‘Son of Jaguar’ © 2017. All images courtesy of Google Spotlight Stories.
Google Spotlight Stories teams with Reel FX to debut new VR short that builds on the Mexican director’s past work from ‘El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rodriguez’ and ‘The Book of Life.’
Google Spotlight Stories’ latest virtual reality short, Son of Jaguar, rolled out this week on Google’s new Pixel 2 phone. A version for Google Daydream and Steam for HTC Vive will be available by the end of the month and, later this year, it will be released on the Google Spotlight Stories app on Android and iOS.
First introduced at Annecy 2017, Son of Jaguar had its world premiere at Cuernavaca, Mexico’s Pixelatl Festival and was on view both at SIGGRAPH 2017 and during this past weekend’s ANIMATION IS FILM Festival. Director Jorge Gutiérrez and the rest of Google Spotlight Stories team will also be presenting a making-of the VR short along with demos at the CTN Expo in November.
The eight-minute first-person narrative thrusts the viewer into the central role in a Mexican wrestling-themed animated short that builds on the director’s past work from El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rodriguez (2007) and The Book of Life (2014), both of which earned the director Annie Awards for character design. For his first foray into virtual reality, Gutiérrez re-teamed with Dallas, TX-based animation studio Reel FX, reuniting with the crew from The Book of Life, including art director Paul Sullivan and character designer Sandra Equihua, as well as the Reel FX animation production team.
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Gutiérrez drew on some very personal themes for the subject matter. Aside from the fact that he admits he always wanted to be a Lucha Libre wrestler, he explained that he now has a child, “and I can’t take the risks that I used to take creatively and artistically. That responsibility, will that take me out of the ring? Will it cripple me because I now have someone that depends on me? And is that a burden? That’s a theme and topic that a lot of artists, I think, wrestle with.”
The director said that the most enjoyable part of making the film was “being able to walk into my head and being able to hang out with my characters and walk around them and see them. As a kid I dreamt of this stuff, and now I get to do it,” he says.
“I always joke about this, but I was the little kid who would go see an animated movie, I would run up at the end of the movie to touch the screen, just to try to get in, because those worlds seemed so incredible.”
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Source: AWN.com