‘Hour Blue’ Explores Exciting New Paradigms in Immersive Storytelling

Among the offerings at this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival was an unusual short called Yellow Dove Aftermath. The film, which won the award for best animated short at the 2023 Paris Independent Film Festival, was distinctive not just for its intrinsic quality or formal innovations – it had both – but rather because it provided a glimpse into a much larger and unique creation, an immersive “StoryWorld” called Hour Blue.

The brainchild of Rony Abovitz, founder of the pioneering augmented reality company Magic Leap, and Sun and Thunder Studio; Wētā Workshop founder and president Richard Taylor; and Chris DeFaria, former president of Warner Bros. Animation and DreamWorks Feature Animation Group, Hour Blue is described as “a multi-platform, persistent animated universe anchored by writers, artists and artisans, advanced technologies and a multi-spectrum relationship between the audience, creator, characters and the mythopoeia of the world.” Offering a new way for audiences to experience stories, Hour Blue plans to produce feature films, books, music, art, and social media, as well as shorts.

We spoke to DeFaria about Hour Blue, which he characterized as being “both slightly disruptive and very much about understanding the code of our communication, the technology behind how we think and what we do, and how that translates to storytelling.” As the executive producer of such films as Gravity, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Ready Player One, he has a longstanding interest in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and he sees his latest undertaking as the logical offshoot of this fascination. Since the concept of a “StoryWorld” is central to the mission of Hour Blue, we thought that might be a good place to start.

AWN: So, what the heck is a StoryWorld?

Chris DeFaria: Well, one can think of lots of comparisons. There are things like the Marvel Universe. There are things like Harry Potter and Star Wars. And it's such an enormous landscape of characters and conflicts and environments and so on, and out of that we get all these different stories. That's essentially what we're creating here, but we're doing it backwards. We're in the process of creating the world in advance of its primary expression, which will doubtlessly be a feature film. So, what we're doing is we're building out some of the things that one might associate with a world. We're building out the art, the music, the designs, and the characters. We're releasing the story in a serialized fashion over the next several months, if not the next year, in small bits. Often, they're going to be through alternative media.

We're releasing a book that's going to contain artwork from this world. We're releasing product, a lot of it from the Wētā Workshop, which will be of this world. The idea behind it, and maybe it's an insane idea, is that, in this day and age, we're all struggling to find ways to launch compelling original IP in a way that audiences will get and embrace. And we're also trying to figure out a way to compete with all the TikToks of the world. I don't know if we've cracked the code, but we're taking a shot at it. We're saying, let's recognize how audiences really engage with new stories when they engage with them at all.

Let's recognize that, with the cost of marketing, studios need to back a feature film that is derived from a previous feature film. Let's recognize all the new media that is out there that is really enthralling people like my kids, and let's take our story – which is a big story that we love – and introduce it to the world via those means and those platforms. Rony makes a crazy comparison with Japan, where he says, "What is Japan? Well, we know Japan's a country, but we also know it's a culture. It's a set of stories, it's an aesthetic, it's a logic, it's a whole bunch of things. And let's build our version of that."

So, our story is Hour Blue, which is about a conflict on a far-off world dominated by these techno-deities. Our heroes are a brother-and-sister team that are part of the servant class, who have been chosen to set the society right. What's interesting about our story is that we have two protagonists who choose two different paths. The brother chooses to take these entities on with action and violence, while his younger sister decides that there's a better way. If computer code is the key to the power of the rulers, she's going to go find the source of that code. And so, the two of them go on these separate journeys. It ends with revolution and change, but also with enlightenment and insight into what we believe are some of the more important issues ahead of us.

The name “Hour Blue” is derived from a French term that refers to a time right after magic hour and before darkness – when the blue of the night sky and the blue of the sea blend together and the horizon disappears. It's a time when we don't know what's real and what's not real. For us, that reflects some of the ethical confusions of our time, particularly with AI, but with all the changes that you and I are witnessing with increasing speed as the walls break down between machines and software and biology.

AWN: As I understand it, the idea of transmedia is that creative developers would, on one hand, create a world from which derivative and appropriate creative pieces could be released in many different forms, while remaining consistent within a broader world. In another way, looking at it as developers, the technology would be adaptable, so that investments in assets, etc., would be usable across different platforms. And one of the goals, as you mentioned, is to reach younger audiences who don't consume content the way that prior generations did. As a creator, to be successful, you need to reach them where they get their entertainment. It sounds like that's how you’re looking at this multiple-pronged model for bringing this immersive story to audiences.

CD: Exactly. The word “transmedia,” like “the metaverse,” has been overused. But it is a legitimate idea. As you suggested, there are two parts. There's what we might call a vessel that contains characters and stories and environments. It's rich and deep, and there are many, many conflicts that are being played out there. It's a myth-opia that just continues to generate stories. On the other hand, and this is where the transmedia technology part comes in, it's making good on the idea that we can be building for one and using in many. Up until now, even in an animated movie, or a movie as complex as Gravity, once we accomplished what we did, marketing couldn't use it because we couldn't actually isolate elements; they could use clips from a movie, but they couldn't use the spaceships or the assets from it. Or in an animated film, we couldn't break them up. It was way too expensive to, say, run a small TikTok video through a DreamWorks pipeline. And so, the question is, when will we get to the point where we can be building in a way that accommodates transmedia formats?

