A girl’s bedroom at night. Jessica lies on her bed, a pen in her hand, writing a letter. Her TV glows, almost floating near the end of her bed, and the night sky outside tints everything in a tranquil blue sheen. Crickets croak in the undergrowth outside.
A sublime virtual reality film called Dear Angelica, by Saschka Unseld, takes the viewer on a journey through dreams, thoughts and fantasies. It’s an animated work made up of still images given life and motion by the fluidity of the art. Brushstrokes drift as if they are breathing with young Jessica, who is in the depths of slumber.
These lines are both clear stylistic elements of the design, yet fine detailing lends them a physical quality. It’s uncanny to see what is clearly an artistic representation of a bed have a three-dimensional presence. You could, if you wanted, crouch down and wrap your hands around the apparition of a bed post.
As a point of comparison, you might recall the huge shark hologram that attempts to take a bite out of Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II’s vision of 2015. This pixellated effigy seemed fanciful at the time, but looking back, it’s one of the film’s more prophetic touches. The augmented reality advertisement for Jaws 19 hasn’t come into being, but instead we have something far more riveting and immersive. The emergent technology of Oculus Rift and its siblings offers the opportunity to take on different perspectives, explore new worlds and experience the atmosphere of a fictional space.
Dear Angelica truly comes alive when we hear the voice of Jessica (Mae Whitman) who begins to narrate her story. As she speaks her words are written in the air. Her mother, Angelica (Geena Davis), was an actress, a star of films that ranged from fantasy to science fiction to crime dramas. As if stepping into her dreams, we see Jessica accompany her in these different stories, while her narration describes how these roles defined their relationship, from rapture to calamity.
The act of stepping inside an unfolding story is an appealing one, but is it anything more than a gimmick? With regard to Dear Angelica, Tera Randall, Technology Communications Director for Oculus, thinks not: “People who come out of it have a range of emotions”, she said, “from having tears because the story really speaks to them in a personal way, to artists who are just really curious about how it was built and how it was created.”
As VR is still a relatively new medium, most new work has an experimental edge to it. Tera explained that the lead artist on Dear Angelica, Wesley Allsbrook, hand-illustrated the animation within the Oculus Rift, using a painting tool called Quill: “She could manoeuvre all the different characters and see what it’s going to look like in the final stages”. This is worked into the experience of watching the VR film, as this dynamic artform simulates the feeling of being inside the creative process.
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Source: Lwlies