AnimationWorld Magazine — November 14, 2018
John Kahrs Enters the ‘Age of Sail’ with Cinematic New VR Short
The Google Spotlight Stories team calls Age of Sail its longest, most visually complex experience to date. The 12-minute VR experience and accompanying theatrical short is certainly ambitious, taking viewers out onto the rough seas of the Atlantic in a tiny sailboat, with all the thrills that entails, yet with nary a twinge of motion sickness. It was produced by David Eisenmann (Pearl, Son of Jaguar) and Gennie Rim (duet, June, Dear Basketball) with design and animation studio Chromosphere, and executive produced by GSS EP Karen Dufilho and creative director Jan Pinkava. From a technological standpoint, Age of Sail is a masterpiece. But from a storytelling perspective, it’s even better — expansive and truly immersive, Age of Sail uses the language of cinema to deliver a story that is as heartbreaking as it is hopeful.
From the beginning, Kahrs approached the project like an epic feature. “Spatially, a lot of the things I’ve seen in VR — in my mind’s eye, at least — they’re on a very small scale. And I didn’t want to make something that was cute and small and felt compressed into this small space. I wanted to go for a David Lean expansiveness and make a story that had that epic quality,” he says. “Characters with histories, going back to Victorian time — I wanted to load all that stuff in there so it felt like this was a substantial movie, a big, sweeping, epic movie compressed into a really short running time.”