March 16, 2023
min read
14 creators entered the OhShape and Synth Riders Caravan Palace collaboration competition! We’ve crowned four winners who will be taking home their cut of $2,000, and tons of entries have earned themselves swag from both games!
Filmmaking competitions take place in VR all the time, and you don’t always have to have the most expensive equipment or most intense gameplay to win. Let’s take a look at our four winners and learn about what made their videos so successful in this competition!
Best Production
German pair Stocki and Nessi took first place for best production!
Standing out amongst the field of thousands of VR creators can be a struggle, especially if you need to make content longer than 30 seconds.
A great way to keep the audience's attention is by using multiple camera angles and clean cuts. The easiest way to do this is to record a few gameplay sessions from different angles and stitch them together in post, just like they did in their full video!
If moving your camera isn’t a physical possibility in your studio space, you can always try something like OpenVR Advanced Settings to move your playspace -- moving your playspace will look like the camera moved instead!
StockiVR let me know that it was actually 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit for my fellow Americans) in their studio that day. Speaking of studio, every time StockiVR wants to shoot a mixed reality video, they have to build up everything in their living room!
With 3 takes and full, black outfits on, it probably wasn’t a very comfortable shoot. After all that work and disassembling their studio, they noticed their calibration was off! Even I get lazy sometimes, but checking your footage as you record it is critical in any type of recording session.
After setting everything back up and even more recording, it took them about 5 hours to piece together this winning take. Hopefully the prize was worth it!
Best Performance
If I didn’t already know who RIRI was thanks to my obscure knowledge of Japanese arcade games, I’d have no idea how he was so good at dancing.
Thankfully, I do know how he’s so good at shuffling, he’s literally the 9th Konami Arcade Cup Dance Rush Stardom champion!
Dance Rush Stardom is made by Konami, the same company that makes Dance Dance Revolution. It’s an arcade game RIRI has played for years that emphasizes freedom to dance along its multi-colored floor, and RIRI uses his full body tracked avatar to translate his shuffling skills into OhShape beautifully.
This category is all about movement and not so much fancy cuts or multiple angles. Check out RIRI's winning entry here:
The 9th KAC champion really used the free time between OhShape walls to express himself and stand out above the other entries. While there aren't any fancy cuts or edits, RIRI does use LIV's secondary avatar camera to show off a synchronized front view!
With incredibly clean footwork, RIRI tosses in tons of shuffling favorites like the Charleston that you see him usually incorporate on the dance floor, making it no surprise he took first place in the best performance category.
Best Synergy
Lapricap literally blends both OhShape and Synth Riders together, putting her solidly in first place for Best Synergy!
It was more complicated to edit than I originally thought, Lapticap ended up compositing 4 separate layers together for her video. The layers were OhShape with only walls, OhShape mixed reality with the Caravan Palace background, Synth Riders mixed reality with a chroma stage, and Synth Riders balls only on the chroma stage. She even had to end up using blue chroma instead of green so that you could see the green Synth Riders ball!
Her goal was to seamlessly blend the two games together. In her editing software, Lapricap masked out the Synth Riders balls in parts where she was playing OhShape. She had to do the same for OhShape, but had to make a custom OhShape map without walls because it was too hard to mask all the walls out when she wanted to show off Synth Riders -- OhShapes walls are generally thicker and longer.
She even had to play OhShape on easy and hard to line it up with the Synth Riders map In the end, there were a lot more takes and editing than you’d originally think watching the video!
The judges picked the best synergy winner by choosing the player who married the two games together the best, and in this case, it was definitely Lapricap.
Peoples’ Choice
While the previous three categories were voted on by a team of judges at LIV, Synth Riders, and OhShape, the Peoples’ Choice award was voted on by the community!
Otterworldly’s fantastic outfit choice and use of the Synth Riders movement mod captured audiences hearts and landed her the W for Peoples’ Choice! The movement mod for Synth Riders makes it look like the camera is moving around you, but in reality her play space is rotating. That means Otterworldly and the playspace are spinning, and not the camera!
This is certainly a category where having a strong online presence can give you an advantage, telling your audience to vote for you on Twitter, Discord, and wherever else you talk to your viewers would absolutely give you a boost. If you want to win in a category like this in the future, be sure you have ways of getting in contact with people who watch you on multiple websites!
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A huge thank you to the teams at OhShape and Synth Riders for putting on this competition for the community! If you didn't win this time, hopefully you learned something here about what making an award-winning mixed reality video looks like.
Do you have tips you want to share? Toss them out at the LIV Twitter, or join our Creator community in the LIV Discord!
