When Maureen Fan was a child, she devoured animated movies. She became engulfed in the fictional fantasy worlds that made her feel as if anything was possible. As she grew older, she started wanting to bring new stories to life on the big screen in order to inspire others.
Today, she's the CEO of Baobab Studios, a virtual reality company specializing in animation.
"I want people in the world to feel that sense of wonder that they had when they were a kid. That’s what animation does for me," says Fan.
Fan works with a dream team of former Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks Animation employees. Together, they're hoping to change the way we experience films by placing audiences at the center of immersive animated worlds.
Founded last year, Baobab just put out its first virtual reality animated short, "Invasion." The six-minute film, which includes narration from Ethan Hawke, puts users inside an animated world featuring adorable bunnies and aliens.
It's taken Fan 15 years to fully realize this ambition, which she says was difficult to pursue coming from an immigrant family. "My parents were like, ‘You’re going to be poor and destitute if you go into the arts,'" Fan tells Tech Insider. "Instead of following my dreams, I went to eBay as a UI designer and then went into product."
During her six-year tenure at eBay, Fan took animation classes from Lucasfilm animators on nights and weekends. She later worked at Pixar for three months as a production intern on "Toy Story 3" in 2008. But when she saw it could take five years to make a full-length animated film she questioned whether it was the right place for her.
"In order to make my way to the top at a company like Pixar, [it] would require a lot of clawing my way to the top and [I] really didn’t want to lose my soul," she says.
While Fan thought she would be better off starting her own animation studio, she figured it would make little sense to create a company unless she had a lot capital or a distribution advantage. So she held off, and in July 2009, Fan went to Zynga, where she eventually became VP of Games overseeing the Farmville franchise.
On nights and weekends, Fan continued exploring her passion, working on a short film called "The Dam Keeper." It was nominated for best animated short film at the 87th Academy Awards. It was clear she had a knack for animation.
It wasn't until virtual reality came along though that Fan finally found a way to make her love of animation work from a business perspective. VR was a new frontier that lacked competition from big names like Disney and Pixar, making it easier to get ahead. Everyone was starting out on the same playing field, trying to figure out what worked best with the technology.
When she first saw a game she was working on at Zynga in a headset, she was bowled over.
"My developers just wanted to see what it was like," she explains. "It [was] complete suspension of belief. I believe I’m in this world. That’s when I had the eureka moment. I’m like, this is the future of animation."
Fan left Zynga in March 2015 to launch Baobab Studios along with cofounder Eric Darnell, the director of DreamWorks Animation's "Madagascar" franchise. Darnell now serves as Baobab's chief creative officer.
The pair attracted an impressive team and advisory board from virtually every big animation studio, including former COO of Lucasfilm David Anderman, former DreamWorks Interactive CEO Glenn Entis, and Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith.
Everything came together in a few short months. The team, now made up of 15 to 20 people, has raised to $6 million from investors like HTC and Samsung Ventures, which both make VR headsets of their own.
It's this dream team that could make Baobab Studios stand out in the field of other companies working on virtual reality animation. How can you go wrong with former employees of Disney Animation, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, and Lucasfilm?
"Creative people just want to work with awesomely creative people," says Fan of gaining such big talent. "It’s not about how much your salary is — some people may be more about prestige but really, amazing creative people are just attracted to other great creative talent."
Fan says the team will gather to go over stories, tearing apart Darnell's ideas and rebuilding them to make them better. Smith and Entis will offer advice based on their experience in the early days of CG animation, while advisory board member and legendary Disney animator Glen Keane — the artist behind Disney classics like "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," along with newer features like "Tangled" — helps supervise Baobab’s animation.
“The reason the bunny is so cute is because [Keane] was sitting there with our animators giving us feedback on how to make it cuter,” Fan says of the rabbits in the studios’ short "Invasion."
