Will Cherry

When the year 2020 was beset with a viral pandemic, I received a call from Psyop Productions in Los Angeles for some first-of-its-kind work. Since then, it’s been one adventure after another on projects that push the edge of storytelling and engagement. Operating as an Assistant Director, Producer, and Creative Technical Director, it’s been wild pushing realtime boundaries in a fully-remote studio.

Oculus Horizon Beta Trailer

With an entire world frozen in place, production still needed to continue. Psyop’s first call was for something never done before: capturing social VR material in VR for Facebook/Oculus’s Horizon open beta.

What it involved was a fully-remote shoot using traditional film hardware, a remote Oculus team, and a lot of Zoom choreography to get the shots necessary for an exciting invitation to the new digital hangout spot.

Working with director Georgia Tribuiani and producer Suzie Cimato was an absolute blast to get all we needed through every technical challenge along the way.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2

Right on the curtails of Horizon, I received a call to come in and replace an interactive producer at Psyop on a massive animation challenge: all the animation states and in-game cinematics for Hardsuit Labs’ Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2.

While the game is set to release in the future and with another developer besides Hardsuit Labs, it was an adventurous year of developemt full of MoCap shoots, cleaned-up and keyed animations, and thousands of character seconds prepared for a dynamic dialogue system befitting of The Masquerade’s fantastic dialogue.

Play With Snoopy Instagram AR Filter

For the release of AppleTV’s The Snoopy Show, Apple’s Media Arts Lab reached out for an AR experience that allowed anyone to play with Snoopy— from anywhere!

Turns out, bringing 2D frame-by-frame animation into our 3D world is super compelling. We reconstructed the animation directly from the show into SparkAR for a custom state-machine: As users tap on the screen, Snoopy performs a variety of tricks and gags before revealing the entire Peanuts gang.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the endless support of Apple, WildBrain Entertainment, and especially Eddy Adams. He is a master of SparkAR filters, and made the experience unlike anything the platform had tried before. Absolute kudos!

Welcome to Cricket AR Parade

Have you ever received a parade made just for you?

Well Cricket wanted to create just that— and so we gave them the opportunity for anyone on any mobile device to access a personalized AR or 3D parade from the comfort of anywhere.

Built on 8th Wall for Android and iOS, this fun shareable celebration was a technical challenge to get the best quality animation in a tight AR package. And we had to get it to work on every device under the sun!