Oculus Story Studio

Oculus Story Studio
Information
Type	Internal division
Industry	Virtual Reality, Animation, Film
Founded	2014
Founder	Saschka Unseld, Max Planck, Edward Saatchi
Headquarters	Menlo Park, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Saschka Unseld (Creative Director), Edward Saatchi (Producer)
Products	Lost, Henry, Dear Angelica
Parent	Oculus VR (Facebook)

Oculus Story Studio was an internal virtual reality film studio operated by Oculus VR, the headset maker that Facebook acquired in 2014. The studio made animated short films designed to be watched inside a VR Headset rather than on a flat screen, and it released three pieces between 2015 and 2017: Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica. Henry won a 2016 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program, the first time a virtual reality production won an Emmy in that category.

The studio was assembled in 2014, partly from former Pixar staff, and was unveiled publicly in January 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered Lost. Facebook closed it on May 4, 2017, after deciding to fund outside creators instead of producing VR films in house.

Background and founding

Oculus Story Studio was set up in 2014 inside Oculus VR to explore narrative storytelling in virtual reality, a use of headsets distinct from the games that dominated early VR. Its leadership came in part from feature animation: creative director Saschka Unseld and Max Planck had both worked at Pixar, and the studio was joined by producer Edward Saatchi. The studio operated out of Oculus and Facebook facilities in Menlo Park, California.

Oculus made the studio public in January 2015, when it premiered its first short, Lost, at the Sundance Film Festival. The work fit a broader content push at Oculus: the company under Facebook had committed large sums to fund virtual reality experiences, and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at an Oculus Connect event that the company had put 250 million US dollars into original VR content, with more planned.

Films

The studio completed three films during its roughly two and a half years of operation.

Title	Year	Director	Notes
Lost	2015	Saschka Unseld	The studio's debut, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015; a short about a robot in a nighttime forest
Henry	2015	Ramiro Lopez Dau	An animated short about a hedgehog, narrated by actor Elijah Wood; built in Unreal Engine 4; won a 2016 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program
Dear Angelica	2017	Saschka Unseld	Released free on the Oculus Store on January 20, 2017; voiced by Geena Davis and Mae Whitman; the first animated short hand-painted entirely inside VR using the Quill tool

Lost

Lost, directed by Saschka Unseld, was the studio's first narrative piece and premiered at Sundance in January 2015 alongside the public unveiling of the studio itself. The short follows a giant robot searching for its detached mechanical hand in a forest at night.

Henry

Henry is an animated short directed by Ramiro Lopez Dau, a former Pixar animator who had worked on Brave and Cars 2. It was narrated by actor Elijah Wood and tells the story of a hedgehog that wants to hug things despite its spines. The film was built in Unreal Engine 4. In September 2016 it won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program, which Oculus described as its first Emmy and which press coverage identified as the first such win for a virtual reality production.

Dear Angelica

Dear Angelica, also directed by Unseld and produced by Edward Saatchi, was released free on the Oculus Store on January 20, 2017 after premiering at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Geena Davis voices the title character, an actor named Angelica, and Mae Whitman voices her daughter Jessica, who recalls her late mother through scenes from the films Angelica appeared in. Artist Wesley Allsbrook built the film's illustrated look by drawing it inside virtual reality, making Dear Angelica the first animated short hand-painted entirely in VR. The brushwork the film required was the direct reason the Quill painting tool was created (see below).

Quill

Quill is a VR illustration and animation tool that began at Oculus Story Studio. The first version was built by Iñigo Quilez during a 2015 hackathon, prompted by the needs of Dear Angelica, which had to be drawn by hand inside virtual reality and play back with a painterly look in real time. After the studio closed, Quill remained available on the Oculus platform but received little further development for a period.

On September 20, 2021, Facebook spun Quill out to Quilez and his company Smoothstep, which took over maintenance. The application was rebranded Quill by Smoothstep on the Oculus Rift platform, and Facebook open-sourced Quill's immersive content file format, called IMM, along with a player for it. The handoff resembled Facebook's earlier divestment of its other VR creation tool, Medium, which was sold to Adobe.

Closure

Facebook announced on May 4, 2017 that it was closing Oculus Story Studio. Jason Rubin, the Oculus vice president of content, wrote that the company had "decided to shift our focus away from internal content creation to support more external production." As part of the change, Oculus said it would put 50 million US dollars into external, non-gaming interactive VR content, money drawn from its larger committed content fund.

The studio had about 50 employees at the time, and Oculus said affected staff could apply for other roles within Oculus or Facebook. The closure cancelled the studio's in-progress fourth project, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's children's book The Wolves in the Walls.

Aftermath

The unfinished Wolves in the Walls project continued outside Oculus. Producer Edward Saatchi co-founded an independent studio, Fable Studio, with Pete Billington in January 2018, and Fable completed and released a VR adaptation of The Wolves in the Walls. The project won a 2019 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media, with the award citing Billington, Jessica Yaffa Shamash, and Saatchi alongside Fable Studio and Facebook.

Significance to virtual reality

Oculus Story Studio was one of the first studios funded by a major headset maker to treat virtual reality as a medium for cinematic, non-interactive storytelling rather than gaming. Its films tested how to direct attention and frame scenes when the viewer can look in any direction, a problem with no equivalent in flat-screen film. The studio's recruitment of Pixar veterans, and Henry's 2016 Emmy, drew mainstream attention to VR animation as a form distinct from VR games.

The studio's most lasting technical legacy is Quill, the in-headset painting and animation tool created for Dear Angelica. Quill outlived the studio, passed to an independent developer, and remained in use by VR artists after 2021, and the open-sourcing of its IMM format was intended to let VR animation files be shared and played outside a single application. The studio's 2017 closure, and Facebook's pivot toward funding external creators rather than making films itself, is also cited as an early marker of how large platform owners chose to support VR content.