Google Spotlight Stories continues to evolve as an “on device” experience, luring Patrick Osborne (Pearl) and Shannon Tindle (On Ice), who appeared on a first-time Google panel at Comic-Con.
The phone creates a window to a 360-degree story, providing the freedom to look anywhere, set the pacing and frame the shot. Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group thinks of it as a mobile movie theater in your pocket.
“So my initial inspiration for this was using the perceived limits to make this more interesting to watch. And all of the interesting looks that I’ve been into playing around with at Disney could be done in real-time. I was trying to simplify color and shape, and it seemed like something you could do in a game engine: playing with edits and a pared down look. What you see is what you get, so as you’re working and animating you don’t have the compositing step that you normally do. On top of that we’re doing stuff with music and syncing audio to what happens on screen.”
Pearl is a road picture told in musical format (composed by Scot Stafford) and made at Evil Eye Pictures and Google ATAP. It’s produced by David Eisenmann, exec produced by Karen Dufilho of Spotlight, with Tuna Bora serving as production designer and Matt McDonald as VFX supervisor.
Meanwhile, Tindle has been also working with Evil Eye and ATAP on his wacky comedy, On Ice, about a bear that wrecks an Ice Capades show for the star skater. Tom Knott produces, Dufilho exec produces for Spotlight, Lou Romano is production designer, Mark Oftedal serves as animation director, McDonald is VFX supervisor and the score is by Stafford.
“So we took inspiration from ’70s/’80s sci-fi and I carried that through to the music as well. I wanted it to sound like Queen did the music for this and I think Scot did a good job of that. It’s heavy guitar, big music, and kept saying go bigger.”
The same philosophy applied to the animation as well. “Once you’ve hit way too stupid, you’ve probably hit where I want. The look is inspired by 2D graphics: simple silhouettes and rich color. I wanted a more stylized, flatter look even though it’s in CG. And a fairly broad palette.”
On Ice really pushes the SDK with so much going on. Tindle makes use of an extended arena screen for additional clips, and the viewer is free to explore other skaters to some degree.
“It’s pretty amazing what we were able to get using real-time graphics,” Tindle added. “And it wasn’t iterative except to refine — it was whatever I wanted and whatever I liked. ‘Get it on device.’ You hear it all the time. And we thumbnailed it and got it into Maya as quickly as possible. It’s an amazing way to work.”
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
