Wild Animals VR

Overview

Amidst the growing controversy around live animal handling, school workshop company ‘Education Group’ responded by phasing out the traditional animal visits into schools and asked Munk Studios to develop a VR experience as an alternative. This was a great challenge to create a VR workshop to compete with the real thing. Munk studios has a wealth of experience creating VR workshop content and alredy know how a format like this could work in schools. The biggest challenge was creating good quality competitive content, on a budget.

CGI vs Live action

We considered the options available to produce an animal workshop and quickly recognised that filming wild animals was not going to be a straight forward option.  Filming animals in the wild would be a huge undertaking, and given that 360 video is usually a single shot it turns out that not a lot can be observed in a 3 minute period and it would be at risk of boring the kids.  So we decided to take the CGI route.  By creating the animals in CGI we could not only get as close as we liked to the animals, but using animation, we could recreate any scenario we liked.  Not only did we have the flexibility to control the action, but we could also use x-ray style vision to get a more indepth look at the animals and their anatomy.  The videos feature 4 exciting moments including a tiger hunting a deer, an eagle diving to catch a hare, a tree frog escaping the jaws of a viper and a group of tuna fish feasting on a giant mackerel baitball.  The dynamic visuals combined with an informative script and engaging voice over made this workshop a huge success with the kids.

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“The workshops have the wow factor!  We witness their natural behaviour during hunts, feeding and even metamorphosis, all from the safety of the classroom” Tamzin Smith (Education Group)

Museum

These films had a huge amount of education in a small space of time, so after having a mind blowing experience getting up close and personal with the animals, we needed something calm to finish things off.  To help bring the children back down to earth, we created a museum module to finish off the workshop.  Each room in the virtual museum features animals from the workshop and more.  The children were free to navigate the workshop and interact with the content to consolidate their learning from the workshop.  This format proved successful not only for the children, but also for the facilitators as the flexible duration of this module allowed them to fill out the remaining time of the workshop with plenty for the kids to do.