START VR ANNOUNCES VR FILM ‘AWAKE’ WITH ANALEIGH TIPTON AND JAKE MCDORMAN
Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles-based virtual reality studio Start VR today announced its next original project Awake, an interactive cinematic VR experience starring actors Jake McDorman and Analeigh Tipton. Start VR’s Chief Content Officer Martin Taylor is the creative lead and director of the experience, authoring the concept and story world over several years and now bringing it to life in VR. Financial partners include Screen Australia and HTC VIVE. The project will be co-produced with award-winning animation and VFX studio Animal Logic, with creative collaborators including Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios, Mike Jones (VR Noir, The Kettering Incident, Deadlock) and Christian Cantamessa (Red Dead Redemption, Shadow of Mordor, AIR). Start VR recently signed with United Talent Agency (UTA) to elevate its original entertainment experiences with top talent. The partnership aligns with the VR studio’s longstanding fusion of Hollywood-level entertainment and emerging technology.
Taylor brings extensive VR and award-winning filmmaking expertise to the project. The director will collaborate with Cantamessa, who will serve as a contributing writer and interactive design consultant, to lend innovative interactive mechanisms to this new frontier of storytelling. HTC VIVE will be the primary production and distribution partner and Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studio will serve as the volumetric video capture partner, with Animal Logic to supply its award-winning animation, VFX and design expertise to create visually-stunning virtual environments custom-built for the story line.
Jake McDorman (Lady Bird, Limitless, American Sniper, Shameless) will play the protagonist Harry, a sharp and misjudged man with a mysterious past and unique insight into the unseen worlds that exist around him.
Analeigh Tipton (Crazy Stupid Love, Lucy, Warm Bodies) will play Harry’s wife, Rose. Rose is the love of Harry’s life at the center of his favorite memories.
Awake is a thought-provoking, character-driven VR series blurring the line between dreams and reality as it explores the perplexing concepts of space, time and existence. The fictional series demonstrates how cinematic stories can be told through unique virtual immersion and interactivity.
The protagonist, Harry Whitbread, is a prisoner of his own making, having made a life-changing choice in his past that cost him everything he loved. Through spatial narrative, dreamworld encounters, clue-hunting and object interaction, viewers bear witness to a broken man’s harrowed past, somber present and unforeseen future. The audience will embody Harry’s deepest struggles as they take on his rare ability to escape into his dream world, relive key memories as the best version of himself with his wife (Rose Whitbread) and try to solve the mind-boggling mystery behind his life’s mission. At its heart, Awake is a love story–a chance for atonement that explores the evolution of humanity and questions the nature of reality.
This project represents Start VR’s genre-defining commitment to creating interactive cinematic VR experiences that prioritize audience participation and creative storytelling.
Awake is slated to launch early 2018 and will be available for the HTC VIVE and other headsets following its launch, including Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headset.
About Start VR
Start VR is an award-winning full-service production studio specializing in a new era of highly immersive and interactive cinematic entertainment. The studio brings vast expertise in entertainment and technology to fuse feature film-quality visuals with interactive content, creating original and branded, best of class narrative experiences.
Start VR’s expert team of interface designers, developers, artists, filmmakers and producers use proprietary techniques to create polished, critically acclaimed experiences designed to spark unprecedented levels of engagement and immersion. Since its inception, the company has been at the forefront of creative technology, pushing forward to expand the narrative capabilities of VR and immersive storytelling.
