#2 How to Spur Emotion Using VR with Larry Cutler
How VR will allow creators to tap into human emotion more than ever before
Larry Cutler has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry for dozens of years starting at Pixar and then Dreamworks. Cutler cofounded Baobab Studios alongside his longtime friend Maureen Fan when they realized that VR was finally ready for some primetime application.
Google released the animated VR short Invasion! as a launch title along side the Google Daydream. Invasion! features a bunny rabbit named Chloe that thwarts the invasion of earth by aliens.
Invasion!, directed by Eric Darnell who also wrote and directed the Madagascar films had an incredible launch and has proven to many the power of VR animated movies and how strong emotional bonds can be forged with characters in a short period of time.
Click on any of the links on the left to listen to my talk with Shane on your favorite podcasting platform or scroll down for our interview text!
I strongly recommend you watch the full short Invasion! by Baobab Studios by clicking on the video link below!
Thanks for joining me Larry, how would you describe Invasion!, and have you shared it with younger audiences?
LC: Yes, we’ve definitely shown Invasion! to younger audiences. It’s ultimately an animated cartoon in VR about two Alliances who try to take over Earth but they’re always thwarted by the cutest little bunny creatures and not by humans. So, in this case the invasion is thwarted by a bunny named Chloe, so of course our films are geared to people of all ages.
We really want to have shorts and VR projects that have really broad appeal across a wide range of age demographics. However, the VR the jury is out on what is an appropriate age for showing content to because there’s no real research yet to understand how VR affects a child’s brain.
In fact, we’re always very cautious and we want to make sure that the work that we’re doing is not only appropriate content wise for kids, but at the same time, the industry as a whole really wants to understand how we can create VR experiences that really further kids’ education and make kids super excited to learn more, and to really interact with these worlds in ways that they just couldn’t get previously.
For me personally, VR is really interesting because my daughter has an eye issue where one of her eyes is stronger than the other. It’s often called a lazy eye and that means that she wears a patch a few hours a day, and wearing a patch is something that is really super challenging for a kid to do.
And yet it’s amazing how much stronger their weak eye gets from wearing a patch, so one of the most amazing uses of VR that I’ve seen is a company called Vivid Vision, where the founder actually had a lazy eye, and as a kid hated wearing a patch. So, he never wore one and his eyesight never healed fully as an adult. He’s created VR games that help kids and adults to be able to really treat their eyes and to make their weak eye as strong as possible.
So, on the weaker eye they’ll actually give a lot of high frequency information and they’ll have the world something that’s very grounded in the dominant eye, and in this way, they can both detect how much vision loss or how much weaker the weak eye is. And at the same time, they can help strengthen the weak eye by changing the parameters of what’s shown in one eye versus the other. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
So, I had my daughter come with me and we did a demo of all this stuff, and what was amazing is that instead of something that is a stigma and was always a challenge for her, wearing a patch a couple hours a day, all of a sudden, she was doing something that was essentially playing games, and at the same time, she was really strengthening her eyes. I think applications like that have huge promise.
All the possible medical applications are what really get me excited about VR. Just the various ways in which we will be able to help people, especially in psychology and mental health counseling.
LC: Yeah and it’s funny. What’s interesting is that as a grad student, I did VR research, twenty years ago and we were really doing very early work. I was actually focused on how we use two hands with six degree of freedom trackers input devices actively, which now, all of a sudden, is becoming much more prevalent where the vibe controllers and the Oculus touch.
That’s really cool. Where do you do this research?
LC: I was doing this research as a grad student at Stanford, one of the canonical demos that we had at the time. We had this table top display called the response of workbench and you projected images on the table which felt like they were on top of the table. The main demo that we had was a medical application for medical learning where you had a skeleton on the table.
You could go in and grab all the organs and bones and scale and rotate them and have real anatomy training. I saw the promise of VR twenty years ago. It just didn’t work at the time but I knew how transformative VR was going to be when it was finally ready for mainstream adoption.
I’ve been focused on the entertainment industry over the last twenty years so we’re very excited to have a new medium for entertainment. But in a wide range of industries, I think you’re going to see it transform. How we cannot just visualize, but how we will be able to interact and train.
Absolutely but let’s rewind a second. Let’s go a bit into your Computer Science background at Stanford and then later on at DreamWorks and the entertainment industry. How did you end up co-founding and becoming CTO of Baobab?
LC: I have been following VR for the last couple of decades from afar, and in some sense, have always been waiting for VR to be ready for mainstream adoption. It’s just been one of those things in the back of my mind, even though I spent my career primarily in the computer animation industry.
Then when the Rift prototype started coming out. A lot of my co-workers were just incredibly, incredibly excited and started doing work with them, and there was just an incredible amount of buzz in the artist community and the technical community.
I started putting on the DK2 and seeing demos, and immediately, I saw a lot of the technical and economic challenges. However, now there was heavy backing because Facebook had purchased Oculus.
