I recently completed an Idea Tournament, a creative exercise that I did in 2016 when I left Mirada to strike out on my own as an independent creator. First and foremost, I 100% stole the idea for this exercise from Lucas Martell, who has recently done some incredible work in VR. I modified his version…
There is a lot of noise and hand-wringing about AI in general right now: it’s going to steal jobs, it’s going to be smarter than us, it’s going to kill us all, etc. There are especially loud discussions around generative AI – neural nets that can transform the style of a given image or turn…
Coming Spring 2023 – “The Carrier” is a first-person VR180° experience starring Karolina Wydra and Nicholas Massouh. This immersive short film straps viewers into the POV of a baby whose family is trapped in an apocalyptic traffic jam. Unable to move or speak, the audience must watch in vain as their parents make one potentially…
We can finally announce that in a few short weeks we will be in Vancouver presenting THE 100% at the Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the VIFF Immersed program
I had the extreme honor to be invited to present our use of LiDAR for creating THE 100% as part of HxGN Live this year. This “Embrace Reality” Keynote was all about Leica’s BLK family of LiDAR and Hexagon’s software, and my presentation was one of two entertainment industry uses of these tools. The other…
we can now announce that THE 100% was selected as a finalist for a Creative Arts Emmy in the “Innovation In Interactive Programming” category!
It is with extreme pride that we would like to announce that our volutmetric VR experience “THE 100%” has been selected as a finalist for the VR Social Impact Award in the VR Awards 2019!
Leica has published a great interview / case study of our use of LiDAR capture and point cloud processing software on THE 100%, a volumetric video VR experience that premiered at Tribeca a few weeks ago, where we won the Tribeca X award for “Best VR Experience”.
I was interviewed during NAB by Steve Waskul about the traditional and interactive work currently happening at Mirada. This interview explores my winding path to end up leading digital and interactive projects and covers some of the trends affecting traditional and immersive content production today. We also talked about how Mirada approaches projects using emerging…
I had the distinct honor to be interviewed by David Gidali a little while ago, and the result was last week’s episode of The Post Post Podcast! The PPP features interviews with post production artists who have managed to move onwards / upwards from VFX or other parts of post to become writers, directors, producers, and other forms of content creators. Previous episodes have featured Aaron Nee (Masters of the Universe, Minecraft), Tomer Eshed (Dragon Rider), Kevin R. Adams and Joe Ksander (Next Gen), and – honestly completely randomly – one of my good friends and classmates from film school Ethan Shaftel!
Andrew Shulkind and I are going to be on SMPTE’s monthly tech webcast in a few weeks talking about VR, AR, MR, XR, RR… all of the alternatives to reality. We’ll be covering the state of the industry and talking about our feelings on how it’s all going so far, and discussing where and when we see things going next.
I’m going to France in less than two weeks to be a judge for the 2018 edition of the Marseille Web Fest, where I will also be doing a fireside chat on VR (and probably other immersive and interactive mediums). This is my first time going to this festival – being asked to judge the web series in competition has been an honor, and watching the entries has been an interesting experience.
Anthony Magliocco from Digital Tech Today recently filmed an interview with me about the art, business, and technology of VR and AR. He has released a series of videos from this interview, divided into various topics and collectively covering a wide range of my thoughts on the industry as it develops. We talked for several hours and the conversation covered a lot of ground, so there’s 7 videos in the VR interview series.
Mettle just posted part 3 of a series of behind the scenes interviews with John and I about the “Vegas:Alter Your Reality” project (part 1 here, part 2 here). This time it’s a close-up on our process for bringing Signal Noise‘s vision of Las Vegas to life in “Vegas Rising”. This immersive film features the most artwork directly from its featured artist due to James’ ability to create most of the buildings using his normal weapon of choice: Adobe Illustrator.
In part two of a series of posts about the recently-completed “Vegas: Alter Your Reality” 360º video art project, Mettle has taken a plunge into the process that brought Fafi’s vision of Las Vegas to life. Of all five artists, Fafi’s style was the most ‘analog’, which presented many creative and technical challenges for the team to solve.
In the first of three behind-the-scenes articles, Mettle has pulled back the curtain on the work that we did to bring Adhemas Batista’s vision to life for the recent “Vegas: Alter Your Reality” project. This article dives deeper into the ways that we used Mettle’s brand new VR tool MantraVR and the Skybox plugins that Mettle developed which are now part of the core of Adobe’s After Effects and Premiere. Check it out, and stay tuned for articles about our work for Signal Noise and Fafi, coming soon!
