ABOUT GONE VR
CONCEPT
A magical eight-minute VR cinematic experience, GONE uses cutting-edge storytelling to create a dystopian fairytale. The cinematic VR film brings to life the imagination of a post-apocalyptic world through a high-fidelity virtual environment that combines volumetric performance footage, 360° camera scans, photogrammetry, 3D animation and FX in Unity's HDRP render pipeline created for the Meta Quest headset. Using the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland & Labrador as a background for a strange land where anything is possible, GONE playfully and philosophically explores aging, existence, and the future of humanity.
LOGLINE
An epic journey of loss and discovery, Jane wanders the barren desert in search of a mystical egg. Along the way, she meets an emaciated sabre tooth cat, a drug-peddling shrub-ox, and a herd of ghostly mammoths.
LONG SYNOPSIS
Jane, a disheveled middle-aged woman, is lost in a red rock desert, where nothing grows, and the wind perpetually howls.
Navigating a strange and seemingly infinite land, Jane is simultaneously caught between somewhere and nowhere. She walks.
A pathetic, emaciated sabre tooth cat creeps up on her from the distance. He’s starving. Their loneliness and hunger creates an immediate and intimate bond. Jane and the cat deliriously discuss the future of existence, and how the origin of all creatures is rooted in a magical egg.
Jane is in search of that egg. To save herself. To save humanity. To feed herself. The cat and Jane curl into the hard rock and settle into sleep until they are woken by a thunderous crack. Cod fish miraculously rain from the night sky. Jane opens her mouth and voraciously tries to catch them to no avail. She stops and sees that the cat has quietly died in their sleep.
In despair, Jane continues her solitary journey until she stumbles upon a greasy drug peddling shrub ox. He attempts to give her magical pills to extend her time on earth. To make her younger - thinner - more beautiful. She refuses. Jane presses on.
Jane finds the egg and is suddenly overcome by ghostly woolly mammoths that howl and chatter in intimidating, inaudible, orchestral, voices. She crawls beneath their hairy belly’s, and enormous transparent limbs, in an effort to escape. To seize the egg. To win the mysterious race. With Jane’s every breath, her bones inch towards the infinite egg, and the earth transforms. The oxidized red blooms into luscious green moss and sinewy trees. Everything grows. The egg cracks.
ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY
GONE integrates volumetric performance, 360 projection, photogrammetry, 3D animation, VFX, and spatialized sound design into the Unity Game Engine via its High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to produce a virtual reality cinematic experience.
COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING
Andrea Cooper – the director, writer and performer’s vision for this ambitious storytelling experience is realized through a collaborative effort of cinematographers, programmers, 3D artists and sound designers, coordinated and standardized through a custom workflow implemented and managed by VR experts DCXIX.
VOLUMETRIC PERFORMANCE
GONE uses volumetric footage in a unique way to insert a human character into the virtual scenes and have her interact with the computer-generated assets of the environment. Experimenting with the use of volumetric footage in VR and pushing these boundaries provides new storytelling opportunities in VR. All volumetric footage plates were recorded, processed, and provided by Infinite Frame Media.
CREATIVE TEAM
GONE Written, Performed and Created by Andrea Cooper
IAndrea Cooper is an interdisciplinary artist with a master’s in visual studies from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Concordia. Cooper's video Honey premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival's Forum Expanded in 2010. Strange Things premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival's Forum Expanded in 2007 and won the National Film Board of Canada's Emerging Filmmaker/Video Artist Award at the Toronto Images Festival in 2007. Previous group exhibitions include Mimetism at Extra City in Antwerp and Darkness Ascends at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Cooper's video and installation work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and internationally, most recently Starring Part 2 was exhibited at the Rooms as part of the exhibition Future Possible in St. John’s as well as Wild Honey in the exhibition Insect as Idea at the McIntosh Gallery at Western University. Recent screenings of her work include Toulouse France at the XXVèmes Rencontres Internationales Traverse in 2022.
A REAL WORLD LANDSCAPE
The post-apocalyptic/prehistoric landscape of GONE is created from real-world scans of the Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. The Tablelands, one of only two locations where the Earth’s mantle is exposed and very little grows on the toxic rocks – are generated through a combination of GIS satellite topography data and very-high resolution 360-degree, spherical image-captures of the location. The spherical image capture is then projection-mapped onto the GIS model and small, high-frequency landscape details are added to the models to improve accuracy.
VISUAL EFFECTS
The visual and particle effects in GONE leverage the advanced physics and particle system technologies available in the Unity game engine. These effects use real-world physics to calculate and manipulate the paths of the particles. A VFX designer configures and tunes the various forces to make the particles behave as desired. The VFX for GONE were created and implemented by Dustin Boyce of DCXIX.