Obviously, the movement toward GPU-based rendering, game-engine rendering, is going to be a big help. But so is planning ahead for the building of the assets, and selecting carefully all the people that are going to be part of your pipeline. And that's an important core to this idea as well.

AWN: What you're describing certainly makes sense, and it's using new technology in ways that haven't been used. But it's also not a trivial undertaking. How big a team are we talking about, how are the creatives all hooked together, and how long does this all take?

CD: Most of the major digital services companies – and I work with all of them – have massive international pipelines, but they also, obviously, work with proprietary rigging and technologies, which means you can't transfer from one to another. So, we break that hurdle down through essentially devising our own novel pipeline, which we're working on right now. It's almost like open source, so that DNEG or Framestore is going to be able to build into this environment. But, importantly, so will individual artists. And that's the biggest idea we're looking at. We've all heard this dream articulated before, but I think we're now across that threshold where we can have a toolkit that can go out. And so long as we're curating the building of the world and the creation of the stories properly, we can make a tool set available to people around the world.

AI is part of it – but it's not replacing artists, it’s rather serving as an empowering tool. We think we can begin to achieve the scale that's necessary to sustain this StoryWorld. We’re not trying to build a big metaverse to start; rather, we want to arrive at that organically by building out all the small, appreciable elements of a real world. We have music, we will have a feature film, and there will be a limited series. We have an EDM concert scheduled at the end of the year, which is possibly going to be a fundraiser for the rebel forces in our story. It's that kind of rolling out across a lot of platforms.

AWN: One of the things I’ve seen, and it's only been since the pandemic, is what I call the “big-gear vendors” – the NVIDIAs, the AMDs, Amazon – who are interested in M&E again, and it’s because of all this cloud-based, collaborative, photorealistic, real-time production of visual content. And even though M&E is teeny for them, they need to be involved in this. But they come at this opportunity from the CTO down, not the artist up. So, this is what they're missing, because you’re talking about creatives who straddle both sides of the fence and know how to harness all this tech into a new way of providing entertainment. And that's something I think they will embrace.

CD: That's the bet we're making. We've been thinking about this for a while: When are we going to have these transmedia assets that can live across all these platforms? When are we going to be able to empower individual artists working at home with a software package that integrates with some of the larger digital service providers? We all have imagined this, but I think it's only in the last two years that we've gotten to critical mass. During the pandemic, with people working at home, we had to build very rapidly. I finished my last movie with 300 people, all at home.

Now we've not only adopted a tool set that facilitates decentralized autonomous networks to build things, there’s also really been a cultural change where we're all now accepting that. 10 years ago, if somebody said, "I'm going to stick you at home with a computer and you're going to be making movies from there,” it would have been ridiculous.

AWN: And now you suddenly have a talent pool you can access beyond just the people you can bring into your studio, wherever that might be.

CD: I've had conversations with some of the big companies, and one of the frustrations they have is that, during the pandemic, many of the great artists they worked with decided to buy homes, but none of them could afford to buy homes anywhere near the studios. Technicolor's offices are on the right bank in Paris, DNEG is in Fitzrovia, London, ILM is in San Francisco. These are not places that artists can find a place to live. So, they bought homes an hour-and-a-half train ride away, and they've struggling to find a way to bring everyone together. I think the time is definitely right for the remote paradigm.

AWN: So, apart from your presentation at Annecy, how are you going to start bringing all of this to audiences?

CD: The first short film, Yellow Dove Aftermath, has been accepted at over 25 film festivals this year, and some of them are the small-town ones. Rony likes to say, "It’s like a rock band that's playing the local clubs right now." We're playing the small festivals for several reasons. One is we really are committed to an organic rollout of this IP. And it starts just like politics. It's a handshake business.

Also, it's a spoke and hub system. There is music, art, publishing, graphic novels, and films – let's say, narrative linear entertainment. There's also new media. For each of those different platforms, we’re engaging in a variety of partnerships. So, the next year will be a rollout of partnerships based around this IP. You might see a collection of music inspired by it before you see a feature film depicting it. Also, additional shorts will be released, and they'll continue to play the festival circuit.

AWN: The first thing I noticed about the short was that there are a number of disparate styles and components coming together in an interesting mix. But it's not too busy or frenetic – it's almost gentle in its approach.

CD: What people will come to learn is that every single thing in that nine minutes, every object or asset, has a story behind it. And we hope that will really interest people as they begin to see what’s going on.

AWN: I just sent notes to someone this morning about a pitch and a story bible, and it's all just so bleak. I really appreciated the lightness and the whimsicality of the short.

CD: All of us associated with this live the world of IP development. We understand the attraction of dystopian worlds, and it's hard to imagine a future that doesn't include conflict. However, we are deeply committed to stories that are life-affirming, that have humanity at the core. I sometimes joke with Rony that I don't want to do any work that's not in some way a defense of liberal democracy.

AWN: Anything else you want to share before we go?

CD: In terms of general idea and mission, I’m not claiming that we’ve cracked the code and have it all figured out. But I do feel we’re identifying extraordinarily opportune and advantageous trends in the business right now. All the transformations in media and audience behaviors – some stemming from the pandemic, many just stemming from the adoption of social media as a major entertainment platform – are pointing to the need for novel industry approaches. We think we have one, and we're just incredibly excited to give this thing a try and see if the world will embrace us. It'll be really interesting to see where we end up.

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.