Thursday, April 20, 2017

A Moment in Time

Before I talk about this piece I wanted to first borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs.
"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything."
To me this applies to the Oculus Rift & Touch in combination with "Quill": A VR painting tool developed by oculus story studio. After doing several paintings in VR, one of them being "Worlds in Worlds", Quill already changed the way I look at art forever. And just as I thought it can't get more exciting the Quill team let me test a version of Quill with animation capabilities.
Immediately I started thinking about how I could use it in my work. Several years ago I used to create animated gifs in form of endless loops. I always liked how these gifs could capture moments far better than a single painting. That made me think:
"What if I painted and animated a moment in time that people could explore and experience from multiple angles at their own pace?"
This is when I started working on my first animated Quillustration. I started with a street and animated a guy walking down this street frame by frame. Then I added a guy smoking a cigarette on the other side of the street all as looping animations. The more I added to the scene the more magical it became. Seeing my painted characters come alive and being inside my painting with them was incredible. The scene kept growing and as I added positional audio to the mix it became complete. This piece took me about 80 hours to finish and the fact that Quill allows a single person to create something like this is still mind boggling to me. Important to note, what you are about to see is a real time capture of the animated Quillustration meaning it’s all running in real time inside Quill. This new medium is truly something extraordinary, it's more than I could have ever dreamed of! So thank you Inigo Quilez and the Quill team to make this possible!
This is "A Moment in Time"