Nun’s Beach VR Development Blog #1
CAN I EVEN WORK IN VR AND DO I EVEN WANT TO
This will be a development blog for a Virtual Reality Research and Development project titled Nun’s Beach, made possible by Canada Council of the Arts.
G’day! My name is Simon Cottee and I’m an Australian 2D Animator and Director living in Montreal with 10 years of industry experience. I’m very comfortable working in the traditional 2D film production workflow, but hey guess what I’m not comfortable working in… VIRTUAL REALITY!
Like what even is VR anyway; from a practical artistic standpoint, from a “hey what if it was my job to make art experiences in VR in 2021” standpoint.
I’ve always been excited at the promise of VR, I think we all have right? Since we saw The Lawnmower Man (1992) and then Johnny Mnemonic (1995) (note: there are no other movies about virtual reality).
But the few times I‘d gotten to experienced VR I was always left incredibly underwhelmed. The available technology was far behind my expectations and all the VR experiences seemed so gimmicky and fleeting. Combining that with the high financial cost of entry and I went quickly from an excited hopeful to a sceptic.
But despite all these emotions the thing I couldn’t shake was the promise of VR. I started to think of Jurassic Park; Stephen Spielberg, Phil Tippett and ILM. Jurassic Park was originally intended to be completely stop motion animation using sophisticated dino miniatures… that is until ILM popped up with a 3D test of Dinos and it was clear at that moment that stop mo was dead in blockbuster live action cinema. BUT Jurassic park had Phil Tippett and his team of stop mo animators remain on board, who animated the 3D Dinos using sophisticated miniature input systems. An amazing union between traditional animation and 3D (a technique that seemed to shortly after fall to the wayside). I bring this up because VR and AR (augmented reality) are set to eventually blow my industry wide open and create all kinds of new opportunities.
I’m already working in a way that would make Disney’s 9 Old Men freak-the-fuck-out. I work completely digitally, using a Huion drawing screen tablet to create 2D animation in a software package. I’m in my 30s now and I can see myself become stubborn with technologies in the next decade or so. My father is a draftsman and I remember him in his 40s needing to switch from giant sheets of paper on a enormous drafting desk to an Autocad digital version. The struggles he had… It was like the romance of his craft got digitally wiped away.
So that brought me to the idea of a Virtual Reality Research and Development grant with Canada Council of the Arts. I really love pitching to Canada Council and have been awarded some grants in the past. My newly finished film The Pioneers to name one (I’ve also failed to receive funding with a good amount of grants for the record). My early reasoning for this grant was that the initial cost of entry to VR is so high that I could not justify to myself investing into hardware and softwares that may ultimately serve me no purpose, like an Ab Workout informercial product in the basement.
THE VR PROJECT — NUN’S BEACH
A proof of concept of a VR experience relating to the 2019 Australian Bushfires
I was in Australia for Christmas in 2019. I live in Montreal now but try to make an effort every 2 years return to my family, especially to introduce my many new babies to my sister and parents. I grew up in Canberra (where my family still lives) and as a tradition we spend the summer Christmas holiday at the beach. My Grandfather built a small beach house on a cliff looking out over the ocean in Rosedale.
My whole life we have been coming to Rosedale’s many beaches and spending our holidays there. We never went abroad, rarely went to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane but we always went to Rosedale. 5 years ago after the passing of my grandparents the family sold the Coast house, which was a melancholy experience. We all loved Rosedale so much though, that we decided we would never stop going there and instead rent Coast houses.
So that brings us to 2019, where myself, my wife Fanny and two young kids (2.5 yearer and a 7 monther) were staying in a great place near Nun’s Beach in Rosedale. Nun’s beach is a beach we didn’t spend that much time on but was one we always enjoyed walking around the bend of the coast to visit. Its a beautiful remote and quiet bay beach. There is an old Nunnery that perches in the cliffs behind it, hence it’s name.
We found a great hidden path from our house where we could bushwalk to Nun’s beach and enjoy the serenity of it.
It was a beautiful and eerie 2 week vacation at Rosedale. The air was thick with smoke and we would get these incredible red sunsets.
2 weeks later it was all on fire, the house my grandfather built reduced to a black burned frame. The people who lived in Rosedale or holidaying took refuge on the beach and watched the ridge and houses burn.
I’d just returned back to a snow covered Montreal and was shaken. I’d been developing an idea for a VR grant application where my proposal was to build a VR Cinema, for viewing indie short animated films, the films that myself and my studio partner Malcolm Sutherland had made. In trying to process the events of these fires and my connection to this beach one night an explosion of an idea burst out of me:
I could try to recreate this beloved beach, to hold onto how I remembered while also presenting the effects and devastation of the bushfires. How the beaches themselves became the refuge from the flames, the contrast of the tranquil beauty and family experience of the beach against a raging inferno.
So I submitted my pitch. You can read the pitch document here.
Oh hey, it was now 2020. I’d submitted this pitch grant on the 16th of January. Guess what happened next? Guess what is still happening at the time of writing this? COOOOVIIIIDBAAAABBBBYYYYY!
So yeah. That was and is a whole thing we’re still going through. Our day-care shut and my wife who is an essential worker kept working and I was home with two young kids for 3 months slowly losing my mind. The bushfires quickly became a distant memory. 6 or so months after my grant application I received the news that the grant was rejected, which seemed fair to me.
We’d all experienced so much now, the bushfires didn’t feel so pressing.
I put together a new grant for a AI driven podcast (a longshot grant) and submitted it. 6 months or so later I received the news that this grant was also rejected, then… somehow… for some reason… that same day… I received the news that my VR Nun’s Beach Grant was awarded. Huh? The bushfires? Oh yeah. What was I meant to do? Of course I’ll do it! VR hey? What… Where am I. I believe because the Canadian Government injected a bunch of cash into these programs for emergency funding relief for indie artists is likely why this all worked out. I’d just lined up a 6 month contract working on a National Film Board animation so I had to postpone my production on this VR project to the 2nd half of 2021, because oh yeah, in May 2021 we were also expecting our 3rd kid…
SO HERE I AM. Fresh out of paternity leave, working from the loungeroom with a Valve Index headset with a wife and baby and dog in the room.
It’s gonna be a blast!
SO stay tuned for the next blog entry which will be about WHAT my goals are for this project. What my research questions are and how I intend to answer them.
Smooth landings,
Simon Cottee
