Geena Davis will never forget the first time she tried virtual reality, because it literally brought her to tears. “I was crying, and so moved by it,” she recently recalled. “I was just a mess by the end.”
Davis’ tear-inducing introduction to virtual reality (VR) came when she first watched a draft of “Dear Angelica,” a new 12-minute cinematic virtual experience from Oculus Story Studio that is premiering at Sundance and on the Oculus Rift headset Friday.
“I felt bad about it,” Oculus Story Studio Creative Director Saschka Unseld recently told Variety. “We made Geena Davis cry! She completely teared up.” Davis nonetheless signed on to the project and voiced one of the main characters, which is roughly based on her life and career.
But “Dear Angelica” isn’t just a deeply personal and intimate story that intertwines personal memories with the ones produced by Hollywood; it’s also pushing the boundaries on virtual reality storytelling itself, as it is the first animated movie that has been drawn entirely within VR.
Capturing memories, line by line
Facebook-owned Oculus unveiled Oculus Story Studio as a unit to explore storytelling for the new medium in early 2015. After experimenting early on with the possibilities of new medium with “Lost,” a short film that followed a robot lost in the woods, the studio had its first major success with “Henry,” an animated comedy about a hedgehog in need of love. “Henry,” which was directed by Pixar animator Ramiro Lopez Dau, won the studio an Emmy last year.
But while “Henry” was a fun short film in the tradition of Pixar and Disney, “Dear Angelica” is decidedly darker fare, animation for adults. The story is all about a daughter of a famous movie star, voiced by Mae Whitman, who writes a letter addressed to her late mother.
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“Dear Angelica” blends personal memories with famous movie scenes, transforming for instance a family road trip into a “Thelma and Louise”-like shootout. COURTESY OF OCULUS
That letter becomes the narration to the movie, and takes the viewer through a series personal memories which are intertwined with the movie scenes the mom is known for. “I’ve been watching all of your movies again,” the daughter writes, and continues to say that she sometimes can’t tell her personal memories apart from those movies. “Your movies were so much more than just movies — they were about us,” Whitman can be heard saying.
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Source: Variety