Jessica’s mother was dying.
She’d been a larger-than-life figure while Jessica was growing up, an actress whose silver screen antics had filled her daughter’s childhood with grand visions of action and fantasy; of shoot-outs and fantastic flying beasts. But here, as Jessica remembered her mother’s final moments, she seemed weak, frail, impossibly small. And compared to the visions that had towered overhead just moments before, she actually was: the few lines sketching out her hospital room scaled down to the size of a grapefruit as she succumbed, shrinking smaller and smaller, until she wasn’t even there at all.
The fact that I’m still carrying around Jessica’s memories as if they’re my own says a lot about Dear Angelica, the latest virtual reality short from director Saschka Unseld and Oculus Story Studio. Receiving its formal premiere here at the Sundance Film Festival — it’s available on the Oculus Store today — the piece follows a young woman named Jessica (voiced by Mae Whitman) who reminisces about her late mother, Angelica (Geena Davis). But to place viewers inside Jessica’s romanticized world of memory, the group abandoned its Pixar-friendly animation style for something else entirely: an impressionistic, illustrated look that reveals itself, stroke by stroke, seemingly in real time. It swirls and envelops the viewer in a way that just wouldn’t be possible in other mediums — and that’s no doubt because Dear Angelica was drawn entirely in VR itself.
MADE IN VR, FOR VR
“In the very beginning, it was just the desire to create something that was illustrated inside of VR,” Unseld tells me in Story Studio’s San Francisco offices. “The beautiful thing about drawing is that it starts with a blank canvas — and then out of nothing, an illustrator or painter creates something. And that wonder feels so conducive for VR.” Interested in exploring a story about loss, and the stories parents pass down to their children, Dear Angelica was born.
My colleague Adi Robertson got an early look at the project last year, and the finished film unfolds in much the same way. The long, looping lines of artist Wesley Allsbrook wrap around the viewer to create three-dimensional illustrated scenes that you can move around, behind, and within. As the story unfolds, Jessica begins writing letters to her departed mother, thinking back to the memories they shared and the roles she saw her play during the course of her career. And just as the brush strokes unfurl in real time, they vanish as well, calling to mind the ephemeral nature of memories and the relationships we build with our loved ones.
,
Source: The Verge