Key words

Google, ATAP, Windy Day, Motorola, Buggy Night, smartphone, telephone, Moto, app, peripherals, devices, 3D, 360, short film, interactive, immersive 

Summary

Geri’s Game is a 1997 animated short produced for Pixar by Karen Dufilho and directed by Jan Pinkava. Awarded an Oscar in 1998, the film was a turning point in the history of digital animation.

Jan Pinkava, also co-director of Ratatouille, and Karen Dufilho both recently joined Google on its Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) hub dealing with R&D projects for Google’s mobile technologies and peripherals. As Jan Pinkava says in preamble: "ATAP wants to streamline access to the full potential of its peripherals" (smartphones, tablets, connected TV). "Right now we only use a very small portion of our smartphones’ capabilities."

Starting from the premise that smartphones blend a service dimension (directories, schedules, etc) with an emotional variable (music, photos, videos) in a technological context, Google prompted the creatives to work on new content. It was a simple brief: create something integrating emotion for phones. "Of course film sprung to mind right away, but if we were to impact smartphone usage, it meant that users needed to control the camera," Jean Pinkava tells us.

Brain-storming further, they chose to move away from traditional film-making constraints such as field, cut and thus editing. "Here this is neither a video game nor a movie with beginning, middle and end."

Windy Day

The first example presented is called Windy Day. This is an immersive and interactive film, not in the sense that viewers can change the narration but that they can manipulate the temporality. "Viewing is the only interaction. There’s no way of interacting with the characters, no choices concerning the plot, and no actions needed for surfing the storyline."

More concretely, Jan Pinkava showed to the conference audience a smartphone rigged in front of a camera that would allow him to project the film and also his manipulations to the gathering. "Once the app is launched what you have in front of you here is a short film with a potentially linear story arc. The smartphone serves as both projector and camera, and the audience can actually track the main action from start to finish, as passive viewers, or explore the surrounding settings or a side action. When that’s the case, the main story puts itself on hold and then begins again at the same spot when the ‘smartphone camera’ returns to the story." Windy Day lies at the border between movie and real-time game.

Produced in 9 months, the film relies on Motorola, a smartphone manufacturer, a team of graphic artists and video-game trained developers, and a team of artists drawn from the world of animated cinema. "We structured the team in relation to the skills needed but did not want to formalise it into a real production studio," Karen Dufilho explains. They hired talents from Valence, São Paulo, Bangkok, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Vancouver, Sunnyvale, Los Angeles and then Portland, where Jan Pinkava lives. Most of the meetings took place via Skype even though they met live in Portland for important production phases.

Unlike video games, the environments were not created in 360° "because we thought it was silly to imagine someone waving a smartphone around in the air. But we set the scene as if for a half-sphere, enabling left/right and high/low manoeuvring, depending on moves made and in real time."

Once the images were settled, Jan Pinkava and his team discussed the configuration needed for the sound surround: "We created musical moments which overlap like roof tiles. This means that no matter where the camera/viewer turns, the original music isn’t cut off. It’s actually an integral part of the story since its volume varies in proportion to distance from the camera. The more you get "lost" in the environment, the less present it is until it’s just background music. The more you move toward the main action, the louder it becomes." This short film was only offered, free of charge, to owners of the Motorola Moto X.

Their second film, Buggy Night, tells the story of a small gang of bugs terrified by the light of a pocket torch, a role played by the smartphone. Jan Pinkava describes the concept: "When you move your camera, you light up another corner of the woods. You can very well lose sight of your bugs and cast light on other nocturnal animals."

Although Jan does not really want to set up a production studio, it just so happens that a third short is now being developed. It will be directed by Glen Keane, notably the creative behind Tarzan and Tangled.

Buggy Night

Their second film, Buggy Night, tells the story of a small gang of bugs terrified by the light of a pocket torch, a role played by the smartphone. Jan Pinkava describes the concept: "When you move your camera, you light up another corner of the woods. You can very well lose sight of your bugs and cast light on other nocturnal animals."

Although Jan does not really want to set up a production studio, it just so happens that a third short is now being developed. It will be directed by Glen Keane, notably the creative behind Tarzan and Tangled.

Drafted by Stéphane Malagnac, Prop'Ose, France

Translated by Sheila Adrian

The Annecy 2014 Conferences Summaries are produced with the support of:

Conferences organised by CITIA

under the editorial direction of René Broca and Christian Jacquemart

Contact: christellerony@citia.org