 minute run time, it’s relentlessly paced, barely letting a minute pass before radically switching up storytelling styles. The plot follows Lupe, a young Puerto Rican-American voiced by Rosario Dawson who happens upon the ferocious Debbie while flirting with a New York jail cell. Taken under her wing, Lupe bonds with Debbie over disillusionment and outrage as they plot to bring their plight to the stage with the repetitive thud of punk rock musiv. An assortment of misadventures befalls them along the way.
“We started seeing VR films out there and VR experiences and we’re like trying what we didn’t like of them and how we can do the film we want to see in VR,” Allais explains. “It was a very personal process because there’s nothing written really in VR language, so you can do everything at the same time.”
It’s that kitchen sink delivery that makes Battlescar sing louder than its screechy-voiced soundtrack. No two instances are the same, be it a fleeting ride on the back of a motorcycle in which you long for the wind to bite into your face, or the dizzying clashing of drums and ideas from all angles as Lupe’s frustrated words flow from mind to page. “I just wanted to come with ideas like what we think should be the experience of getting in a headset,” Allais explains. “So that’s Battlescar for us, a big playground of exploration and ideas. Narrative, framing, and I think pretty much everything that we came up with ended in the film.”
Despite Allais’ earlier dismissal, there are traces of VR’s past, like the hints of Dear Angelica in its readiness to tinker with scale. But it’s otherwise blisteringly fresh; a collection of revelatory discoveries just waiting to be made. One minute Debbie has an enormous gun held to her head with terrifying proximity, the next her and Lupe are leap-frogging their way home like a level in Super Mario Bros.. In fact, Allais tells me he and Casavecchia eventually stopped watching other VR experiences to maintain their own ideas. One guiding star was particularly crucial; no interactivity.
“When we started playing with VR, we wanted to create a piece that wasn’t interactive, but at the same time used the space in an interactive and playful way,” he says
Simply put, there isn’t time for interactivity in Battlescar. There are no moments to linger; to lean in and wonder if you can pick up the drum stick resting on the desk or strum the guitar sitting next to you. This isn’t a world, it’s a slideshow, kicked and bashed together to demand the viewer’s attention at all times. Without this urgency, Allais suspects it wouldn’t be half as engaging.
“Because you don’t have a director’s point of view that shows you how to go from one place to the other,” he says. “So what we wanted to do is just the opposite. If people want to see more they need to see it again.”
I won’t go on much longer, suffice to say I truly loved Battlescar. It was an experience that reenergized my love of narrative-driven VR and brought me back to the infantile excitement of seeing this technology with fresh eyes. I can’t wait to see what the pair does next.
“Now we’re more into coming back to some of those techniques and developing them more,” Allais teases. @[Battlescar] is like this mash-up of different techniques and ways of storytelling and they need to be developed. And that’s what we want to do hopefully in the following story.”
Sign me up.
Battlescar is planned for release on home headsets in the near future.
Back in 2016, director Jon Favreau, in association with immersive studio Wevr, released the Gnomes & Goblins preview, a demo of an (at the time) ambitious VR film project. While it was well received, it lay nearly forgotten as the years passed with no sign of a full release. Hope has been reignited thanks to a recently revamped website teasing that project is “coming soon.”
A testament to how quickly VR is moving; back in 2016, the idea that Jon Favreau (the director behind The Jungle Book (2016), Iron Man 1 (2008) & Iron Man 2 (2010), among others) was working on a VR film was pretty big news. An original story complete with immersive interactivity, Gnomes & Goblins seemed quite promising in its five minute preview which was released on Steam. Unfortunately the project’s intrigue slowly faded from memory as years passed with no indication that it was headed for a full release.
That all changed in the last week when Wevr, the immersive studio producing the project along with MWM, offered up a sly tweet to the project’s official website which has been completely revamped, now prominently featuring “coming soon” text at the top.
