The making of "Age of Sail"

ABSTRACT

"Age of Sail" tells the story of William Avery, an old sailor adrift and alone in the North Atlantic. When Avery rescues Lara, who has mysteriously fallen overboard, he finds redemption and hope in his darkest hours. In this production talk we'll go behind the scenes in the making of this multi-platform immersive animated short. Some of the unique challenges we'll discuss: bringing a 2D illustrated style to life in the medium of 6DoF VR with new non-photorealistic rendering techniques; immersing the viewer in a storm-tossed ocean without making them seasick; adapting a single story to multiple mediums (desktop/mobile VR, 360° video, and 2D film); creating a better sounding and more responsive sound mix with multiple surround formats and a new spatialization model; and optimizing it all to run at 60fps on a mobile phone.

References

1. Cassidy Curtis, Kevin Dart, Theresa Latzko, and John Kahrs. 2019. Non-Photorealistic Animation for Immersive Storytelling. In Proceedings of the ACM/EG Expressive Symposium (Expressive '19). Eurographics, Genoa, Italy.
2. Patrick Osborne, Rachid El Guerrab, David Eisenmann, and Cassidy Curtis. 2016. The Making of "Pearl," a Google Spotlight Story. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Production Sessions (SIGGRAPH '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 29, 1 pages.
3. Scot Stafford, Kevin Dart, Theresa Latzko, Sara Diamond, and Camille Cellucci. 2017. Sonaria. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Computer Animation Festival (SIGGRAPH '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33--33.
4. Jerry Tessendorf. 2004. Simulating Ocean Surfaces. ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes 32 (2004).

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

      • Virtual reality

    • Rendering

      • Non-photorealistic rendering