A Cracking Good Time: ‘Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway’ Arrives on Meta Quest

When the team at Atlas V met with the fine folks at Aardman, the synergy was instant, thanks to a mutual admiration for storytelling and innovation in animation. The Atlas V team had long been fans of Aardman’s work, and they wanted to bring a major IP into VR. Their prior success in XR, like Madrid Noir created with No Ghost, showcased their commitment to immersive storytelling, which resonated with Aardman’s ethos. And that shared passion laid the foundation for a beautiful collaboration on Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway.

Players are able to play from the perspective of Wallace, Gromit, and their brand-new contraption, Auto-Caddy, with a variety of replayable mini-games along the way. And in addition to the fully immersive adventure, players can take center stage in their own environment with the MR game Jamtastic!

To celebrate today’s launch, we sat down with Atlas V Executive Producers and Co-Founders Antoine Cayrol and Arnaud Colinart and Aardman Executive Creative Director of Interactive Dan Efergan to talk all things Wallace & Gromit.

Arnaud Colinart: My journey in the media industry spans over 15 years, where I’ve explored documentary, animated series, feature films, video games, and virtual reality. My first VR experience, Notes on Blindness, was a pivotal point in my career, earning accolades at Sundance and Tribeca. It led me to co-found Atlas V with Antoine, Pierre, and Fred, aiming to explore immersive entertainment.

Antoine Cayrol: Like Arnaud, I have a rich background in various media, but my passion has always been in immersive storytelling. Working on projects like Alteration and I, Philip helped shape my vision for what VR could achieve. Joining forces with Arnaud and the team to form Atlas V was a natural progression, driven by our shared ambition to push the boundaries of VR and XR storytelling.

As a company, Atlas V has always been at the forefront of innovative storytelling, producing acclaimed films like SPHERES, BATTLESCAR: Punk Was Invented By Girls, and Gloomy Eyes. Our collective experience across diverse media has positioned us uniquely in the industry, allowing us to explore and excel in new forms of immersive experiences.

Dan Efergan: I’ve been at Aardman now for 14 years, so quite a while. My background is as a coder, although I worked across many creative technology spaces, from gaming to tool building, with projects from mapping wifi networks with a fleet of taxis to large-scale light projections across a city. The other big part of my life was running an exhibition for graduates, which was conceived while still at university (I studied a course run by artists playing with computers called MediaLab Arts), set up to get ourselves jobs but ran for eight years, after which I turned the network into a kind of boutique recruitment agency... so, varied!

Antoine:Wallace & Gromit were an integral part of my childhood. Their stories, brimming with wit and inventiveness, were not just entertainment but a source of inspiration. Growing up with these cartoons, I was always amazed by the clever storytelling and the charming clay animation. This early exposure undoubtedly fueled my passion for storytelling and animation.

Arnaud: For me, Wallace & Gromit represented a fascinating blend of humor and inventiveness. They were more than just cartoons—they were masterpieces of animation. My early fascination with their adventures, particularly the clever inventions and the unique bond between the characters, played a significant role in my later interest in immersive media and interactive storytelling. Today, it’s something that I share with my kids, and I think they’re even bigger fans than I ever was.

Arnaud: The memory that stands out for me is A Grand Day Out. I was immediately drawn to the quirky humor, the intricate plots, and the incredible attention to detail in the animation. I love the fact that The Grand Getaway is an homage to the very first Wallace & Gromit short. It’s in VR, it’s a new story, but it has that same spirit they had already so many years ago.

Antoine: My first encounter with Wallace & Gromit was watching A Close Shave. I remember being captivated by the seamless blend of humor, suspense, and the unique charm of the characters. The way the story unfolded in such an imaginative and engaging manner left a lasting impression on me, and it ignited my passion for creative storytelling.

Efergan: The first experience I had was way back in ’98, at DisneyQuest, a kind of Disney arcade based alongside the main park. I must have been about 19, and the ride had huge lumbering HMDs, very basic graphics, but still invoked that feeling of awe.

More recently, it was when the Oculus Development Kit was released. A friend had visited Aardman to share the experience. We were playing a contraption building game—it may have been an early version of Fantastic Contraption. I remember leaving something down beside me virtually and reaching over without looking to pick it up, and I was like, “Wow, this is really going to work, isn’t it?”