CO-PRODUCER
Rink Rat Productions
Founded in 1994 and based in St. John’s, NL, Rink Rat Productions has produced high quality programming for over 20 years. Most recently Rink Rat co-produced the critically acclaimed feature film Maudie, an international co-production between Newfoundland (Rink Rat), Ontario (Screen Door) and Ireland (Parallel Films) and winner of 3 Irish Film & Television Awards and 7 Canadian Screen Awards including Best Motion Picture. Rink Rat also co-produced the series Cold Water Cowboys with British Columbia based Paperny Entertainment for Discovery Channel and the movie-of-the-week, A Christmas Fury, for CBC. Past productions include the feature films How to be Deadly, Violet and Behind The Red Door, and cult CBC comedy series’ Hatching, Matching & Dispatching and Dooley Gardens. Rink Rat has also produced Award winning documentaries, including Tommy… A Family Portrait and Ron Hynes: The Irish Tour. Rink Rat is currently co-developing the period drama Cougar Annie with Rock Island Productions for CBC, as well as the feature comedy Auntie Vigilantes and feature drama Portuguese Boy. Other projects include the feature comedy A Bay Story, and the dramas Brotherly Love and Dear Everybody.
Mary Sexton
With over thirty years’ experience as a producer and executive producer Mary Sexton is a cornerstone in Canadian Film and Television Production. She is best known as the producer of the multi award-winning Maudie, A Christmas Fury, Hatching Matching Dispatching, Canadian Idol and Cold Water Cowboys. She has produced the documentary films Me Mom and Covid, Till We Meet Again: Moravian Music in Labrador and Ahead of the Curve. She directed the National Film Board of Canada’s, Tommy: A Family Portrait which won the Gemini for Best Documentary. Mary is a member of the Canadian Media Producers Association and was previously Vice-Chair, Mentorship of the organization’s executive committee.
VR PIPELINE DEVELOPERS
DCXIX Inc. (Six Nineteen)
DCXIX Inc. is a boutique software firm that specializes in hardware and software integrations for the real-time production industry. Services include Virtual Cameras, Performance Capture, Photogrammetry, VR/AR Technology, Pipeline Development, and Proposals, and other related activities. Notable past and present clients include MARZ, BioWare, and Cyndicate Productions. DCXIX is run by co-founders Dustin Boyce and Chelsea O’Hara.
Chelsea O’Hara
Chelsea O’Hara is a software developer and digital media content creator from Toronto, Canada. After a stint as a digital media specialist and creative project manager, she pivoted her career towards software development. She has experience programming scientific tools for image mapping and manipulation, and architecting secure, full-stack systems to support big data throughput.
Chelsea is credited with performance capture credits on the following AAA series and game titles: Assassin’s Creed (multiple titles), Far Cry 5 & 6, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Watch Dogs: Legion. As a motion capture coordinator for the performance capture team, Chelsea managed all aspects of the audio recording sessions and coordinated with the production teams to ensure recordings were completed on time and on budget. Additionally, each project had unique technological requirements for performance capture, for which Chelsea was well-versed in.
Chelsea is passionate about leading technical teams through new territory, and designing software that is accessible, intuitive, and beautiful. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Queen’s University in Film and Media. In 2017, Chelsea presented on motion capture production at the University of Waterloo Games Institute, and was a panelist for ACTRA Toronto’s “Acting for Games” seminar.
Dustin Boyce
Dustin Boyce is a software and hardware integration specialist with over a decade of experience in tools programming and pipeline development for cinema, games, and virtual production. He helped build the Ubisoft Toronto performance capture studio from the ground up, and was an integral part of the design and construction of the world’s largest virtual production stage at Pixomondo. Recently, Dustin contributed his technical expertise to Bioware’s upcoming entry in the Dragon Age series: Dreadwolf. Dustin has a Media Arts Diploma from Sheridan College, and contributed to the advancement of virtual production education as a researcher and developer at Sheridan’s Screen Industries Research and Training Centre (SIRT).
During his time at Ubisoft, Dustin leveraged his software and hardware design skills to directly deliver technical solutions for several AAA Games and Series including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, The Far Cry series, Tom Clancy’s ‘The Division’, The Assassin's Creed series, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Watch Dogs 2 and Watch Dogs: Legion.
Dustin has also contributed to various solutions at VFX houses ‘Monsters, Aliens Robots Zombies’ and ‘Pixomondo’, including the modernization of an existing VFX pipeline, the development of AI solutions/tools for VFX, and the creation of hardware & software infrastructure for a Virtual Production Stage. Several Films and TV shows have benefited from these solutions including Marvel’s ‘Wandavision’ as well as CBS’s “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”.