I recently attended a lecture at SIGGRAPH 2019 called "Classic Art, Cutting Edge", in which I was exposed to an animated short created for Google Spotlight. The 3D animated short told the story of an old sailor who finds redemption when he saves a young girl who had fallen overboard her ship. I enjoyed the story, but what captivated me the most was the way the animation was presented. The team of ten or so people at Boathouse studios had managed to create a beautiful sketch-like ocean scene that was able to run in realtime and in VR. I believe the project took them almost a year since the team was so small and the film was about 12 minutes. I am very interested in the new ways film and storytelling can be shown outside the scope of traditional theaters, and I have been working with more VR related projects recently. The shaders and ocean scripts were created by the team, as animating and simulating the ocean using normal simulation in Maya, for instance, would be too expensive for VR (the whole film is set in the ocean). I admire how they were able to create a captivating film, where the viewer has the ability to look wherever they would like but still be able to follow the narrative the way they intended.
A theatrical (non VR) version can be found here.
