Hibiscus Mask - An Immersive Storyworld Animated Short Film

Hibiscus Mask, written by acclaimed author Rich Shapero is TooFar Media's 12th multimedia production. The story is a gripping psychological mystery about the preconditions for love and the tragic cost of hidden identity.

This animated short film represents the first three chapters of the story and uses some of the latest cutting-edge technology to build out the Immersive Storyworld including Playcanvas, Blender, Adobe Suite, Adobe Firefly (AI asset generation), Affinity, Adobe Stock and Shutterstock, Cubase Pro 13 and Soundforce and Davicini Resolve.

The script for the storyworld was created from key elements of the first three chapters of the book. We didn’t have many image assets available to visualize the different scenes within the script which led us to the ‘islands of moments’ concept, where each scene would appear from the darkness and be a simple representation of the elements of the story, but without visualizing the characters themselves.

The recorded voiceover was edited to match the timing requirements and used as a guide track for the animation within Blender. The audio track was further refined into a multi-channel sequence featuring the Malaysian kompang percussion excerpts, with environmental and foley sound added to sit behind the voiceover.

For the first time we used generative AI to generate and extend image elements. Adobe Firefly was used to create some of the assets from scratch and customize them. Adobe Photoshop was also used to extend the boundaries of stock images and further edit them for use within the storyworld production.

The camera movement, and lighting were added in Blender to complete the animated sequence. Once the scene was complete in Blender, we exported groups of elements using the Graphics Library Transmission Format (glTF). We also used custom properties within Blender to add meta data for our export and playback system.

The exported glTF packages was then imported into our PlayCanvas project, ready for playback through our scripted playback engine. We added the 3D integrated text elements within each of the scenes in Blender, and exported them to PlayCanvas.