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e Reaching Out: In five short years, Baobab has introduced six memorable animated VR outings: Invasion! (2016), Asteroids! (2017), Jack: Part One (2018), Crow: The Legend (2018), Bonfire (2019) and Baba Yaga (2020).
Virtual World of Wonders The team behind the acclaimed VR powerhouse Baobab Studios looks back at five years of creating cutting-edge, industry-defining projects.
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irtual reality startup Baobab Studios has achieved so much since its inception that it’s hard to grasp that it has only been five years since it was founded by Maureen Fan, Eric Darnell and Larry Cutler in Redwood City, Calif. One of the clear frontrunners in the evolving animated VR content creation field, Baobab has managed to deliver a series of innovative, imaginative and highly involving projects each year. The outfit’s six major titles — Invasion! (2016), Asteroids! (2017), Jack: Part One (2018), Crow: The Legend (2019), Bonfire (2019) and this year’s buzzy Baba Yaga — are some of the most accessible and entertaining VR titles we’ve seen to date, and were showered with all kinds of awards worldwide. We recently caught up with the studio’s creative leaders to get a close-up look at how the company is faring during this very challenging year. Looking back at the studio’s beginnings, Baobab’s co-founder and chief creative officer Eric Darnell (best known for directing blockbuster features such as Antz and the Madagascar franchise at DreamWorks), says he was looking for
something new to put his creative energies into after focusing on animated features for two decades. “I left DreamWorks to go figure out what that ‘something’ was going to be. An old friend and former employer, Glenn Entis, told me that Maureen Fan, a VP of content at Zynga, was interested in starting a VR animation company and he introduced us. When Maureen and I got together she brought an early headset. I’d never tried VR before and I was blown away by what it could do and by the possibility of what it could become.” Fan says one of the key creative challenges was to create a culture that blended narrative with interactivity. “Our mission is to make the audience matter,” she explains. “That meant we needed our projects to have both narra-
tive and interactivity. Film and game industries have vastly different cultures, and people from each industry may come with preconceived notions of the other industry. They can come entrenched with their traditional ways of doing things. We tore these norms apart, encouraged the team to leave behind their old processes and the definitions of ‘game’ or ‘film.’ Instead, we invented our own new language to describe what we are doing and new processes.”
Learning from Bunnies One of the main goalposts was to make sure the team pushed the limits of interactivity a little more and experimented to make the audience matter. “I’m really proud of how the team has tackled ambitious problems with Baba Yaga
Baobab principles, from left, Larry Cutler, Eric Darnell and Maureen Fan. www.animationmagazine.net
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january 21
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