Eddie vr fiance11/4/2023 This is my first time in a "social" VR environment, and it's hard not to smile the first time a real/not real VR person waves at me. I am given the chance to dive into Maestro to see how the team collaborates in the virtual world they have created. The distinctive visual style makes Arden's Wake feel more like a "proper movie." The characteristics of the world it portrays feel familiar, so your attention isn't drawn away from the characters, but it's visually compelling enough that you sneak a look around any moment you can. (Penrose's staff does contain some Pixar DNA.) The artistic style is vaguely similar to what we've seen before in Henry (by Oculus Story Studio, where Chung once also worked). Arden's Wake is much closer to something you'd expect from Disney or Pixar in its aesthetic style. Each character's role is unclear right now, but the delivery is captivating.Īrtistically, Penrose's last project, Allumette, sits somewhere between Henry Selick's James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Meena's father, Tide, is an inventor, but is he a good inventor? We catch a glimpse of a potential love interest and a mysterious beast in the darkest depths of the deep blue. It sets the scene, the context and the backstory, with just enough teasing elements to leave you hungry for what happens next. The episode I was shown is described as the prologue for a tale that will continue to grow in installments. "I don't think we could have done any of the Penrose sequences without Maestro," he says.Īrden's Wake takes place in the middle of the ocean sometime after the family of its hero, Meena, is torn apart during an accident at sea. "We're cooking food in the kitchen because we're hungry," Chung tells me, explaining that in the absence of any existing tools for the job, Penrose was basically forced to create its own. Maestro allows everyone involved in a project, creatives and engineers alike, to step out of their separate professional worlds, into the same virtual one. Imagine a VR Slack with moonlike faces for avatars, and chunky articulated hands. CEO Eugene Chung explained to me that Arden's Wake likely wouldn't have been possible - not at this level of visual fidelity and sophistication - without it.Ĭollaborating inside the actual virtual world they were creating was so crucial that Penrose developed its own in-house tool for the job: Maestro. While Zuckerberg's frivolous virtual selfies might be getting the headlines, Penrose has quietly been using VR collaboration almost every day for the past 18 months. This week, Facebook revealed Spaces, an app that melds hanging out with real friends with the synthetic worlds of VR. Little did I know when I watched a preview of Arden's Wake recently at Penrose's San Francisco HQ that the world of virtual reality was about to shift. The same studio that gave us the haunting Allumette and infantile captivation of The Rose and I is back at the Tribeca Film Festival this year with its third VR story - Arden's Wake - and it promises to be bigger, more detailed and more technically improbable than anything we've seen from the studio so far. Penrose Studios doesn't care much for comfort, it seems. The limitations of a cinema screen make storytelling easier, linear, comfortable. There's no " mise en scène" to play with, and even the basic 180-degree rule is washed away with a head turn. Making good animated movies in virtual reality is hard. Making movies in virtual reality is easy.
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