Fantasia: Music Evolved

A motion-controlled music game set in the world of Disney's Fantasia, where players conduct and remix songs with their arms.

Studio

Harmonix

Publisher

Disney Interactive and Microsoft

Year

2014

Platforms

Xbox 360 and Xbox One, with Kinect

Role

Art lead

The game runs in two modes. In performance, players conduct and remix songs with sweeping arm gestures, a new set of Kinect controls built for the game. Between songs, each realm is a small world to explore and wake up with music, from a frozen birch forest to a factory party and an undersea city. A 3D cursor tied to the player's hand let them reach into the scene and play with it directly.

I wrote the style guide, a key deliverable in the Disney deal, and oversaw Yen Sid and the stylized cast. We mixed original lore and characters with Disney’s own, and balanced hand-painted textures against PBR material response and lighting.

The bar for character animation was high, in the worlds and in the cutscenes. The cast ran from a wizard to snow creatures to fairies, and many of them needed their own rigs and tech to come to life.

On top of each world's theme, we used post-processing to push its look further. The Haven and the Hollow took opposite routes. The Haven went reduced, almost graphic: a snowy birch forest in a tight palette, with pushed contrast for a more modern feel. The Hollow went the way of a European fairy tale, dense gnarled woodland finished with a cross-hatching pass so it read like an old children's book.

Every element worked to set the worlds apart, so moving between them felt like real exploration.

I ran the external partnerships with Virtuos and Liquid Development.

In 2014 I presented the game at SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live, walking through how motion control shaped the art.

Fantasia and its characters © Disney.