3DArtist recently interviewed John and I about our use of Maxon’s Cinema 4D in creating five animated 360º films for the Vegas: Alter Your Reality art project. This interview dives into the details of how we used C4D and its integrations with Adobe products, Octane, and plugins such as X-Particles and RealFlow to bring the vision and style of each artist into VR.
NVIDIA recently asked me to provide some thoughts about our use of Octane in the Vegas: Alter Your Reality 360º animation project, seen in the above-embedded video. This was the largest project I have used GPU rendering on to date, and the amount of refinement that we were able to do due to the insanely fast render times was a luxury that I just simply have never had. GPU rendering has massively changed the speed at which CGI can be generated and iterated, and it is only getting better and faster. Renders that literally took hours a few years ago are now almost realtime, which is allowing experimentation and refinement that was previously just simply too expensive to attempt.
I had the honor of once again joining Larry Jordan’s Digital Production Buzz to talk about VR, along with Michael Wohl, Michele Yamazaki, Matthew Celia, Chris Bobotis, and James DeRuvo. This time we discussed how VR is challenging the creatives and technicians who are interested in getting into it
I had the honor of joining Nick Bicanic, Brian Glasscock, Duncan Shepherd, Chris Bobotis, and James DeRuvo in discussing VR with Larry Jordan on his show Digital Production Buzz.
FMX 2016 has come and gone and left us completely jetlagged (but inspired). This is the first time that I have made it to FMX, and after years of hearing great things from those who have gone I can say first-hand that it is a great conference and you should put it on your radar!
FMX 2016 has been officially announced, as well as the initial lineup of speakers/panelists and screenings that will take place throughout the week of April 26-29 in Stuttgart Germany. Mirada will be participating in the VR demo area, and I will be on at least one panel and giving a presentation on storytelling in VR.
Intel just posted a big article with a ton of backstory and information on Paige Fraser, our dancer for the RealSense Dancer project that we created for CES and an anthem commercial. This interview includes a much deeper backstory on Paige’s struggle with scoliosis, which formed the basis for the choreography and the visuals.
Video of the Storytelling in VR panel that I spoke on for the VRLA Winter Expo is now online. This panel focused on narrative in VR, but we wandered into topics such as ethics, pre-production and blocking actors, even the economics of virtual reality. Jonnie Ross moderated myself, Bryn Mooser (Ryot) and Annie Lukowski (Vanishing Point Media).
In early February, Unity held an AR/VR summit in Hollywood to bring together the developers and creatives that use Unity to create groundbreaking experiences for these two emerging mediums. I was asked to do a presentation about how we have added interactivity to immersive cinema in some of our VR projects at Mirada, and it is now live!
Next week I will be continuing my ‘Virtual and Augmented reality evangelism tour’ by doing a presentation at the Unity Vision Summit 2016. It will be a presentation of a series of case studies on Mirada’s work to add interactivity to 360º video, specifically focusing on how and why we chose Unity to create three of our recent…
I went to one of the first big VRLA meetups a little over 1.5 years ago. It was held in the parking lot of USC’s MxR Lab, and even though it was not a huge crowd, it was actually quite mind-blowing how many people came to a virtual reality meetup. It was the first time that VR seemed…
After having multiple conversations about VR monetization, adoption rates, and other ‘gazing into a crystal ball’-type thought exercises recently, I decided to put together my predictions for how VR is going to roll out. The TL;DR is that I think that mobile VR is the only thing that will have any kind of audience for…
Mirada will be in full force this weekend at VRLA – we’ll be showing The Strain, Google Shop, Michigan, GE, Jump, some new R&D, and we will have a really cool new way to view and interact with 360º video on display. VRLA is the biggest and best VR conference around, If you have not bought a ticket yet,…
Some of the Mirada VR team will be at The Brewery downtown tomorrow (Saturday Jan 16) to demo VR experiences such as The Google Shop, The Strain VR, and Michigan Football. If you’ve been meaning to come out to one of these events, or you really really want to try some VR out for yourself,…
Andrew has been asked to present an overview of the VR ecosystem for a webinar run by Cynopsis Media. The session is called “Virtual Reality: What Programmers Need to Know Now to Lure Viewers and Advertisers” and is tailored towards traditional media folks who are looking to better understand the space so that they can…
Animation World Network reports that The Strain VR won “Best VR Based on Cinematic and Television Experience” and the Google Shop at Currys VR Tour was named “Best in Mobile VR” at the recent Digital Hollywood VR awards: Google Shop at Currys VR Tour launched in April 2015 as the first official app for Google Cardboard,…
Investors.com did a quick write-up of the VR-focused panel that I was on at this year’s CES: While the Harry Potter films were about watching a boy wizard grow up, a VR game of the same concept would have to be about the experience of actually being a wizard, said Andy Cochrane, director of interactive and…
