A Tale Of Time

Throughout the production process, I collaborated closely with the rest of the team to ensure that the project was optimized for AR and that the rigs and animations worked in Unity. I worked very closely with a Unity developer to get it working with AR SDK’s for both iPhone and Android mobile devices.

I was extremely fortunate to have children of Yahoo employees during Take Your Kid to Work Day as our very first audience of the film. It was such a joy to show the film to the kids and observe the way they engaged with the technology, as well as see what they enjoyed and understood about the story.

Then, when the Magic Leap first came out, we converted the story to work in Mixed Reality. This offered a better viewing experience and we were also able to create a few more moments of intractability with the Magic Leap SDK. We premiered the Magic Leap version at Advertising Week UK.

Results

Thanks to the hard work of the team, A Tale of Time was successfully produced and delivered a compelling short-form storytelling experience for AR viewers. The project demonstrated the potential of real-time engines for animation and served as a proof-of-concept for the studio's shift in focus.

Overall, my role on the project was instrumental in bringing the vision to life and delivering a high-quality AR experience. The success of A Tale of Time paved the way for future AR projects at RYOT and solidified the studio's position as a leader in the emerging field of real-time animation.

However, the project did yield a few key lessons for the field of AR/XR. While VR films were widely adopted and accepted into film festivals, we had a lot of difficulty getting festivals to watch our AR film. Ultimately, there was an extremely limited audience for the film and we did not achieve the reach we had targeted.

The Task

A Tale of Time was an augmented reality (AR) animated short film that I pitched and directed at RYOT. I saw an imminent need for us as a studio to shift to realtime engines and build out a pipeline for CG animation, and I was able to secure a budget for this production as a way for the studio to proof-of-concept Unity workflows while also delivering a compelling short-form storytelling experience for AR viewers.

My Approach

As the director of the project, my role involved developing the concept and vision for the story and working with a children’s book author to nail down the story beats. The animation budget only covered animators, so I also created all of the character and environment models, textures/lookdev, and rigs.

I hired an animation studio, Boxel, to partner with us on the short. We created rough blocking for the character animation, and gradually refined it through the traditional CG animation process (blocking, two rounds of splining, and polish passes). I also cast and directed voiceover talent, and worked with a very talented composer to create custom music for the piece.

A Tale Of Time

My Approach

Watch The Film!