7 minute read
Virtual World of Wonders
Reaching Out: In fve short years, Baobab has introduced six memorable animated VR outings: Invasion! (2016), Asteroids! (2017), Jack: Part One (2018), Crow: The Legend (2018), Bonfre (2019) and Baba Yaga (2020).
The team behind the acclaimed VR powerhouse Baobab Studios looks back at fve years of creating cutting-edge, industry-defning projects.
Virtual reality startup Baobab Studios something new to put his creative energies tive and interactivity. Film and game industries has achieved so much since its incep- into after focusing on animated features for have vastly different cultures, and people from tion that it’s hard to grasp that it has two decades. “I left DreamWorks to go fgure each industry may come with preconceived noonly been fve years since it was founded by out what that ‘something’ was going to be. An tions of the other industry. They can come enMaureen Fan, Eric Darnell and Larry Cutler in old friend and former employer, Glenn Entis, trenched with their traditional ways of doing Redwood City, Calif. One of the clear front- told me that Maureen Fan, a VP of content at things. We tore these norms apart, encouraged runners in the evolving animated VR content Zynga, was interested in starting a VR anima- the team to leave behind their old processes creation feld, Baobab has managed to deliver tion company and he introduced us. When and the defnitions of ‘game’ or ‘flm.’ Instead, a series of innovative, imaginative and high- Maureen and I got together she brought an we invented our own new language to describe ly involving projects each year. The outft’s early headset. I’d never tried VR before and I what we are doing and new processes.” six major titles — Invasion! (2016), Asteroids! was blown away by what it could do and by the (2017), Jack: Part One (2018), Crow: The Leg- possibility of what it could become.” Learning from Bunnies end (2019), Bonfre (2019) and this year’s buzzy Fan says one of the key creative challenges One of the main goalposts was to make Baba Yaga — are some of the most accessible was to create a culture that blended narrative sure the team pushed the limits of interactiviand entertaining VR titles we’ve seen to date, with interactivity. “Our mission is to make the ty a little more and experimented to make the and were showered with all kinds of awards audience matter,” she explains. “That meant audience matter. “I’m really proud of how the worldwide. We recently caught up with the we needed our projects to have both narra- team has tackled ambitious problems with studio’s creative leaders to get a close-up look at how the company is faring during this very Baba Yaga challenging year.
Looking back at the studio’s beginnings, Baobab’s co-founder and chief creative offcer Eric Darnell (best known for directing blockbuster features such as Antz and the Madagascar franchise at DreamWorks), says he was looking for
Baobab principles, from left, Larry Cutler, Eric Darnell and Maureen Fan.
Crow: The Legend
‘When we won the Emmys, it felt like a culmination of all our efforts over the last three years of working our butts off as a start-up, raising money, building our own desks, squatting in friends’ offces, and putting all of our passion into this little engine that could.’
— Maureen Fan, Baobab co-founder & CEO
each project, learned, iterated and come up with new problems to solve — from the Invasion! bunny, Chloe’s eye contact and digging into cognitive psychology to fgure out people show and develop connection to each other,” says Fan. “I’m proud of what we’ve achieved in such a short time.” The CEO says it has also been quite rewarding to see how both she and Darnell have changed their creative views over the last fve years. “Eric started frmly in the traditional narrative camp, having had 25 years of feature flm success, yet over the last fve years he’s come to believe that your choices need to really matter rather than be a gimmick to get you to engage more,” says Fan. “I come more from the interactive side, having made games (the FarmVille franchise at Zynga) and have learned so much from Eric about what gets you to truly bond with a character. Merging the two together, we will be unstoppable!” Darnell says he tries to fnd a way for everything he gets involved with to be fulflling. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” he asks. “I started my career making short experimental animated flms that hardly anyone saw, and I found that fulflling. Making feature flms that millions will see is very rewarding, too, but in different ways. Making VR content is exciting because no one knows what they are doing. We are all explorers in an undiscovered country. So while VR today won’t fnd the audience that something like a Madagascar flm found 10 years ago, it is pretty invigorating to be on the tip of the spear in this brand-new medium.”
Building Emotional Stories
The studio’s head of content Kane Lee says the magic of the studio’s interactive storytelling is the way audiences can believe that their presence, feelings, thoughts and actions are part of the story that is unfolding in real time. “We invite you into our story, but it’s your story at the end of the day,” he points out.
Lee mentions that with their debut project Invasion!, Baobab had to deviate from the ways of traditional cinema to break the fourth wall in unexpected ways. “Because there were no narrative experiences in VR yet that we had seen where you were not only acknowledged but played a role through the entire story, we saw people respond in ways we hadn’t imagined,” he recalls. “They would try to pet Chloe, the bunny rabbit, make little noises at her, even mimic her — which we learned from psychology is an unconscious way of relationship-building called ‘mirroring.’”
Hand controllers were introduced in the market during the production of Asteroids!, so audiences could play fetch with a robot dog (which used AI to “mirror” the audience) and help save the life of an alien. “There was no negative outcome, but you would be rewarded with a more personal, emotional outcome — as you probably would in real life, if you decided to rise to the occasion,” says Lee.
Native Joys
He says with Crow: The Legend, the studio opted to offer something like pure unadulterated joy in key interactive moments. “You are the Spirit of the Seasons and you can literally bring winter to the planet for the frst time with the nudging from a legendary Native tribal elder, make the constellations and the planets sing with John Legend, and even create fre for the frst time with Oprah,” notes Lee
Baobab was able to push the boundaries of real-time graphics as they created its frst 2D program, rendering in real time at 11 frames per second in each eye. “We were able to make animation look beautiful both inside the headset and on a fat screen,” Lee says. “With Bonfre, we fnally learned enough in our storytelling toolset to make the audience not just a sidekick but the main character in the narrative. We accomplished something similar with a VR immersive theater piece called Jack, where live mo-cap actors interacted with you live on a stage and could improvise according to our script. But with Bonfre, we could use AI to give our characters emotional ‘brains.’”
Lee says the latest offering from the studio, Baba Yaga, combines everything the Baobab magicians have learned from past projects to build a narrative climax around a choice the VR user will make to determine how their personal fairytale may culminate. “Baba Yaga really represents that next step forward for us on a number of different fronts,” says Chief Technology Offcer Larry Cutler. “It’s this amazing set of fairy tales that comes from Eastern European or Russian mythology and centers on this witch who lives in a house that’s on top of chicken legs and she rides around on a mortar and pestle. In many of the cases, she’s this kind of evil villain, while in others, she’s ambiguous.”
Although this year’s pandemic restrictions made it impossible for Baobab to have live presentations at popular VR venues like Tribeca and SIGGRAPH, the studio was able to participate in online, virtual events and, in a way, made their projects accessible to a wider audience around the world.
Fan and her partners all believe that younger audiences are hungry for more interactive content. “It’s what they do,” she says. “They love games and immersing themselves in animated worlds for hours on end. For VR, the market is accelerating massively with Quest sales and COVID. In addition, people are stuck at home and VR offers them an excellent escape. For animation in any form (2D or otherwise) there’s incredible demand because it doesn’t require in-person flming the way live action does. Baobab is driving even deeper into the 2D animation space given the incoming demand from TV, flm and book distributors for our stories and characters. We’ve been asked to adapt many of our VR IP into these more traditional mediums. We’re honored that there’s so much interest.” ◆
