We are perhaps best known for the Annie nominated former mobile adventure game of the year ‘Gesundheit!’, but a ways back we also made an experimental simulation slash tech-demo for iPhone called ’UFO on Tape’ that in many ways has been even more successful, and is the reason I’m writing today.
Released in 2010 (in the days before VR/AR was a thing again) it was an experiment in combining rotoscoped scenery, 2d mattes, and using the then new gyroscope found in iPhones, to simulate the experience of witnessing and ‘filming’ an alien invasion. Using the phone as a pretend window into the real world was kind of meta and not really game-like and so it seemed to strike a chord.
It won a bunch of games industry awards and went on to be featured by Apple some 30+ times, culminating in being chosen 8years later(among a field of 2 MILLION apps!!) as one of just twelve titles inducted into their ‘All Time Greats’ collection.
Long story short we have been ‘strongly urged’ to make a sequel that is more epic in it's scope, and takes advantage of technological advancements made in Augmented Reality in the time since, to further blur the lines between game and cinema. I can't talk too much about the details here other than to say this is a very real and significant opportunity to help create something unique and have it seen and enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people!
The opportunity is such that we’d be very keen to collaborate with a VFX artist preferably from the film industry, who is keen to explore something that bridges the gap between cinema and interactive media to see just how far we can take the idea of being IN the scene! If you can imagine creating a scene for a movie where for example we are looking out at the NY skyline and a UFO or UFO’s descend from the clouds and you literally move your iPhone to pan around within the panorama like an amateur filmmaker - with the goal of keeping the ufo in frame while ‘recording’ then that’s what we’re hoping to achieve.
I’m no vfx guy
but my best guess is we're talking a lot of compositing and someone who can render realistic looking UFO's.Our points of reference tend to include movies like District9 or Oblivion. Then we definitely want to add lighting and vary the mood slash difficulty by having a nighttime mode, rain, fog etc.
Feel free to check out our 2010 original on the appstore (UFO on Tape) and if this sounds like an interesting challenge we'd love to hear from you.
Please email me direct at wwhatford at iCloud dot com hopefully with examples of your work.
Thanks!
Wayne Whatford
Founder & CEO
www.RevolutionaryConcepts.org
www.StoryDiceKids.com