It’s likely no coincidence that this would happen now—shortly after the release of Favreau’s latest directorial project, The Lion King (2019), which used a purportedly groundbreaking virtual reality production process which Favreau himself likened to a “multiplayer filmmaking game” in a recent interview. And with the excitement surrounding new headsets like Quest, Rift S, and Index, it seems like an opportune time to revive the project.
While we still don’t know when it will launch, the revamped Gnomes & Goblins website now seems to have a firmer idea of what the VR film will actually be. While the original version of the site waxed about the experimental nature of the project—and rightly so, as the merger of cinematic narrative and interactivity in VR was still just barely being probed in 2016—the new version of the site quite concisely describes the experience as a “story driven game set in an enchanted world of gnomes and goblins with you as the protagonist” [our emphasis].
Indeed, since the debut of the Gnomes & Goblins preview in 2016, a handful of successful examples blending strong narrative with interactivity in VR have come to fruition with projects like The Invisible Hours (2017),The Great C (2018), and Star Wars: Vader Immortal (2019). Granted, with a clearer picture of the language of VR storytelling, Favreau and his collaborators are now faced with modern expectations; to what extent Gnomes & Goblins has or hasn’t been reworked to fit in today’s VR landscape won’t be clear until its launch, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Disney Animation Studios is set to debut its second VR short film, A Kite’s Tale, late this month at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles.
Following the debut of their first VR short film, Cycles, last year at the same conference, Disney Animation Studios will offer the first showing of A Kite’sTale at SIGGRAPH 2019 in the ‘VR Theater’ portion of the show. The event is being hosted from July 28th to August 1st at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Disney says that A Kite’s Tale “combines classic hand-drawn animation and the latest innovations in virtual reality to tell this whimsical tale of two kites; a playful puppy (with a wagging tail) and a pompous dragon who clash, tangle, and ultimately must learn to live with one another subject to the winds of fate.”
The short film is being directed by Bruce Wright who has been working with Disney for more than 20 years. Some of his credits include work on Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Frozen 2.
A Kite’s Tale was born out of Disney Animation’s ‘Short Circuit’ program which allows anyone within the studio to submit blind pitches that may be selected to be turned into short films. The VR short film is the second to come from the Short Circuit program, with the first being Cycles.
Though A Kite’s Tale will debut at SIGGRAPH, it isn’t clear when (or if) the film will be released to the public. Cycles, which debuted in 2018, is still not publicly available.
Vive Studios has released its ‘feature-length’ immersive film titled 7 Miracles. On the surface, the immersive film is a reenactment of the Gospel of John in the Bible that specifically centers around the seven miracles of Jesus Christ. Under the surface, however, it uses advanced filmmaking techniques such as photogrammetry and volumetric video capture to achieve 8K imagery.
Directed by Rodrigo Cerqueira and Marco Spagnoli, 7 Miracles was shot across Matera and Rome, both classic locales for returning viewers of The Passion of the Christ and Ben Hur. According to the official blog post, “The seven-part episodic feature runs over 70 minutes, making it the first feature-length cinematic experience from Vive Studios,” and one of the longest immersive films we’ve ever seen.
7 Miracles is also notable for winning the ‘Spirit of Raindance: VR Film of The Festival’ award at Raindance Film Festival 2018, as stated by Vive Studios in their blog post at that time.
While the award-winning biblical reenactment is predominantly meant for consumption via Viveport, where it is sold at $20 as a complete PCVR experience, Android owners can also join in on the gospel for $10 via the Google Play store.
In the future, Vive Studios hopes to bring 7 Miracles to additional platforms such as iOS and the Vive Wave. The studio also promises to introduce post-release content over time, citing ‘new 3D room-scale scenes’ for release with upcoming updates to Viveport users.
Currently, 7 Miracles is only available in English. You can find more information about the immersive experience at its official website.
”We’re very happy to have been chosen to have our world premiere in the heart of Silicon Valley. It seems a fitting place to show our first VR-film at such a melting pot of technical and creative achievements. We’re looking forward to the screenings and networking with other filmmakers and distributors of VR-projects at the festival,” says producer Petter Lindblad in a statement.
