The Campaign

VR is a deeply engaging, highly immersive film experience for one, where you don’t just watch the action, you are the action. So on opening night, of the Melbourne International Film Festival the audience wasn’t invited to watch a film, they were invited to be someone else inside one. We developed VR Digital Puppetry – a virtual reality world paired with live 3D Projection mapping to create a performance embodying the festival’s spirit.

Creative Execution

First, we wrote a film script, only the performances of the character’s faces were filmed – such as a baby, a crazed methodical killer and a promiscuous house wife. These facial performances we’re projected onto custom-built masks using 3D projection mapping. The face mask was attached to virtual reality headsets worn by audience members, who would play the characters in our short film. To match the movement of our digital puppets to the action in script, we digitally directed them in real time via a virtual construct of the stage powered by a gaming engine. Each layer of technology further detached them from the real world, sinking them deeper into their on-screen personality.