Suddenly, that meant that there were a lot of other big players who were getting in and looking at VR and it became apparent that VR was here, and at the same time, that VR could really transform entertainment.
I knew Maureen Fan, our CEO and co-founder of Baobab, because she went to Stanford several years after me, and I mentored her in the past, and we’ve stayed and been close friends since then.
I’ve also worked with Eric Darnell our Chief Creative Officer and other co-founder who was also the writer and director for all the Madagascar films at DreamWorks. I worked with him at DreamWorks and the three of us came together with the same vision that we could create animated experiences and animated narrative stories using VR, and it would have this amazing ability to inspire the dreamer and all of us to bring out our sense of wonder and take you to worlds and make those worlds feel real in a way that just wasn’t possible in other mediums.
So far, Invasion! was our first short which we premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and the reaction has been beyond anything we could have dreamed about. We’ve had a lot of critical acclaim for the short, and at the same time, it’s one of the more popular content pieces of VR, and I think a big part of that is that not only are you immersed in this world, but the that you fall in love with the characters and you make this connection that’s just fundamentally different than the connection that you make in a film. We actually try to put you in the action and make you part of the story. In that way, people had responses to it that were just very different, and were fundamentally much more immersed than they would have been from sitting back in the theatre and watching a movie.
How, how do you demonstrate VR films to a crowd of people?
LC: Yes, so obviously with the VR headset it’s not something where everyone sitting in the theatre is watching the same experience at the same time. We actually demoed Invasion! over two thousand times as part of our process of doing user testing. Most of that was really one on one demos where you get someone in a headset and they watch Invasion!, and then you ask them questions, and of course, we can see what they’re viewing so other people can see what you’re viewing in the headset.
But there really is something quite different from watching something on a screen when you’re actually in the world, and you’re immersed with these characters, but most of it is really that one on one user testing.
What I find really amazing about Baobab is that you guys are all from very deep in the entertainment industry. You’re not a bunch of co-founders who decided that animation’s going to be huge and VR is cool so let’s do that.
“You guys cover strong backgrounds in entertainment, and you know the fundamentals. You’re just taking this new technology and optimizing it.”
You guys cover strong backgrounds in entertainment, and you know the fundamentals. You’re just taking this new technology and optimizing it.
LC: One thing for us is that we have deep roots in both the computer animation and feature film world as well as the game world. For us, the most important thing in the creation of a VR narrative experience is the storytelling and that really hasn’t changed at all.
For us to be successful, we have to tell great stories that have great characters that you have empathy for, and that you fall in love with, and then our goal is to take those stories and tell them in a brand new way with VR.
“For us to be successful, we have to tell great stories that have great characters that you have empathy for”
What we’re hoping for is that you’ll have that same kind of emotional connection that you have with a great movie. But unlike a great movie, you’ll also be part of that world and part of the action. You’ll be able to not just have the empathy that you have for these characters, but you’ll be a part of the story and be able to act on that empathy. That’s really what needs compassion where you’re acting on the empathy that you have for the characters, and we hope that that’s going to have an even more powerful response from users.
But everything comes down to great storytelling and that’s the craft that we’ve been working on our whole careers at DreamWorks and Pixar.
HP: I know that you secured a large investment from Twentieth Century Fox, and I know Google definitely likes you guys. What has the reception been like from the mainstream industry?
We’re really excited to have Twentieth Century Fox and Google as partners in different ways. The reception of Invasion! has been incredibly positive, both from a critical acclaim standpoint, and it’s one of the more popular pieces of content in VR across a wide range of platforms.
From Hollywood’s perspective, what’s interesting is that they want to partner with us because of our storytelling D.N.A., and at the same time, they really see that we’re pioneering the path for narrative storytelling in VR, and this is something that they see as part of their future.
They’re just excited to work with Eric Darnell, our co-founder, because he has this strong proven track record for all the movies that he’s done at DreamWorks. He’s got this twenty-year track record of creating great characters and the team that we’ve assembled has incredible depth to help deliver on that. It’s been incredibly surprising and exciting for us is that we just signed a deal recently with Roth Kirshenbaum Films.
They want to turn the characters in Invasion! into a feature length movie. What’s notable about this is that this is the first time that we have a story and characters that were created for VR that are being turned into a mainstream feature film in a Hollywood movie.
What has been typically happening in VR is it’s going the other way. Hollywood is taking their movies and then they’re trying to create experiences in VR with those characters; this is really going the other way around.
That’s incredible. When I was watching Invasion!, I noticed that there was very little pixelation. Unlike typical 360 recorded pieces. How by using animation, everything looks so great.
LC: It’s interesting. When we started, one of our hypotheses was that VR and animation are a really perfect fit for each other because in animation, firstly, you’re always creating these realities that are really just the imagination of the creators and they don’t exist in the real world.
