Wired - An animated multi-scene movie drawn and animated in VR

This four-minute short was made by a student from New York

Animated films created using the VR helmet are not a special novelty. But most of them are separate scenes looped into a repeating loop like an animated GIF. Perhaps the camera moves there, grabs some details, but as such there is no history there. But cartoon Wired is another matter. This is one of the first animated films created in VR, containing several scenes and a pronounced story. This beautiful short film shows the life of a boy studying a world without wireless technology. It falls from a cable stretched over huge skyscrapers, which makes local residents look up and enjoy the sky.

The film was made by one person, Zeyu Ren , a design student and animator from New York. He decided to start the project by watching a short filmAlex's Sci-Fi World , an amazing looped animation created by Matt Schäfer using Oculus Quill, a Facebook-based 3D drawing and animation software package. Wren became interested and began experimenting with a Rift helmet owned by his college of the Rhode Island School of Design.


Ren had his own Instagram project called Planet Diary , where he drew three-dimensional planets and wrote short stories about their fictional inhabitants and their features. For example, in December 2016, he drew the blue balloon Kisage, and wrote: “Kisage, an ice world whose inhabitants have to migrate to and fro between north and south, fleeing floods caused by melting ice.” Wren wondered if he could use Quill to visualize one of his fictional worlds. The student was attracted by the speed of working with the tool, which allows creating three-dimensional animation without traditional problems - complex modeling, rigging, texturing and lighting settings.

“All this usually takes so long,” Ren Engadget said. “And in Quill, you can do all this just by drawing.”

At first, he practiced a bit by painting his Chinese hometown of Huabei. The final looping video, published on Vimeo in May 2018, shows a busy intersection where there is an Apple store, Starbucks cafe and many quadrocopters flying overhead. The video turned out to be rude, but understandable enough, filled with animated advertising, street food sellers and children playing on portable consoles. “The video shows a lot of experimentation,” he explained, “when I try to create this feeling of immersion and a vibrant city.”


In the same month, Facebook art director Goro Fujita released Beyond the Fence , an animated movie made with Quill and designed for Facebook Spaces' social VR project. The two-dimensional version was also posted on Vimeo. Rena was inspired by the short but sweet story of a little robot trying to escape from a landfill of rusty waste. Until that moment, he saw only short, looped videos like GIF animations. “And I thought,“ Oops, it works, ”he said.

Ren knew from the very beginning that he wanted to paint a world that relied on cables for charging and communications. “There probably aren't any batteries in it,” he explained. The student imagined a dense forest, where instead of a copious amount of vines hanging wires. But in order to make a real film, he needed to show some kind of “change” in the characters or the environment, as well as an abstract element, an episode that gives artistic value and expressiveness.

Almost immediately, he decided that there would be an episode in the film with an airplane connected to a giant cable. “Since this is the beauty of this world, everything is connected using cables,” he said. It took some time to invent the rest of the story. At first, Ren thought of a boy with a pacemaker who wants to break out of his city while remaining physically attached to the house where he grew up. But it was a difficult idea, and having talked with the teachers, he simplified it a bit to a curious boy who noticed a beautiful butterfly outside his balcony.



Ren began by drawing various skyscrapers in the forest. It was a rough sketch in which the colors were not perfectly matched, but it was proof that the scene and general concept could work inside Quill. “On the very first day, I already had a video footage on which the boy looked up, and I made him look at the plane,” he said. “And I thought: Wow, if you bring it to a decent appearance, it could be a good 10 second story.” He made sketches of base shots and episodes on paper for recording, but relied on the imagination and experiments inside Quill when he brought each episode to a final state.

The young director broke the film into four separate episodes: the main skyscraper, from which neither the sky nor the plane can be seen, the roof with a beautiful blue sky and the airliner flying overhead, the abstract “fall”, and the final episode, where the boy woke up on the ground, and locals open onto balconies. These episodes needed to be split into separate project files partly because of how the processing of light and exposure was done in Quill. For example, the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the first episode meant that the sky above your head would look white and overexposed.

Dividing the film into parts made the project easier to work with. The “copy and move” Quill animation style means that the basic geometry - and the size of the entire project - doubles with each new frame. “Therefore, if you squeeze a four-minute animation into a single file, it will end up being huge,” Ren said. “So you have to break everything up and organize it carefully.”



The student spent most of October creating the scenery, character development, and “just doing free creativity.” In November, he redoubled his efforts by drawing and animating at Quill for six hours each day. By December, he was ready to “shoot” all the scenes in Quill and export them to Adobe Premiere. Using After Effects, he added visual beauties, and then exported the resulting material to the high-quality Apple ProRes format. The final version, with background noise and music written by composer Häfen Liu, he brought to Mac using Final Cut Pro.

The duration of Wired was a little longer than that of Beyond the Fence, four minutes. But these two projects are slightly different. Wired was immediately designed as a traditional animated film that can be watched on a laptop, smartphone or TV. This decision allowed Ren to limit the clutter of the 3D world and build the behavior of the virtual “camera” to ensure that it does not get into the frame. Beyond the Fence animation is intended for viewing in a VR environment where the user can look in any direction.

Ren was surprised that he was able to finish Wired by January: according to his plan, the project had to be completed by the end of the academic year. The animator posted the film on Vimeo and in the popular group Virtual Animation. The response was mostly positive, and helped build Quill's potential as a tool for creating videos. “That's great,” commented VR researcher Eva Hoert. “One of my favorite shorts made in VR.”



Facebook users were also amazed at the scale and quality of work. Fujita immediately contacted Ren and asked him to describe the process of working with Quill in a separate article. “I almost fell out of my chair,” Ren said. “It's great, because I know that I can share with the community the workflow, the problems that have arisen and how I solved them.” Soon after the release of the film, the Quill update should happen, which will simplify the creation of long meter films in VR. “You can make the whole movie in one of the upcoming releases,” Inigo Quilez, product manager and Facebook chief engineer wrote in a comment.

“The potential of this tool should improve markedly after the next few updates,” Ren said. - From Facebook I was informed by email that Quill will be able to edit longer stories. I was very happy about this. "

An artist in VR will graduate from a design school this spring. Now he plans to make a small series of one-two-minute episodes, which will be drawn and animated in Quill. “I’ve already started the pre-production phase,” he hinted.