Owlchemy and Google were working on a brand new game for the Meta Quest 3 following the success of their VR hit Job Simulator. They approached my team at Big Farmer to create an announcement trailer that caught the attention of VR players as well as quickly sold the multiplayer aspect of the game.
The game, Dimensional Double Shift, featured revolutionary hand-tracking technology not seen in a VR game before, and so it was important to the client and us that we harnessed the cool film-making tech available to us at the time to make this live action trailer.
Initially, we knew we had to get the players out of the headsets, that way our trailer would be platform agnostic and we’d get to see the fun they were having interacting together. The client wanted all the action to take place in a retro 90s American diner, which was going to be a tall order in the U.K. so, with virtual production being a large part of our tech toolset here at Big Farmer, we started exploring whether this could be a VP shoot, and if so what cool shots would that enable us to do.
This meant we could craft our location to be exactly what we wanted. After a lot of concept art, we set about building our diner and gas station in Unreal Engine 5 - making sure every last detail fitted our 90s aesthetic.
With the set built in Unreal, this allowed us to place cameras and stand-ins and rehearse the shoot multiple times in pre-production. With the hefty costs involved in a virtual production shoot, this was invaluable as we were able to identify issues in setups and eventually squeeze so much more out of the shoot days
Using DMX controlled lights, we built our shot setups to have live interactive lighting that could change as the dimension around the actors changed, allowing for an almost theatre-like responsiveness to ideas on set.
Although we had our entire diner and gas station built virtually in Unreal, there were some moments in the script that required our actors to be next to virtual elements. This meant we had to construct entire sections of walls and windows that we wheeled in for certain setups. What was particularly impressive is how Unreal will calculate the reflections for windows for you automatically.
The resulting shoot was the VP studio's “smoothest technical shoot yet” with cast, crew and the entire team really enjoying themselves.
The client happily reported that they received 10 times more downloads than they had forecasted and they see our trailer as a big part of that.
Gold Winner at NYX Game Awards for 2024 Game Video