What is the film about?

Dive into the world of Polly: 39 versions of the same person, each one year apart, living and reliving the same life. So this must be a day like any other.

A little background information...

Tadpole started as an experiment. Being primarily a hand-drawn 2D artist, I was curious if immersive filmmaking could be done with… well, just that. The idea was intriguing for two big reasons: 1) Couldn’t immersive film look like it was hand-drawn, and not dimensional/built in 3D? And then, 2) Could 2D-based filmmakers make immersive films without knowing any 3D knowledge?

So I began testing it out. I took the equirectangular grid that matches the distortion of mono 360 video, and drew directly on it… Then, I told the video player that it was “immersive.” And it worked– simple as that!

How was the film made?

I started by coming up with a story idea that I felt could only be told in VR space. So, I started backwards by asking myself what could be a unique storytelling device for a 360 film, and then I came up with a story that would use it.

Once that was ready, I started picking at production steps… first by doing some visual tests and seeing if it looked compelling. Then, I wrote the full script and recorded a full scratch track. Making the “animatic” was tricky– I couldn’t really storyboard or thumbnail it out. I had to start by doing a floor plan of the space, and a 360 sketch of the space. Then I put the scratch track on it (with the dialogue and some key SFX), then started blocking out where each character had to be at a given moment. There were so many characters, and it quickly got confusing, so I color-coded them. There was a lot of changes at this stage, and working out of order.

Eventually, when the choreography was settled, I could get to the animation. Boy, it was so much animation. Every character had to be addressed somehow because you can’t just make them disappear by “cutting away.” But the character designs were simple and everything so stylized that I could actually get away with a lot of “inaccuracy.” Things didn’t have to be perfectly the right distance, distortion, etc.

It’s funny– each step I expected it to fail, to fall apart, or not perform as expected. I kept thinking, surely, this couldn’t possibly work… but it kept going, so I kept going, and at the end of the path there was a film.