Walt Disney Animation Studio will launch at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference, which takes place from 12 to 16 August, the short Cycles, the first made for virtual reality. The objective of the experience will be to inspire a deep emotional connection with the story thanks to the capabilities of the medium, something that its director Jeff Gipson hopes that more and more people will appreciate, that is, the emotional possibilities of this type of experience.
The story revolves around the meaning of creating a home, and focuses on the ups and downs of a family as they develop their lives in that space. “Each house has a unique story for the people, the characters who live there. We wanted to create a story in this unique place and be able to make the viewer witness the life that is unfolding around them, ” Gipson explains.
For the creation of the short film, the work team was made up of 50 collaborators who took about 4 months to carry it out. A project for which they used motion capture techniques and tools such as Quill, which was previously developed by Oculus Story Studio and which is now in charge of maintaining the social team of Facebook.
This work will not only be the first for Disney, but also for director Jeff Gipson, who was part of the animation team of films such as Frozen, Zootopia and Moana. Disney subsidiary Pixar did debut its first VR experience for the movie Coco last year.
The Cycles experience will be in the Immersive Pavilion, which will also have the presence of more companies showing virtual and augmented reality projects, such as the multiplayer of the augmented reality platform of Niantic, the experiences of Light Fields of Google, the short Wolves in the Walls of Fable Studio and the Crow: The Legend experience of Baobab Studios.
