Saschka Unseld

Saschka Unseld (born 1976) is a German-born director and multidisciplinary artist who works across animation, virtual reality, installation and live action. He spent six years at Pixar, where he wrote and directed the short film The Blue Umbrella (2013). In 2014 he co-founded Oculus Story Studio, the in-house VR film studio of Oculus VR, and as its creative director he directed the studio's first VR short, Lost (2015), and the Emmy-nominated Dear Angelica (2017), which was drawn and animated inside VR with the tool that became Quill. In 2018 he was one of four co-founders of the immersive studio Tomorrow Never Knows.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every cited claim, quote, date and credit against its source (Passion, Cartoon Brew, HuffPost, German Films Quarterly, TechCrunch, Road to VR, Meta blog, Peabody, IDFA, Biennale, Variety archive, Engadget, Apple docs, personal site); birth year rests on one University of Warsaw database. About review dates.

Early life and education

Unseld was born in Germany in 1976 and comes from Hamburg, which he jokingly called "Germany's Seattle" in a 2013 interview with the Huffington Post. He graduated from the Institute of Animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

Career

Studio Soi

In summer 2003 Unseld was one of six Filmakademie graduates who founded the animation studio Studio Soi together with Carsten Bunte. With Jakob Schuh he co-directed the studio's computer-animated short Engel zu Fuss, commissioned by the German broadcaster ZDF. He also co-directed the concept pitch for The Gruffalo, a production that received Oscar and BAFTA nominations.

Pixar

At Pixar, Unseld worked in the layout department on Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Brave and the television special Toy Story of Terror. He wrote and directed The Blue Umbrella, a short about two umbrellas, one blue and one red, that fall in love during a rainstorm in a city. The idea came from an umbrella he found lying in a gutter, lost or thrown away, and he chose a photorealistic look because, as he put it, "if it was cartoony or stylized, the magic would be gone." Its music was made by Jon Brion and the singer Sarah Jaffe. The short was shown in the Generation program of the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival and was released in theaters that summer in front of Monsters University.

In November 2014 Unseld moved to the East Coast of the United States to join the commercial production company Passion Pictures in New York as creative director; Cartoon Brew reported that he was also directing films for several VR companies at the time. He described the move as "a bit of a reverse-commute" and said, "I think I'm the first to go from directing at Pixar to directing in commercials."

Oculus Story Studio

Unseld co-founded Oculus Story Studio in 2014; at its launch Road to VR described him as a former Pixar director and layout artist. His fellow co-founders included Max Planck, another Pixar veteran, and Edward Saatchi. When Oculus presented the studio in January 2015 it had a team of about ten people, with Unseld as creative director, and its task was to release examples of VR cinema for filmmakers. Unseld told TechCrunch: "Everyone who starts a project in VR encounters the same things in the beginning. They try to figure out 'How do I make these things I know from film work in VR? How do I do a cut in VR?'"

Unseld directed the studio's first piece, Lost, which premiered at Sundance in 2015. Oculus described it as a four-minute real-time piece built in Unreal Engine 4 for the Crescent Bay prototype headset, set in a moonlit forest with an unusual creature, mixing hand animation with procedural animation and using gaze control so that each viewer set the pacing. Story elements waited to play until the viewer looked at them, so the running time could vary from about three to ten minutes. The studio's second piece, Henry, was directed by Ramiro Lopez Dau and won the Emmy for Outstanding Original Interactive Program in September 2016; Unseld's personal website lists him as its co-creator. In a 2015 Motionographer feature, Unseld explained that Henry had been planned as a slapstick comedy but turned out more sad than funny: "If someone falls on their face right next to you, it's not funny." He added, "In VR, there is no such thing as a fourth wall, because in VR you are right there with the characters in the world." With Planck, Chris Horne and Inigo Quilez, he presented creative and technical lessons from Lost and Henry in the session Introduction to VR Filmmaking from Oculus Story Studio at Oculus Connect 2 in 2015.

Unseld directed Dear Angelica, in which a daughter (voiced by Mae Whitman) relives memories of her late mother Angelica (voiced by Geena Davis). It premiered at Sundance on January 20, 2017 and was released for Oculus Rift owners the same day. The film was made entirely within VR: the technical team built tools that let art director Wesley Allsbrook paint the images frame by frame, and those tools became Quill, which Rift and Touch owners could download. "The hardest thing is that we were building the tool while we were telling the story," Unseld told TechCrunch. Dear Angelica was nominated for the 2017 Emmy for Outstanding Original Interactive Program and was later released for Oculus Go. It received a 2017 Peabody Award in the Interactive/Virtual Reality/360 category, credited to Oculus Story Studio.

Oculus closed Story Studio on May 4, 2017, laying off about 50 employees as it shifted from internal content creation to supporting external production, and set aside US$50 million of its committed content funds for non-gaming, interactive content; its planned fourth project, Wolves in the Walls, was cancelled at the time. Most of the team at Fable Studio, which premiered the first chapter of Wolves in the Walls at Sundance in January 2018, had been laid off when Story Studio closed, and Fable says the project won it a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media; the Peabody Awards credits list Unseld as executive producer and for the "original VR conception".

Through You and Terrain

With the dancer and choreographer Lily Baldwin, Unseld co-wrote, co-directed and co-edited Through You, a 360-degree video VR film about one woman's love story over a lifetime, developed in the 2016 Sundance Institute New Frontier and Jaunt VR residency. It premiered as a VR exhibit at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and tells its story without dialogue, through bodies, gesture, dance, color, music and sound. It was released on Oculus Video for Samsung Gear VR.

Baldwin, Unseld and Kumar Atre directed Terrain, a 45-minute piece set in the Bardo, a space between lives, which played in the Venice VR Expanded section of the 2020 Venice Film Festival. It ran on VRChat, and Unseld was also its cinematographer and co-editor.

Tomorrow Never Knows

In April 2018 Unseld and three partners, Nathan Brown and Tom Lofthouse of Discovery VR and Gabo Arora of Lightshed and the United Nations' UNVR program, launched Tomorrow Never Knows, a San Francisco studio for VR, AR and other emerging-technology storytelling. Discussing the commercial potential of headsets bought by early adopters, Unseld told Variety, "Right now, monetization for that is naive," while out-of-home VR was a different matter: "Location-based VR is huge." The founders also planned to build their own production tools. Unseld said the name was meant to express a childlike excitement about the new technology each day brings.

The studio's first announced productions were ZIKR: A Sufi Revival and The Day the World Changed. The latter, co-created by Unseld and Arora with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Nobel Media, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and places viewers in the ruins of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial dome with artifacts and survivor testimony. Unseld told Engadget, "We want this to be an unwavering, uncomfortable experience for people." Tomorrow Never Knows also produced Pilgrim (2018), directed by Lauren Hutchinson, an augmented reality audio documentary built from interviews recorded on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, which had its world premiere at IDFA; IDFA credits Unseld as its co-creator with Hutchinson and as one of its producers.

Later work

Unseld's personal website lists commercial work made in Unreal Engine, including a Rocket League commercial (2021) and a Fortnite Season 8 story trailer (2022) produced with Evil Eye. The site also lists him as lead game designer on Petite Asteroids (2025) and as lead game designer and engineer on a puzzle-platformer for Vision Pro shown in a 2026 WWDC session, both credited to Apple. Apple publishes Petite Asteroids as a VisionOS developer sample that demonstrates building a volumetric game with RealityKit for Apple Vision Pro.