In an attempt to spread holiday cheer far and wide, Google has brought a special 360-degree animated short film called Special Delivery from its Google Spotlight Stories to YouTube. The film’s really designed to be viewed on mobile through something like Google Cardboard, but maneuvering about on a computer isn’t too bad.
Special Delivery focuses on what Google refers to as a caretaker as he attempts to keep everything nice, tidy, and taken care of while a "mysterious stranger" dashes to and fro. Given the holiday-themed nature of it, you can probably guess which stranger makes an appearance. The short comes from animation studio Aardman Animations, and it was directed by Tim Ruffle.
The interesting thing about the Google Spotlight Stories is that the 360-degree nature of the thing means that different little narratives play out based on where the viewer is looking. When using a phone, this means pivoting and such to point in different directions, which then shows the appropriate angle of the animation. Given that folks can’t look in multiple directions at once, each experience should be slightly different. It’s like an interactive video version of "Sleep No More" — except more Christmas and less stabbing.
“In the full interactive experience,” reads Google’s blog post about the short film, “you’ll encounter 10 subplots, three potential ways to view the ending, and 60-plus moments where you can decide to follow the story in different ways.” The post also promises to bring more Google Spotlight Stories like Special Delivery to both Android devices as well as the YouTube iOS app. Given how amusing the plot of this one is, not to mention the gorgeous animation, they will surely be films worth looking forward to.
The YouTube 360 version lets viewers look around the scenes without full interactivity and see a preview version on the web or in the iOS app.
