Recently, The Cat Ghost, a VR short animation developed by DigiLab, the School of Animation and Digital Arts of the Communication University of China (CUC) has been selected for the Immersive Media Unit of the 41st Tehran International Short Film Festival. After reaping the honor at the Animaze Montreal International Animation Festival, this work has made it to the finals of a high-level international festival for the second time.
▲ The VR animation short film The Cat Ghost
This short film was created by a team of faculty members from CUC, including Directors Wang Lei and Wang Yi, Scriptwriter Zheng Danqi, Art Director Wang Yi, Technical Director Duan Wenkai, Producers Liu Youchun and Wu Yanan, Graphic Designer Zhang Xinyi, and Storyboard Designer Zhang Zige. The DigiLab team from the School of Animation and Digital Arts at CUC handled the technical development and content production.
The Cat Ghost is inspired by an anecdote of a Chinese man and a cat from the West in the 2nd century AD, telling a story about how innocence triumphs over cunning and how love defeats suspicion with a narrative full of metaphors. Inspired by ancient cave art, this work offers a magnificent and elegant digital cave experience. It is characterized by the character modeling of Han Dynasty picture bricks and the typical palette of Dunhuang grotto murals. A multi-layered and even-out world is unfolded with simple movements and vividly outlined people, animals, and patterns in a condensed and rich artistic style and frame-by-frame animation approach in a salute to the Chinese school of animation.
The Cat Ghost lasts 8 minutes and goes in CAVE (a digital cave experience) and VR versions. The CAVE version is presented in a 6-faceted LED Cube, the focal point of the Cats of the East, a grand art exhibition held at Beijing 798 Art Zone in 2023.
The VR version fully leverages the advantage of allowing viewers to watch the film while moving freely, with spatial sound design enabling them to pinpoint the sound source, thereby enriching the viewing angle and experience, and drawing the audience's attention to the plot development. Viewers can wear a VR helmet to watch the film and explore the diverse expressions in the hexahedral space.
Iranian Youth Cinema Society has been hosting the Tehran International Short Film Festival consecutively for 40 years, which is hailed as one of the most prestigious and famous short film festivals, an Oscar-qualifying festival. This year, with more than 15,000 contest entries and a selection rate of 0.06%, this festival was touted as one of the most demanding festivals. With the emergence of media technologies like VR and AI, the Tehran Intl. Short Film Festival introduced a new category of immersive media in 2024, where The Cat Ghost was selected among the VR entries.
This film marks another success in the explorations of movie and TV cartoons, immersive and reactive digital art creations by Digilab, the School of Animation and Digital Arts of the Communication University of China (CUC). Members at Digilab are winners of more than 120 festivals across over 30 counties, including China Culture and Arts Government Awards for Animations, the Excellent Chinese Animation Award of the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, the Tokyo International Animation Festival, and Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film
( Editor: Zhu Binger )
