SCREENSHOTS

• TYPE: Interactive movie

• CLIENT: Experimentarium

• STUDIO: Ghost VFX

• YEAR: January 2017

BEHIND THE SCENES

Storyboards were created while the script was still in development. The challenge was to visualize the 160 degree canvas along with the full floor projection in one drawing. While editing the storyboard into an animatic, we could test the experience using an Oculus VR headset directly in the game engine. This gave us an idea of how the final experience would be.

To test the experience on a live audience, we projecting our 2D animatic onto the wall and floor of a sound stage. The scale was completely wrong, but the idea was mainly to test the story and interactive ideas that we were working on. We invited a 7th grade class as our test audience. Though we only had a rough black and white animatic to show them, they were awesome at engaging themselves in the story, and they gave us some fantastic feedback that helped us move forward.

Designing the characters was a fun but challenging process. We aimed for a style that would allow for real time playback within the game engine, but also a design that would not look technically outdated within a few years time. This was important since it was the clients’ ambition to create a show that would run for a 2-5 year period. Therefore we went with a more artistic and clean visual style instead of aiming at realism.

For Martin we wanted to avoid the stylistic cliches of the adventure character, which have been seen in so many movies and series.
So to come up with a new and fresh take on the archetype, we created him as a mixture of a traveler and an sophisticated hedonist.  This added a nice eccentric twist to the character. These are all earlier versions of the design.

The design of Martin’s house had to support his crazy inventor personality. The first versions of the design was covered with retro-high tech features and equipment.

We realized that it was more important for his house to express the active sides of his personality, so for the final model we replaced a lot of the discs and antennas with a swimming pool, a slide and other active elements.

Renders of the final character models as well as Martin’s home made bike/hover craft.
The sharp design forms of Disney Infinity’s toy models was definitely one of our inspirations 🙂

After the models were finalized it was time to record the performances using motion capture. We managed to record all 12 minutes of the story in one single (long) day at Imagination’s studio outside of Stockholm in Sweden.

Facial capture was done in a separate session with one actor doing the performances of both characters.
This was a fun but also time consuming process.

The face capture data was processed and applied to the character models. Adjustments were then made and passed on to Unreal for final implementation into the scenes.

Throughout the production process we invited people to test out the progress of the film and the interactive elements.
These pictures are from one of the tests that were held at Science North in Canada.

The kids went crazy in this climatic dance battle towards the end of the film.
Really fun to watch their enthusiasm.