Antoine: When you’ve already conquered the moon for cheese, where else can you go but Mars? It’s the classic Wallace & Gromit leap—from one cosmic adventure to the next, bigger and bolder. Mars is the talk of the town in space exploration. It’s where everyone wants to go. So, in true Wallace fashion, we thought, “Why wait for the rest of humanity? Let’s get there first!” And who better to lead this daring Martian escapade than our beloved, cheese-loving inventor and his clever canine? It’s a whimsical nod to their original escapade and a cheeky wink to the boundless curiosity and ambition that drive both Wallace & Gromit and space exploration itself. Buckle up: It's going to be a grand, Red Planet getaway!

Efergan: The team here at Aardman, in particular Finbar Hawkins, one of the directors, worked across both productions. Having gone through the translation from screen to “real world” once already allowed us to bypass a swath of creative wrangling due to that experience. For example, Wallace is really big, and his hands can look ridiculous when translated 1:1 into your reality. So understanding how we adjust scale, consider setting up situations, presenting characters to a player etc., all help minimize that sense of the unnatural and were all carried forward from our experience with The Big Fix Up.

Arnaud: Working on Madrid Noir and Gloomy Eyes taught us the importance of a strong narrative core and creating a world that audiences can truly immerse themselves in. These experiences reinforced the need for meticulous attention to detail, both in storytelling and visual design. We applied these lessons to ensure The Grand Getaway not only tells an engaging story but also creates a world that’s fully immersive and interactive.

Antoine: Our previous projects were instrumental in understanding the balance between narrative and interactivity in the XR space. The key takeaway was crafting stories that are not just observed but experienced. This approach was central to developing The Grand Getaway, where we aimed to make every scene, every interaction part of a cohesive and immersive narrative journey.

Efergan: When we started building for VR, we had many assumptions quashed. The biggest one for me was how you need to stop thinking “film” and move to a more theatrical approach, considering the stage, the transitions, the attention as you might placing an audience member into an immersive theatrical performance.

That said, there’s then plenty for filmmakers to translate into VR, too. Bram Ttwheam, who co-directed alongside Finbar, worked his grading magic into the process, pushing for the compositing between models, textures, lighting, and color adjustments.

Antoine: The Grand Getaway represents a significant evolution for Atlas V. It’s a project that blends our expertise in immersive storytelling with Aardman’s iconic characters and storytelling style. This collaboration has allowed us to explore new territories in narrative complexity and character development.

Arnaud: With The Grand Getaway, we’ve expanded the scope of what Atlas V can achieve. This project is not just a step up in terms of narrative length and complexity, but also in audience reach and collaborative scale. It has set a new benchmark for us in creating immersive experiences that are deeply engaging and widely accessible—something we’re incredibly proud of."

Efergan: Atlas V are a clever bunch, coupled with endless enthusiasm—they act like fuel poured onto the sparks of our ideas to kick off the engine of a production. Between Atlas V and No Ghost, we’ve been inspired and challenged throughout. Even when things have been hard, which for any big project is a reasonably regular occurrence, we’ve all worked together to find the best solutions.

Efergan: Our mission at Aardman is to create worlds that our fans can have many windows into. Even though we cherish all the craft that goes behind every format we create, we know people ultimately want to hang out with the characters we create and in the worlds we build—to be drawn through the stories we tell. This transcends formats, and VR/MR is the perfect tool to translate people deep into these spaces and let them explore and play.

Efergan: For Aardman, this was about stepping into this story—and into the world of Wallace & Gromit.

We wanted fans to visit some of the places they’ve seen on-screen, spend time lingering over the normally obscured details, investigate moments that have previously only existed for seconds, and reach out and pull the levers, press the buttons, and see what they actually do.

But we also wanted to offer something unique: new locations, new characters, and a new story. As an audience, you’re dragged into the silly chaos, pulled into the epic adventures Wallace seems to accidentally bumble into.

Efergan: When animating “on twos” (the act of running our animations at 12 fps, which on old 24 fps film would involve taking two shots for each frame) was less of a technical challenge than a creative one. The blending of stylized animation into a space that has to run at high frame rates took a few attempts to get right. In the end, we realized that less was more and that having hero assets provide that style did a huge amount of the creative work in the audiences’ brains.

Efergan: This is the constant tension present in storytelling within formats that offer agency. Some of this tension can be resolved with environmental elements, unpacking the narrative into the places you’re exploring, allowing players to find, discover, and piece together their own narratives. But ultimately, when you’ve got characters interacting with the world and each other, you’re going to need to draw the player’s attention to specific moments.

