For Comic Con 2019, Tim Dillon and Jason Schugardt joined forces with Andrew and a team of top-tier CG artists at Springbok Entertainment in order to bring an insane idea to life: a VR fly-through of Gotham City, to be experienced in a skydiving wind tunnel. Created with Media Monks for DC and AT&T, the Batman Skydive animated 360º video was the centerpiece of a massive activation celebrating Batman’s 80th anniversary.
The schedule was extremely tight, with less than seven weeks from initial creative to final delivery. The team worked in Maya for modeling and layout, Cinema 4D/Octane for animation and lighting, and final compositing was done in After Effects and Fusion. This project benefitted from many of the techniques developed during Vegas: Alter Your Reality, but under a time crunch that necessitated a much more aggressive production approach to maximize quality and detail with limited time for rendering.
In addition to creating the 360º video for the Batman Skydive experience, the same team rendered an enormous version of the CG Gotham City to be printed as graphics to wrap the skydiving machine and to provide backdrops in the briefing room.
The intense physical aspects of flying in a wind tunnel added a huge amount to the experience and allowed us to make decisions with camera movement that would normally be too aggressive for a 360º video. The final video is not currently slated to be shown again or released to the public, but we are hoping that more people will be able to experience it at some point in the future. In the meantime, here is some of the press that this experience received leading up to and during Comic Con 2019:
UPDATE: The Batman Experience activation that the 360º BatDive video was a part of won a Gold Clio Award! Congrats to the team at Media Monks for making all of this happen!