“We knew we were taking a huge risk,” begins Jeff Gipson the director of Cycles, a touching VR short film that shows the time-lapse of a whole life lived, flashing before our eyes in a series of milestone memories.
Gipson, a trained architect, used to design skateparks and is an avid BMX freestyle enthusiast, has been a lighting artist for the last six years at Walt Disney Animation Studios and has worked on award-winning films such as Big Hero 6, Frozen, Zootopia and Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Thanks to the studio’s experimental shorts program, he was given an opportunity to experiment with real-time animation on a short film he envisioned, and enlisted the help of Senior Software Engineer, Jose Gomez. His passion and risk-taking nature attracted other collaborators in the studio, and soon Jorge Ruiz, Animation Lead, and Lauren Brown, Production Lead, joined his quest to produce the studio’s first-ever real-time animated VR short in Unity.