The latest project from VR film specialists Oculus Story Studio. Talking with Ghosts, is a collection of four animated stories, each illustrated and brought to live in virtual reality, designed to bring you into an immersive comic book world.
Oculus Story Studio’s continue their exploration of illustrative VR film when their latest collaborative project debuts at this years Tribeca Film Festival on April 21st.
Talking with Ghosts is a collection of four illustrative VR films, each created by a different artist, each created within VR and each inspired by OSS’ collective love of comic books. Although each film adopt a different stylistic approach, each of them aim to take the viewer “inside the pages of a comic”. The breakdown of the four films is as follows:
- Fairground by Sophia Foster-Dimino—Two childhood friends revisit an old fairground where their divergent interpretations of their past and future collide.
- The Neighborhood by Roman Muradov—A ghost’s tale of his relationships with the house’s tenants from the beginning of time until the end of the universe.
- The Reservoir by Ric Carrasquillo—A couple’s relationship drama unfolds as they play the most surreal game of mini golf you’ve ever seen.
- Tattoo Warrior by Maria Yi—An epic story of war and love told entirely through a 3D tattoo ribbon.
Talking with Ghosts is the next step in Story Studio’s exploration of a medium they arguably created. OSS first created VR art package Quill, then they commissioned Dear Angelica, an illustrative made-in-VR film directed by former Pixar artist Saschka Unseld and painted artist Wesley Allsbrook – entirely using Quill, entirely within VR.
Dear Angelica and Quill not only led to an intriguing new form of filmmaking, it enabled Story Studio to realise a way to make creating immersive VR films much more intuitive and accessible. As the OSS team put it in a new blog post:
We believe the best way to make a VR experience is inside VR, unencumbered by the tools of the past, and we’re excited to share the latest results at Tribeca to help inspire other artists.
We’re still in the early stages of made-in-VR illustrative storytelling. We can’t wait to see what the VR filmmaking community does with Quill in the coming years.
After the new film’s debut at Tribeca, as with every other Oculus Story Studio production, it’ll make its way onto the Oculus Store later in the year.
