An experiment in putting an ardent hand-crafted 2D animator into the heady dimension of the non-linear world of 360° and seeing what floats

This paper focusses on the character designing development and process for Elephant Elephant Elephant! (previously called Millimation's Elefunk Mini-top Experience ME2) a hand drawn 360 degrees immersive story. It is a reflection of the journey of an 'independent avant-garde, experimental film-maker with a self-conscious auteur's perspective', a term coined by Paul Well's, when he discussed the notion of the auteur in animation (1), who decided to develop a hand drawn immersive experience to take the audience on a journey reflecting on the absurdity of the practice of elephants performing in the circus. It aims to demonstrate that even the technology of the often clinically real Virtual world can be subverted with the creativity and experiment that puts an ardent hand-crafted 2D animator into the heady dimension of the non-linear world of 360 degrees. This may encourage other like-minded creatives in to this virtual reality to mess up the aesthetics. The project has spanned four years in a practice-based research exploring the narrative strategies for immersive stories in 360 degrees. The key constraint in the design imposed by the auteur has been to maintain a hand drawn 2D animation aesthetic - the result in the context of the animation short's history of the experimental, it is perhaps quite conservative, being it shifts between being cartoonish and relatively representative but that the whole content is reliant on the hand of the artist as the sole creative in the production - and to see if it this aesthetic can translate and maintain the qualities present in traditional animation shorts when transferred in to the more immersive setting. This paper will concentrate on the development of the design of the main character, the elefunk in relation to it's role in the narrative content of the Millimation's Elefunk Minitop Experience (ME2).