The metaverse is breaking throughis part of the message launched by the creatives of the Ecuadorian studio A&D Real Time together with their first 3D animated short film The boy who heard the silencewhich was officially presented on November 11 at the University of Valencia, Spain, but which had a preview in Guayaquil days before, at the facilities of Épico, the Municipal Public Company for Management and Competitiveness, in Plaza Guayarte.
Various technologies are integrated into the video, including a motion capture system or Mocap and hyper-realistic digital versions of human beings, whether designed from scratch or in the likeness of a real person, that is to say that the characters in the short are metahumans. The aim has been to create a high quality 3D animated film.
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“The world is revolving around digital, it is not just a whim, we are starting to live in that world of virtuality,” he says Santiago Padrón, general director of A&D, who notes that of the 750 billion euros earmarked for the economic transformation of the European Union after the pandemic (announced last October), 90% goes to green and digitization projects. “And Europe is still lagging behind China and the United States.”
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The language of the image is overlapping that of words, in a kind of cyclical return to the time when writing did not exist or had not become popular, theorizes Padrón, leader of the Ecuadorian study that specializes in 3D content, digitalization of online resources and web 3.0.
His first big project is the sphericala digital animation series that would cover the history of the soccer world cups. “They are not documentaries, we are not building a chronicle, ours is a social reading.” The first of those events to be recreated will be the Soccer World Cup 2010in which the Spanish team was champion.
This is a product made in collaboration with the Chair of Innovation at the University of Valencia. From him it emerges The boy who heard the voice of silencewhose protagonist is the footballer Andrés Iniestaauthor of the winning goal against the Netherlands in the 116th minute. An Iniesta was first a child who watched his team’s defeats on television, and then an adult, who jumped onto the field with the colors of his country to face the team Dutch.
That championship goal is the pinnacle of the short’s action, but its intention goes much further. Serves as an introduction to the characters created by A&D: a grandfather who owns the spherical, an object that allows you to enter the metaverse and see events from the past, and their three grandchildren who can barely sit still for a moment to witness the story. Iniesta, from whose memories of that goal came the title of the short film (“when scoring the goal I heard the silence”, he said), was one of the guests at the world premiere of the film, in Valencia.
New ways of telling the story
The director A&D participated in a contest of the Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (Senescyt) in 2020, and was one of those chosen to finance their projects. The connection with the University of Valencia allowed them to train remotely in techniques such as motion capture and 3D animation. “If you review the Holland-Spain match, you will find that the image of the goal is exactly the same, a metahuman recreation.”
With The boy who heard the silence hope to attract the attention of other collaborators to rebuild a metahuman version of each soccer world cup. By the time, what would be the first season of the spherical It is designed for seven episodes with the history of the team that was champion in South Africa. “We already have the scripts, but we need to hire more engineers; the short came out in six months, but we could reduce times and continue with the other world championships”, estimates Padrón.
“We are playing certain themes; in the first game it is defeat, because Spain starts losing; the spirits went to the floor, the speeches were pitiful, and suddenly that selection begins to rise, ”explains Padrón, who specializes in Literature and works as a screenwriter.
What would it depend on to start telling Ecuadorian stories? It is something that they are already working on, in a program that would be called the fifth dimensionin which they will discover details of local sites and events. They have in their sights the history of the Virgin of El Panecillo, in Quito. It is sui generis, comments Padrón, because this deity is “the virgin of the Apocalypse, it is said that it is the image that we will see when the world ends, and we Ecuadorians do not know this reference well. There are all those stories that we are missing.
In the first part, he assures, they want to work with the figure of the virgins associated with different places in the Ecuadorian geography, some of them established near ancient pre-Columbian cult sites. With a 3D precision scanner, they can take photogrammetries or digitalizations of large monuments, large stages and archaeological pieces. They already did a first exercise of this with the Virgin of El Panecillo.
Another topic that interests them is digitization of archaeological cultural heritagewhich would then be in metaspaces, so that anyone can get to know the culture if they do not have direct access to the museum.
“At first it gave me chills,” acknowledges Padrón, from his role as a writer. “We are realizing that writing is transformed, and we begin to live with the image (…), these narratives gain space, but if you don’t walk, you don’t evolve. It would be missing the opportunity to reflect on these language changes, on what will happen to humans in the future”.
The image, he considers, has conditioned us and the new forms of communication will be those that generate spaces for opinion and social reflection. For this reason, they have dared to learn and venture into the construction of high-quality 3D narratives, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and metahumans for customized projects for web 3.0, the creation of digital stages and sets for animation and interactive and immersive projects, precision scanning to build collections of 3D objects for educational, artistic or cultural purposes, and also have a video game engine and the software AbyssMedia’s audio team to develop this type of content for brands, companies or products from all areas. (AND)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
