An immersive modern folktale for XR devices.

Enter the world of Fallax, Huldufugl's first animated VR short film and Iceland's first narrative film made for virtual reality devices.

Follow an escaped convict as they flee into the Icelandic highlands, and are pulled into a mysterious world where time and nature move differently.

Created by Huldufugl in collaboration with UK aerial circus company Hikapee, this is a 23-minute experience for Meta Quest devices and PCVR. The story was written collaboratively by both companies, with Owen Hindley from Huldufugl directing the XR development, and Bryony Livesey-Casey directing the movement in the studio.

The piece combines motion capture (aided by the amazing Target3D team) of aerial circus performers with a unique, custom-made art style, enabled using custom tools developed in Houdini and Unity Engine.

Watch the trailer here:

Whilst working on The Hidden People stage show, the team were forced to pause production on that project due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We'd created an entire thematic world, and put together an amazing team of creators and performers - so during lockdown, we created the concept for a XR film set in the same world, and Fallax came into being.

The first step was to find a motion capture company brave enough to work with tumbling, spinning circus performers using silks, trapeze and counterbalancing equipment - a real challenge for the tracking system - and then do the entire thing on location, whilst adhering to strict COVID-19 safety measures.

We were extremely lucky to find a partner in Target3D, who sent an incredible crew to join our artists in isolation at 101 Outdoor Arts in Newbury for a week. Under Bryony from Hikapee's direction, they recorded an entire narrative of aerial circus-infused action.

It's a unique challenge to produce animated work for VR - where almost anything is possible in terms of angles, lighting, sound and set design. For our piece, we're taking a lot of cues from theatre over film in terms of set layout and the audience's relationship to the performers - but this still leaves us a huge possibility space to play with, which is extremely exciting!

We're also aiming for a unique art style that represents the Icelandic nature - acheived through procedural modelling in Houdini, taking the rough outlines of landscapes, and 'shredding' them into thousands of small, individually coloured polygons. This approach retains sharp edges in VR even up-close, without using textures, whilst also giving us fine control over colour, pre-baked static lighting, and vertex shader effects like wind movement in trees, water and moss.

The tools and processes for this were entirely developed by Owen in-house at Huldufugl, along with the procedural rig retargeting system to adapt and edit the motion capture material to our stylised 3D characters.

Fallax is currently touring film festivals worldwide. International distribution is handled by Diversion.