Blue Figues

Client
Disnosc

Services
Experience Design, Production, Development, Technical Direction, Funding Consulting

Year
2022

We got approached by Disnosc an animation production studio based in Biarritz and Paris.

They are developing a cross-media project around Jazz, their approach regarding this music movement encompasses more than just music. Jazz is so much more!

TV Serie Trailer

While they develop the core TV series in-house they wanted to bring another shade to their universe. Their ambition regarding new media such as VR and mobile entertainment had a very interesting angle for the u.

We joined them at first starting from their ideas of what the interactive experience should be, listing all their ideas and functionalities and content they wanted to embed into it.

The core of the interactive material would happen in Eliott’s record shop, one of the main characters of the TV Serie. The audience would be invited to come and dig records or chat with him about music before he would propose you a record.

As you place the record on the deck you would be transported into the vinyl’s history, bringing you back in time and place into the life of their creators. Allowing you to fully grasp the historical, social, and personal context of that specific record.

On the verge of comic books and flipping pages, the audience would navigate into animated dioramas of the story behind each record.

The visual work to translate the TV Serie aesthetic into real-time VR was done by Léa Peirano using Quill.
All assets were given to us as fbx files including the record shop manager Eliott.

Experience Design

We developed a fully-fledged experience design document showcasing all the functionalities and details around interactions and the structure of the experience.

Above are a few of the materials we created to support their vision of the experience.

With this at hand, we could budget and schedule the production of the piece. With a few important milestones agreed upon we could clearly move forward.

Development

Our work started through developing the core VR hand systems.

We approached the VR character controller with a modular design allowing us to attach an interaction system to the hands and manage them on a per-scene basis. This also allowed u to tweak and adapt each interaction quickly with our client’s feedback.

Once this milestone got approved we moved on to structuring the experience with asynchronous loading, fading, and spawning system, which allow us to choose where and how the audience will emerge into the next scene.

We finally dived into the dialogue system and took advantage of the Unity Asset Store and get a ground base for this. Leaving us to implement the system with our VR systems.

As we were handling the entire prototyping we took over all the required content including animations, UI, texts as well as sound.

While the music was recorded in France and delivered to us, we had the luxury to have a deck and microphone at our disposal to record all the sound related using a vinyl deck.

For the UI we took the path to implement some feedback to the user with a simple graphical representation of the hand moment required to continue: Grasp, Pinch, or Press.

With everything loaded in we worked on some shaders to fully support single-pass stereo rendering with vertex colors and emission map at once.

This allowed us to have highlighted content within the original graphic style without too much rendering expense.

We finally added as a variant the possibility to adjust the hue, saturation, and contrast of the vertex colors. This was great for adjusting quickly the colors of an entire scene without drawbacks due to post-processing or returning to Quill for simple adjustments.