And there always is a stylization and a perspective on reality. That stylization allows us to not get into the uncanny valley where suddenly, you’re going to be creeped out by having a pixelated version of real life. We felt that both creatively and technically, animation is a perfect fit for VR and the other aspect is that with animation, we can also have characters that respond to you and are interactive, and that enables us to make you part of the story and have the characters really respond to the actions that you do in the story.
Right at the beginning of Invasion!, this little rabbit walks over to the camera and sort of looks at you.
LC: I think that the relationship that the users end up having with the bunny is one of the most profound effects of VR for us. At the beginning of our piece, the bunny Chloe kind of hops up to you and looks you straight in the eye. That’s a very simple form of interaction because the bunny is looking directly at you. Everyone looks completely at the bunny and they’re completely focused on the bunny and they make this connection.
And then people actually do things that you would never do in a film, so basically people will start to wave at the bunny. They’ll try to reach out and touch and pet the bunny. They’ll say “Hi”. A number of people were actually mimicking what the bunny was doing. They’ll try to hop around with the bunny and these are just not reactions that you would have if you were watching the same short up in the movie theatre.
And in fact, basically, people are suspending their disbelief and they’re treating the bunny as if she’s real, because they’re actually in that world and they’re making this connection with Chloe that’s just very different than the type of connection that you have in a movie where you’re really not part of that world.
We were playing with that later on in the short where you are actually positioned between the alliance who are trying to attack the bunny and the bunny character Chloe is behind you, kind of cowering, and people found this to be the most compelling part of the narrative. They felt very protective of the bunny because they were the one thing that was in between the bunny and the alliance, and one of our advisors even commented that he could almost feel Chloe’s breath on the back of his neck. Even though he knew she wasn’t real. That really highlighted that there’s actually something here, that is really powerful about this power of the bunny and the power of that connection that you can have with these characters at VR.
Yeah that is something I wouldn’t have noticed without experiencing it myself. What are your main focuses as CTO?
LC: First of all, any time you are working in a new medium, it requires an incredible amount of technology and tools to create these experiences. We’re trying to define a whole new medium for storytelling in VR and as a result, we’re kind of building a pipeline and toolset to be able to create these stories as efficiently and with as much quality as possible.
For us we see this not as a set of limitations, but an incredible opportunity to push the boundaries of what’s possible. And the thing is, I always say, even though I’m CTO, ultimately everything we do is really about telling a great story. The story dictates the technology that we work with and ultimately, the art and the science are only there to service the story.
I think that’s something that really hit home to me. I was at Pixar which is where I began my career in the early days, and the mantra was always that all the greatest tech should only be there in service of this story and that is part of our DNA here.
“The greatest tech should only be there in service of this story”
But that being said, it’s very important for us to build up a strong robust engineering team at Baobab, because there are great opportunities and challenges both to be able to work in this medium, do more of our work in VR, have an opportunity to innovate in that space and to have the best quality characters up on screen and the best quality visuals up on screen. All of that takes a lot of hard engineering work to do.
What are some of your greatest challenges?
LC: I think our greatest challenges stem from the creative where we ultimately have to come up with a brand new cinematic language for VR so there’s been this hundred-year history of how you can effectively tell stories in a film, how to use a camera movement, how you can cut, how you can focus the viewer’s attention and then all of a sudden with VR, we have to relearn all of that, and we have to re-think all of that. The idea of focusing the viewer’s attention becomes a lot more complicated and challenging because ultimately, the viewer has more agency. They can look anywhere in the world they want at any time. They can miss the action as they could be looking completely in the opposite direction of where the acting be where we want the viewer to be having the right.
First of all, we need the right set of tools so that our artists and our filmmakers can actually direct the view where the viewer needs to look at, when they need to look there and still have a compelling narrative experience.
That is both a creative challenge and of course that leads to technical challenges so that we can implement these features. So, there’s just an incredible amount of experimentation that we need to do to figure out what is narrative storytelling in VR and how to do that effectively. We’ve just taken the first little baby steps in that direction but I know that we’ll continue to learn and experiment with each of the projects we do so that it’s both creative and technical.
That’s, pretty incredible. What are some things that you’re excited looking forward?
LC: There’s a ton of things. We’re excited about the idea of the viewer being an active participant in the narrative and being part of that story and being called upon to not just be immersed in the world, but actually become a character in the story.
That is called upon to act at certain points in time and what this means is that we need characters that have that same super high quality of character performance that you have in an animated film, and at the same time, be as reactive and as responsive as you would expect from a high quality game and kind of bring those worlds together.
We feel that being able to have you be part of that world is going to allow us to both have the best qualities of a film where you really do have this connection of the characters, and at the same time, you can also act on the character’s behalf. I think we’re just touching the surface of what’s possible there and I think we’re going to keep pushing on that in the future.
“I think we’re just touching the surface of what’s possible there and I think we’re going to keep pushing on that in the future”
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