At AFI Fest, animation pioneer offers a vision for a VR future

People watch virtual reality content produced by Vrse.Works, during a filmmaker welcome party, with a preview of virtual reality technologies at the AFI Fest 2015.

Nov. 8, 2015 2:34 PM PT

As virtual reality continues to gain traction in mainstream Hollywood, one of the big questions is how much it will feel like mainstream Hollywood.

Not very much, says one of the people on the battlefield’s front lines.

“We are all doing something we don’t know how to do in order to learn how to do it,” the longtime Disney animator and current VR pioneer Glen Keane told an audience at AFI Fest on Saturday, citing a Pablo Picasso line about taking on new challenges. “That’s what’s happening in VR.”

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Keane should know. The 61-year-old is a longtime Disney animator, having spent over three decades working on movies as quintessential as “Aladdin,” “Tangled” and “Beauty and the Beast.” But he left Disney and branched out to VR several years ago, seeing in it both new challenges for himself and new possibilities for an industry. He now works at a Google-backed group creating a variety of new VR projects, both scripted and nonfiction.

Most notably, he’s created the short “Duet,” a touching look at a baby boy and a girl who drift apart then come back together. The animation is hand-drawn and heartfelt, and it shows how VR can be used for -- and in fact might be better at -- empathy and emotion than slick storytelling. (At the AFI event, Keane demonstrated the film by having a colleague capture the action on a smartphone as she moved her eyes around the film’s world, projecting in real-time her experience on a screen in front of the room. It’s still not quite the same as donning the headset oneself, but it’s a better approximation than most such displays.)

What’s especially notable about Keane, whose videos showing him draw in VR have attracted huge viral audiences, is that he’s an old-school artist who prefers the handmade over the computer-enhanced. Keane doesn’t even especially like conventional CG animation -- he compared its appeal Saturday to that of a used-car salesman’s pitch--and wants to continue producing the kind of rough-around-the-edges human animation that Disney once traded in regularly. Yet even this old-fashioned form, he believes, lends itself to VR.

AFI Fest has been one of a number of Hollywood institutions to embrace so-called cinematic VR, the catch-all term for VR storytelling that veers away from the hard-core interactivity of games. The medium is important to the festival and director Jacqueline Lyanga, who says that amid the festival’s display of classic auteur and awards pieces, plenty of room should be left to explore the future as well. (In this regard AFI is in line with Sundance’s embrace of VR, which continued last week with the announcement of a new residency program.)

Of course, all these efforts won’t preclude challenges in the creation and adoption of VR. The transition from a flat, director-dictated form of storytelling to an all-encompassing, viewer-driven one, Keane noted, means moving from thinking “in a linear way [to a] circular way. And not just one circle but two” or more.

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Actor Christian Bale takes pictures and signs autographs with fans lining Hollywood Boulevard before walking the red carpet for the premiere of “The Big Short” on the closing night of AFI.