What do you get if you take Frank Miller’s Sin City, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, and mix them together with the help of VR? The answer might well be Kingdom City Drowning.
This is a new cinematic VR series built in Unreal Engine 4 from phoenixmirror. Designed for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it’s being worked on part time by co-creators, writers and directors, Barret Phillips and William Gerardi, writer Robbie Barnett, and producer and designer Stewart Garner. It’s comprised of three separate episodes that follow different characters, though each is set in Kingdom City, a smoggy neo-metropolis that is forced to continue building towards the sky as toxic haze slowly rises from below. The first episode, titled The Champion, follows James, an inmate at a prison below the surface of the gas.
Talking to UploadVR over email, Phillips revealed that the project was born from his love of the moody atmospheres in games and films like Alien, Silent Hill, and Shadow of the Colossus. “One of my passions is to take the concept of atmosphere to a new level and for me there is no medium superior to VR,” he said. As you can see from the trailer about and the exclusive set video below, Kingdom City Drowning is definitely big on atmosphere. It’s dark, miserable, and promises not to hold back.
“For me VR just seems like the perfect opportunity to mix the DNA of games and movies in new creative ways since ‘established norms’ of VR are being thrown out all the time anyway,” Phillips continued. Having seen the potential in VR stories like Gnomes and Goblins, I know where he’s coming from, though Kingdom City won’t have interactive elements to it. It’s closer to something like Oculus Story Studios’ Henry, at least in execution, certainly not in tone.
Still, when I first heard the term “cinematic virtual reality”, I assumed this would be a 360 video. It’s a pleasant surprise to find out it isn’t. “We decided in favor of an engine-based experience rather than 360˚ video for several reasons; with how new of a format this is, the flexibility of editing in Unreal 4 is unparalleled from a creative aspect while shooting 360˚ would require a precise knowledge of how to maximize the effectiveness of shots before the cameras start rolling,” Phillips said.
“We feel like the game engine route is also simply much more established as providing a good balance of high fidelity to low jankiness-factor for a VR experience at this point and that’s ultimately what we’re after and how we want others to experience our work,” he added. “I’ve enjoyed some good 360˚ video experiences but they all have a certain amount of tech and practical issues holding them back somewhat at this stage. I’m interested to see how light field technology will alter this in the future!”
The Champion is currently being developed in the team’s spare-time, a surprising fact given that Phillips and the team recorded motion and facial capture for with its actors, Kentucker Audley (The Sacrament, Christmas, Again) Sofia Banzhaf (Bitten, Degrassi: Next Class) and Amin Joseph (Dope, Transparent). phoenixmirror is planning to charge around $4 for the episode, which lasts about 25 minutes. The second episode, ‘Lovers In Hell City’ is aiming to released in Q3 2017, though a date hasn’t been set for the third, ‘The Drugs We Eat Won’t Save Us’.