The team used a whole bunch of techniques, timing-based, audio, and visual cues, triggers, and a whole lot of iteration.

The decisions around how to balance agency and attention is ultimately a creative decision, nestled alongside pacing, where each scene is different.

Efergan: No, MR was a twinkle in our eyes when we started. But as the technology was growing, we jumped at the chance. Although the VR experience is all about enveloping you in a new world, the chance to unpack some of this world straight into your living room sounded epic and wonderfully silly.

Arnaud: Designing Jamtastic! was a challenging yet rewarding process. Aardman and Atlas V wanted to create an experience that was quintessentially Wallace & Gromit, yet entirely unique to MR. A lot of effort went into game and level design, ensuring that interactions like shooting toasts and spreading jam felt natural and fun. The goal was to create a playful, immersive experience that stayed true to the charm and humor of Wallace & Gromit.

Efergan: There’s so much to pick from—the warm feeling of waking up in their dining room or the beautiful vistas of retro sci-fi’d Mars. But my personal favorite is a small thing: having Gromit’s hands. The hand tracking is so great, and the team have made the most wonderfully textured hands—and you have four fingers! The whole thing is just a little bit of magic.

Arnaud: My favorite part is the zero-gravity tea-making scene. It’s a delightful blend of humor and poetry, reminiscent of a space mission but with Wallace & Gromit’s unique twist. It’s moments like these that show the playful yet innovative spirit of our project.

Antoine: I particularly love the interactions with the little green aliens. Their design and the way they engage with the player are endearing.

Antoine: Our hope is that players will come away from The Grand Getaway with the same joy and laughter they get from watching a Wallace & Gromit film but enhanced by the immersive nature of VR. We want them to feel like they’ve stepped into a 360-degree Wallace & Gromit movie, interacting and engaging with their beloved characters in a whole new way.

Efergan: A really good chuckle. WIth all the new-fangled tech we get to play with, our intent is the same: Let’s make people smile and make their world a little bit better for a while.

Efergan: This production has been going on for the best part of two years. The first conversation was still during lockdown, so a labor of love for everyone. Some of the funniest moments have to be when recording Miriam Margolyes. She is just one of the best humans that has ever existed, and her sense of humor is both wonderful and sharp as anything. Finbar, who ran the recording sessions, became the source of many of Miriam’s jokes between takes, which personally I’ll cherish forever.

Arnaud: Immersive technologies are rapidly evolving and will continue to revolutionize how stories are told and experienced. In games and films, these technologies will push the boundaries of storytelling, creating more immersive and engaging narratives. The line between viewer and participant will blur, offering more personalized and impactful experiences.

Efergan: I believe ever since we’ve built those clever calculators that became computers, we’ve been attempting to emulate our reality. XR is the next step in this interface with our desire to make our fantasies real, and will continue (however bumpy the road) to seep into our lives. But, much like every format that’s come before, it is unique in the format and form of storytelling. Over the coming years, we’ll all be trying to understand that form to tell better stories. There is no end point as such (have we really worked out how to make the perfect novel, or the perfect film yet?), and so this is just another branch of creativity to pour our souls into.

Antoine: We’re constantly exploring new frontiers in immersive storytelling. Our next project is an MR experience by Eliza McNitt, creator of the VR experience SPHERES. This experience is set in space, offering new narrative adventures in mixed reality. We’re also super excited about Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom, set to release next year. We’d love to tell you more, but you’ll just have to wait! These projects reflect our commitment to storytelling and our passion for exploring new possibilities in XR.

Efergan: Well, there’s a Wallace & Gromit film to finish, and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is coming out on December 15 on Netflix. We’re also deep into our new Chicken Run: Eggstraction game, releasing on Netflix Games in 2024, and have a whole load of XR ideas bubbling away that we hope to be able to talk about sometime soon!

Arnaud: Our parting thought is simple: Go play Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway! Whether you’re a longtime fan or new to their world, we believe this experience will captivate you with its humor, creativity, and immersive storytelling. It’s a testament to the endless possibilities of VR and a new way to enjoy the beloved characters of Wallace & Gromit.

Efergan: Ha, so Antoine and Arnaud have already done the work for me: Go play it. I guess I’d add that a whole lot of love, time, and attention has been poured into this production from everyone involved, inspired by the love, time, and attention poured into previous Wallace & Gromit projects. I hope this comes across when people play it.