Star in This Blade Runner 2049 Trailer
Friends, today is a big day.
For the first time ever, you can see yourself as the main character of the movie you love. Okay, not the full two-hour movie (yet!), but for the duration of the trailer, you can put Ryan Gosling, star of the upcoming movie Blade Runner 2049, on the bench.
Once we admitted that this is clearly the coolest experiment we’ve ever worked on, it came the time to take a step back and realize that we are actually delving into something way deeper — a new way to approach storytelling. And THAT is why it is a big day.
Hit Pause! How Does This All Work?
By coupling Sony Xperia 3D Creator scanning feature with our test app, you can create a lifelike 3D avatar of yourself and make it the main character of custom, 3D-animated scenes. Our first scenes were created as tributes to widely known pop-culture movies. Today, we are thrilled to introduce the first scene created specifically for the release of a movie, with the green light from Blade Runner 2049’s producers and distributors — Warner Bros, Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures.
As a Blade Runner super fan, I can barely temper my enthusiasm. Seeing myself inside Ridley Scott’s dystopian universe is like watching a fantasy come to life, and it’s a fantastic way to illustrate the “magical” side of what we are working on.
A Big Day to Challenge Conventional Storytelling
As a fan, being in a trailer is cool. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to have access to full-fledged bonus scenes that can only be activated with your avatar? What if you were the main character of a side story that solves an unexplained element of the movie?
Let’s continue down that path, give you a glimpse of how far we can go. I mentioned bonus scenes, but why not think of a whole movie where you are the hero? And in fact, why just be the hero? Imagine if you could choose to be either the hero or the villain?
That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? But are you comfortable with seeing yourself being bad? Hurting people? Process this for a second…
Now, you realize that we are dipping our toes into completely uncharted territory.
In a way, it is a completely new branch of storytelling.
Think about it: for decades, we have been writing screenplays with a single, top-level framework — the audience is “watching” the content and consuming it as a “neutral” spectator, so if you want to trigger emotions, you need to create characters that people can relate to. This assumption is certainly challenged by the content we produce, since the audience is actually IN the content.
The way you see yourself will impact your viewing experience at a much deeper level, giving screenwriters a new and powerful lever to pull the strings of your emotions.
And To Think We Are Only Scratching The Surface
We can discuss the content above because the building-blocks of lifelike avatar creation are now available. For starters, take a 3D-scanning app and add a robust scan-to-avatar engine (that’s us right there).
Yet the technology is not currently accessible to all devices, and in terms of rendering quality — even if it easily eclipses everything done before at this scale — we are not yet at, say, Pixar-grade. If you are an avid follower of the technology world, you can anticipate that it is just a matter of time before we reach that level.
In the meantime, we can’t wait to work with industry leaders to produce more and more exciting content, and set rules and boundaries for this new era of what we could call self-casting content.
To that end, in this pioneering experience, what collaboration is better than one with the Blade Runner films? Blade Runner is an iconic sci-fi masterpiece that impacted millions and inspired so many illustrators, writers, and creators with its special universe and mind-binding questions about self-awareness and the human/replicant duality. The perfect fit.
Picture credit: https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/56928382767612404/