Andrew was a member of a panel discussing Virtual Reality and the impact it is already having on the VFX community and entertainment at large at the 2015 VES Summit. The Hollywood Reporter covered the discussion here: The emerging virtual reality arena “could be the saving grace” of Hollywood’s struggling visual effects community, asserted Andrew Cochrane, interactive…
This article is a nice review of a panel about VR at SIGGRAPH that Andrew participated in: Beneath the aura of excitement generated this year at SIGGRAPH 2015 by the prevalence of virtual reality, a number of panels drilled into the nuts and bolts of creating VR experiences, including managing the workflow and assets. From…
Examiner.com did an overview of a panel that Andrew was on at Digital Hollywood’s fall conference focused on mobile VR: Andy Cochrane (Mirada Studios) explained the magic of VR this way, “VR works because it’s presenting a discreet image to each of my eyes and there’s no high speed gimmicky to try to trick my eyes…VR…
The Robot’s Voice did a great review of their favorite experiences at this summer’s VRLA conference, and we were honored that they chose “The Strain VR” as their top pick: I don’t watch FX series The Strain, on account of not having cable, but I stepped inside the world at VRLA. L.A.-based company Mirada created…
ProVideo Coalition recently sat down with Andrew to talk about VR, and the ways that it is already disrupting traditional storytelling: Figuring out how content creators can and should approach storytelling in a virtual environment is something I’ve explored in the past, as the interest in VR continues to build on both sides of the…
Digital Media World talked to Andrew about the process and technical details of the VR experience that he supervised for FX’s “The Strain”: ‘The Strain’ VR experience follows the story’s character Vasiliy Fet, a former Ukranian rat exterminator, as he leads viewers on a 360º journey through an abandoned warehouse, while under constant threat of…
UploadVR’s Matthew Terndrup had an opportunity to see “The Strain VR“, created by Mirada and Headcase for Comicon 2015, and wrote these thoughts on the experience: I tried out the VR demo recently, and it is an exhilarating ride into the world of FX’s “The Strain.” It begins in an abandoned warehouse with a sense of death…
HorrorBuzz.com recently interviewed Andrew about the VR experience he supervised for “The Strain”: At a meetup conference in early August, I listened to Andrew Cochrane, Technical Director of Mirada Studios, talk about the future of VR and how it applies to the VR promo he created for season 2 of “The Strain” on FX. Both…
Andrew was a panelist on Digital Hollywood’s VR Keynote session, covering the state of VR and looking ahead at where everything is headed. The full session is included in the above video for those who were not able to make it to the session. USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab did a blow-by-blow breakdown of another panel…
Andrew Ashton and Andrew Cochrane were invited to speak at The Foundry’s NAB booth about Mirada’s VR workflow, and their experiences working on The Google Shop VR Tour. The above video is of the first day’s presentation, which Cochrane was unable to attend due to a conflict with another project, but later sessions involved both Andrews presenting…
Here is the full-length video of Andrew’s 2015 SXSW session on digital storytelling. This session covered VR, AR, web, mobile, tablet, and live/experiential projects from Mirada and other companies working in these mediums. This panel was selected as one of AdAge’s “Ten Best Events at SXSW”: “With interactive platforms, storytelling is still critical but is…
CG Society recently interviewed Mirada creatives for this in-depth article about the design and technical processes that drove the creation of a massive projection mapped film for the launch of UCLA’s centennial fundraising campaign: Since opening its doors nearly 100 years ago, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has through education and research contributed to the past, present…
Andrew was asked to provide his thoughts on shooting digital vs. film and raw vs. compressed for Cinema Raw, a book on digital cinematography. The full book is available to purchase here, but a long excerpt can be found on the publisher’s website: When you’re shooting with a compressed format, such as with the Canon 5D,…
Motionographer did an extensive interview with the creatives and technicians behind Ro.me: 3 Dreams Of Black, the world’s first fully interactive music video running on WebGL: The folks over at Mirada worked on the conceptual design, animation and technology development for 3 Dreams of Black, which features a song from the new Danger Mouse and…
Dexigner takes a closer look at the creative approach that Mirada used to bring Chris Milk’s vision to life for Ro.me, the world’s first interactive music video using WebGL: Mirada has teamed up with radical.media director Chris Milk on an interactive music video experience called “3 Dreams of Black” for Danger Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi’s Spaghetti…
This article from FX guide is full of details on the massive amount of VFX work that went into the launch commercial for Disney’s World of Color: When the initial idea of a commercial for the Disney World of Color show was presented to Motion Theory, we knew up front that the strength in our…