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Last fall, after weeks of frustration, Inigo Quilez sent an email to his bosses at Oculus Story Studio that essentially said This isn’t working. The visual effects supervisor had been trying to make headway on the studio's virtual reality movie Dear Angelica, but it just didn’t look right.
"We were trying to transform 2-D illustrations into VR and it wasn’t looking good enough," Quilez says. "So I was like, 'No one is doing anything about it.'"
To find a solution, Quilez asked for a two-week sabbatical from his normal duties. By the end of it, he'd coded an entirely new program that allows artists to paint completely within a VR environment using an Oculus Rift headset and the company's Touch controllers. The program, called Quill, is enabling Story Studio to create an experience for Dear Angelica that lets users move around illustrations as they’re being drawn—and it’s unlike anything animators have ever used before.
At least, it had better be: Wesley Allsbrook is moving her life across the country to use it.
Allsbrook is an editorial illustrator and graphic novelist by trade; now she's *Dear Angelica'*s art director. Story Studio creative head Saschka Unseld asked her to be the illustrator for Dear Angelica after seeing a piece she illustrated for a The New York Times opinion piece on sexual assault. She came out to San Francisco from New York to meet the Story Studio team last fall, just around the time Quilez was hitting peak frustration with Angelica, and the two built Quill to give Allsbrook everything she would need to animate the project.
“Inigo made the basics of it during a hackathon,” Allsbrook says. “And as soon as he had shown me this thing I was like ‘OK, well, it’s time to pack up all of my stuff and dump my boyfriend and move to San Francisco because obviously I want to do this with these people.'”
While Allsbrook’s worldly possessions are currently on a truck on its way to the Bay Area, though, her work continues. Since November she’s been working at Story Studio illustrating Dear Angelica, two short teasers of which are being shown today at the Sundance Film Festival. The VR movie involves a teenage girl named Jessica whose actress mother (the titular Angelica) has died but left behind many films her daughter can use to remember her. It unfolds as Jessica writes a letter to her late mother. As her memories come back, viewers watch them being drawn, line by line. "When we started with it, the question became ‘What would memories look like?'" Unseld says. "That’s where the thought came up that the memory should feel like an illustration."
Capturing that feeling is Quill’s true killer use. Similar to the way Google's Tilt Brush works with the HTC Vive, the program places Allsbrook inside a huge empty VR room and then turns her right hand into a paintbrush and her left into a palette. Since she's using Oculus’ Touch controllers rather than a computer screen or paper, she can not only draw left-to-right and up-down, but also near and far, creating a fully volumetric rendering of what she’s drawn. But instead of just outputting a still illustration, Quill captures the location of her strokes as well as speed and turns the actual drawing process into the animation. So what viewers will see with Dear Angelica is not only her drawings but how she drew them, one line at a time.
“The point is that I can make things directly in VR,” Allsbrook says. “I don’t have to sort of do something on a screen, then put on a headset and say 'This doesn’t look right.' I already know that it’s right because my body is there with the work.”
Having one’s body in a body of work is a surreal and, frankly, amazing experience. After just a few minutes playing around with Quill it’s easy to see why Allsbrook would move across the country to use it. Not only does it let her draw anything anywhere in a fully three-dimensional space, it also lets her grab and pull illustrations towards her—just the way someone would do if they were, say, holding a piece of pottery to paint it. "I feel like working with this stuff has really taught me things about drawing," Allsbrook says. "Because when you draw you’re meant to kind of imagine the entirety of the form even though you’re only drawing one certain side."
So, will Oculus users ever be able to draw the way Allsbrook does after their headsets and Touches arrive? Or, for that matter, will other VR movie animators? Maybe. Currently, Quill is being used only on Dear Angelica, and Story Studio’s efforts are solely focused on finishing that VR film in the next few months. (No exact release date has been set.) After that, according to Story Studio’s technical director Max Planck, there's a chance Quill could be released to Oculus users.
“We don’t have plans for that right now,” says Planck, who was one of the recipient’s of Quilez’s original frustrated email. “But I will say it is part of our DNA to be very open and very sharing and very inspiring.” And now it's part of their movies as well.
