Behind the Scenes of Emmy-Nominated “The Notorious B.I.G. Sky’s The Limit: A VR Concert Experience” Edited

8/10/23 Update: I’ve been asked by Hyperreal to temporarily shorten this breakdown. Look for the return of the more informative original breakdown in the upcoming weeks.

This is a short breakdown of the Emmy-nominated “Notorious B.I.G. – Sky’s The Limit: A VR Concert Experience”, which was produced during the fall of 2022 as a VR experience for Meta on their Horizon Worlds platform, and for 2D playback on Facebook. The main production company was Hyperreal, with Metamo Industries and Hi From The Future on the primary vendor side.

My involvement was on the environments and output side, and not with the mocap and animation of the digital character assets, so this breakdown will not delve into those areas.

Due to a demanding schedule, our pre-production phase faced significant time constraints, leaving us with little time for storyboarding and in-depth R&D. Despite these challenges, we successfully completed the project within a remarkably tight timeline of just over 8 weeks. This is thanks to the solid teams that we had on this project, which spanned 5 continents, and many time zones.

Short clip of “Notorious Thugs” performance in the Unreal environment.

Digital environment for Biggie’s apartment. Painted and generated artwork for posters, magazine covers, and photos.

Hyper-real versions of “Biggie” and “Puffy” during the downtown car chase sequence.

Biggie in his apartment during the last sequence.

Throughout this project, we successfully managed a highly skilled and geographically diverse team, spanning five continents and even more timezones. Amazing work by everyone, and I’m honored that it has been nominated for an Emmy in “Outstanding Emerging Media Program”.

Detailed “King of New York” crown. (Dave Howe – Substance Designer, Houdini)

Posted: 07/2023 Updated: 08/2023