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"Invasion," which features two adorable white rabbits visited by aliens hoping to take over Earth, is a six-minute 360-degree immersive animation that took four months to make. Inspired by "War of the Worlds," it debuted in April at New York's Tribeca Film Festival on the Samsung Gear, Vive, and Oculus.
In the Vive and Oculus versions you can see yourself and move around as a little white bunny. It's like being in the middle of a Pixar or DreamWorks Animation film.
Creating short VR film worlds that can be viewed from every angle is no easy feat. Darnell says the goal is for audiences to all have the same experience even though they have the complete freedom of choice of where to look.
That means one of the challenges of being a director in this new space, Darnell says, is guiding viewers to look where he wants them to look.
For "Invasion," 1,700 people were observed to see how they watched the short. Were they spending more time looking at themselves as a rabbit or looking at the aliens when their attention should have been elsewhere?
"That’s where you can learn exactly how the viewer is experiencing it and you can make adjustments so that you can get more and more of the audience doing the things that you’d like them to do," he says. "I sort of think of it as being part director and part magician ... The magician’s job is to get the audience to choose to look at a place that he needs them to so his magic works."
In "Invasion," Darnell says the bunny acts as the magician. Viewers make a connection with the character because he looks you directly in the eye, making you want to follow him around on screen. That connection between the viewer and the rabbit helps guide the eye around on screen, and it's something unique to the virtual reality experience.
When you're watching a film and a character looks out at the audience, they're considered to be "breaking the fourth wall." You're taken out of the experience. That's not the case in VR.
Baobab plans to release additional episodes for the series featuring the aliens and bunnies, and Fan says the team has a number of other original projects in the pipeline.
While Baobab is releasing its content as short form, Fan says the content isn't designed to be short. It starts out as longer content which is then cut up into smaller, more easily digestible content.
Fan says one of the reasons for that is to see how viewers react to the content before creating the entire thing, something she learned from her time at Zynga.
"Instead of spending five years on a film that you don’t know if people are going to like, at Zynga we would put something out there and see if people liked it. Then we knew [whether] it was good and then we’d invest more in it," Fan explains. "I think the value I got from the company is not to assume that we know what’s right all of the time. It’s about, what we call, being 'humble by the numbers,' which is letting your audience tell you or show you what they actually want rather than being snooty and assuming that we know what they want."
Fan says Samsung has data showing people like shorter content right now. In the case of VR, that might be because people don't want to wear virtual reality headsets — which can be dizzying — for long.
"There’s all this talk about millennials wanting short-form content or multitasking. It’s the same with mobile games. Everyone wanted shorter sessions." she said. "On top of that, these headsets are big and bulky, so people don’t want to necessarily put them on for a long time. We want to make sure that we give people what they want and they’re comfortable whether than be in a headset for a long time."
If fans really want to watch all of the shorts back-to-back then they can always binge watch.
While Baobab benefits from being one of the first big players in the space, Fan says she wants to see more storytellers working in VR.
"The truth is we need more people creating content," says Fan. "Right now, the problem is there are these headsets, but there’s such limited content that you’ll watch, maybe a week’s worth of awesome stuff, and then what? We need reasons for people to keep on picking up these headsets over and over and there needs to be compelling content. And I don’t think there’s enough stuff out there. There’s some really great stuff, but we need more."
More than anything, Fan wants to make sure VR isn't just for early adopters. Right now, she thinks too much of virtual reality involves tech demos to show off "how cool VR can be" instead of focusing on storylines.
"When the novelty wears off, it’s still going to be the storytelling that matters at the end of the day," says Fan. "I think a lot of stuff is shiny and new right now and for somebody’s first experience in VR it’s, ‘Oh, it’s magical. It’s new.’ But later on, it’s still going to be as it was with film, as it was with books, with every single entertainment medium. The things that last, at the end of the day, are a good story."
"We want VR to go out to the masses," she adds. "And to do that it’s not just making the headsets easier for people to get and less bulky or less expensive, it’s giving people a reason to purchase these headsets which is content that is appealing to everybody."
Check out a trailer for "Invasion" below:
