Shoguns Studios is one of the leading animation studios that develop animated content for the children’s entertainment industry. Having worked with the likes of Disney, Hasbro, ITV to name a few, they have been instrumental in developing animated nursery rhymes for the Japanese powerhouse, Benesess Studios which has been entertaining children in Japan since 1993.
The studio has been developing animated shorts for their YouTube channel for the last 3 years which so far has gained over 65 million views worldwide.
Now Shoguns Studios is set to venture into creating animation for the metaverse in which stories will be told in the format of Virtual Reality. Demystifying the uniqueness of Virtual Reality as a medium, Shoguns Creative Director, Willard Appiah talks about pushing beyond the screen and connecting more deeply with people’s hearts and imaginations. He desires to put across compelling stories to the audience through Virtual Reality which has an important role to play in the history of mediums.
Going back in time, Director Will explains, “Imagine our ancestors are sharing stories of how the wild deer were hunted for dinner. We hear their words and have to for a moment suspend our disbelief and visualize the story being told. The same thing happens when we look at historical cave paintings and the book about early homosapiens.” Will adds that the mediums of the radio, the television, or the cinema all require what we call the “suspension of disbelief” because there’s a gap between the reality of the story and our interpreting the story into the reality. And Virtual Reality bridges that gap.
“Now, you are on the battlefield in the Battle of Hastings, or you are out there hunting buffalo with your tribe members. Here’s what is special about VR, in all other mediums, your consciousness interprets the medium, but in VR, your consciousness is the medium.
So the potential for Virtual Reality is enormous”, says Will.
Giving us a reality check, Director Will continues to say that currently, we are at year one of cinema, in the times of the Lumière Brothers film that allegedly sent a theater full of people running for their lives as they thought a train was coming toward them. At the time, it took the medium of cinema and early film decades to understand that it was best used for feature films.
Talking about the role of Virtual Reality, Will asserts that we see VR as a gaming apparatus but there is much more to it. He shares that music and sound matters a lot in this medium guiding our emotions. He brings a tool called “spatialized Audio” to our attention in which Spatialized audio is sound processed to give the listener the impression of a sound source within a three-dimensional environment. This is a more realistic experience when listening to recorded sound than stereo because a sound can be put anywhere in front of a person, left or right and even behind, and when the individual turns his/her head, the sound rotates accordingly. This way Virtual Reality can be used to direct one’s attention, making us feel as if we are part of something, explains Will.
Comparing the film world with that of Virtual Reality, Director Will says that the composition of VR is completely different than in film, where we have a rectangular frame. Unlike traditional film, where every shot is composed, in VR the world moves around us.
“A close-up in VR means you’re actually close up to someone. It brings that character inside of your personal space, a space that we would usually reserve for the people whom we love. And you feel emotional closeness to the character because of what you feel to be a physical closeness”, says Will envisioning the close-up angle of Virtual Reality.
On that note, Will adds that Virtual Reality as a format and as a medium is not complete yet. It actually employs what we use to make sense of the world. Eventually in the future, VR, AR, and MX will even allow us to use all our senses like touch and smell and give us access to another experience that has not been imagined just yet, we still have a long way to go for that to happen. Director Will wants us to live inside that dream and claims exciting times ahead.
