This was the interactive story of a young boy (Milo) and his dog (Kate) growing up in a new house by the sea "The Best Summer Of Your Life".
A highly ambitious evolution of the Dimitri concept but this time utilising Microsoft's Kinect camera. This deservedly gained enormous amount of media interest worldwide. However the response was pretty evenly split along the lines of 'that's just weird' or 'that's truly astonishing'.
Visually I wanted to give the title a 'heightened reality' quality, where everything is essentially naturalistic but cranked up to 11. It was part of the brief that Milo was to be the most believable interactive cg character in popular culture. I think he probably still is.
Milo's world had to have a curious childlike quality and I decided to attempt this by having peculiar, arrangements and juxtapositions of content rather than it being overtly 'fantastic'. It was all about seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Seeing wonder in the ordinary.
This production was a first for us in many ways: Motion Capture, Facial lip-sync, Kinect camera inputs. It was also the first time we worked extensivly with artists from other industries: Cinematographers, Directors and Script Writers. Milo & Kate is a genuine phenomena and was key to communicating the, still largely unrealised, potential of Kinect to the world.
Milo's resting at the moment but there's plenty of him on the net. Here's some highlights:
