Ian Cheng: Life After Bob

Life After Bob: The Chalice Study is an animated film by Ian Cheng, playing as a real-time simulation rather than a fixed recording. Combining traditional keyframed animation with programmatic elements, the film uses the Unity Game engine in place of a static renderer, allowing the film to remain live and at times unpredictable while still being authored with the intentionality of a directed work.

Complimenting the linear film, which is screened on a strict time schedule, there is also an open-ended "worldwatching" mode: visitors can use their own devices to pause any scene and tap on any character, artifact, or entity in the frame to explore its lore and mythology. The film premiered at the Luma Foundation in Arles and subsequently showed at The Shed in New York and Light Art Space in Berlin.

I served as Producer and Technical Director across the full production — from early development in early 2020 through the final installations in late 2022. The project ran almost entirely through the pandemic, which required building remote production pipelines capable of coordinating and sustaining a team of over eighty people across the world without interruption. At one point our team covered a time-zone spread of 17 hours.

On the technical side, I directly oversaw a twelve-person team working in Unity, integrating keyframe animation, procedural animation, live interaction, and performance capture workflows into a single coherent system.