This New Year’s Eve, together with the team of VRrOOm, I worked on the virtual reality concert Welcome To The Other Side, starring the electronic music legend Jean-Michel Jarre playing inside a virtual Notre-Dame Cathedral. The concert was a huge success (with more than 75M total views!), and this was possible thanks to the work of all the amazing professionals that worked on it. I made my part, and since many of you in the communities asked me to write a postmortem about this concert, highlighting the lessons learned and telling you some anecdotes… well, prepare yourself for a long read about how I personally lived this adventure!
Welcome To The Other Side
The idea of Welcome To The Other Side came out after we did the concert Alone Together, always with Jean-Michel Jarre. As you can read from my related postmortem, the concert went out pretty well, but since we had to rush it in just 3 weeks, it also had its big share of problems. Louis Cacciuttolo, the head of VRrOOm, talked with Jarre about the possibility of organizing a new concert, this time having more time to make it better. Jarre, that is an innovator at heart, agreed immediately, and there was a lot of talking about how to do this new virtual event, that could really showcase the potentialities of virtual reality concerts and realize what Jarre had in mind.
There have been many ideas about this concert: we evaluated different target languages, different platforms, different event days, etc… but there were always two constants in all the drafts: Jean-Michel Jarre and Notre-Dame. There has always been this idea of mixing these two French masterpieces, so different (Jarre is a modern artist, Notre-Dame is an ancient masterpiece) yet so similar (both can create awe) and letting people enter again Notre-Dame for one special event. In the end, I don’t know who took the decision, we decided to do a New Year’s Eve celebration, I guess to give even more importance to this event, and to do it targeted mostly at the European market. And so we did.
We started working on it in September, and more actively from October. 3 months is much better than the 3 weeks we had for Alone Together, but it’s still a short time for this kind of performance. When Jvan Morandi, the professional that took care of the lights choreography (and much more) heard about the concert, his comment was “Is it for Summer 2021, isn’t it?” and when he discovered that it was for the end of 2020, his comment was “You guys are totally crazy”. Yes, we know we are.
How we did it
If you are here on my blog, most probably you would like to know some technical details on how we carried on this project. And I’m happy to tell you.
Since we had more time than with Alone Together (the previous concert), there was enough time for a design stage. In this phase, Jarre and the various artists (Vincent Masson, Jvan Morandi, etc…) decided how the visuals of the concert would have been. Some experiments have been carried out and in the end, it was clear what was the final goal.
Once we knew what we had to do, we started some experiments to understand what was actually doable inside VRChat. We chose VRChat as a platform because it was the one we were the most confident in (we made all our biggest projects there), because it is one of the most powerful and versatile, and also it let us use Unity, a game engine we all knew very well. Also, VRChat has a great community that has created many tools that have been very useful for us.
We started assembling the scene in Unity. Many people asked us where we took that amazing model of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. I would like to say that it was made by us, but actually, it is the model that Ubisoft used in Assassin’s Creed, a model that required 2 years of study to be done. After Notre-Dame burned, Ubisoft made the model available to whoever wanted to create artistic projects for the community, and ours was absolutely on target. it is a model we took from a dedicated store (UPDATE: in a previous version of the article, I have written we got the model from Ubisoft, but this is not true. We had contacts with Ubisoft, but in the end we preferred using another model we found online because it was easier to manage that). The model has been taken and simplified/optimized to be used in VRChat by MID and then we begun filling it with the elements of the concert.
Vincent Masson produced the amazing 3D animations you could see around you, while Jvan Morandi worked on the spotlights animations and both worked on the 2D videomapping projected on the walls of the cathedral. SoWhen took care of creating a beautiful avatar of Jean-Michel Jarre: this was not easy, because the public image of an artist is very important, so they had to create an avatar that was at the same time cool and that represented JMJ’s style. Since we were using Unity, we used very standard asset types for all of these features: FBX models for the 3D animations, the avatars, and the spotlights; Light objects for the spotlights’ lights; and mp4 videos for the video mapping, that were projected with proper UVs on the walls of the cathedral. As for the tracking of Jean-Michel movements, while last time we used Vive Trackers since they were the safest solution, for WTTOS (Welcome To The Other Side), SoWhen employed a mocap suit compatible with SteamVR, that guaranteed better accuracy in the tracking of the body of the artists, plus tracking gloves to record his movements in playing the instruments.
Once all the material was ready, it was time to assemble it in Unity and optimize/polish everything. This was the work carried out mostly by Lapo Germasi and Victor Pukhov of Manifattura Italiana Design (MID). VRChat has not only the requirements of a smooth framerate to satisfy (you don’t want people to see the concert with 20FPS), but also of space: if the overall scene weighs more than 300Mb, your users will take too much time to download it, and sometimes things can also crash, so people won’t have a good experience. MID and I took care of making sure that everything was running at the right FPS and the world was not too heavy to download.
Then MID and I finalized everything adding:
- All the temporizations: the spotlights, the videomapping, etc… everything should be triggered at the right time and be in sync with the song. This required some creative solutions inside VRChat;
- All the interactions: you can’t produce a VRChat world without any interactions. Interactions are good for the engagement of the users, and also to justify the sense of being in VR, so we added some things you could do while watching the concert (like the ability to make the fake crowd popping into colored stars);
- All the elements needed to shoot the video. Since the concert was in VRChat, and we didn’t want to provide a flat streaming from a single point of view, we actually created a complex cameras system inside VRChat so that Georgy Molodotsov and Maud Clavier could work on a great 2D version of the concert. We utilized an opensource project to initialize the camera system, then we used also VRCLens for the shots taken by hand with depth effect and a 360 videos recorder avatar by VoxelKei to shoot the 360 videos shown in the Afterparty world. The result was the video you can see embedded at the beginning of this post.
For the after-party, the experience was designed by Denis Semionov, that also took care of actually sculpting the whole scenery inside Quill. It was optimized by MID, then we added the interactions (like the ability to go on the Zeppelin), and it was done.
The various types of concerts
Last time for Alone Together, I admitted that the real Jean-Michel Jarre was only in one room, and here I have to tell you the same. In VRChat, a person can only be in a single world instance, that is a room with 40-60 people, and it is not possible to circumvent this limit. So while the real Jean-Michel was playing at midnight in Studio Gabriel in Paris, only a few people could really be there with him. All the other people attending the concert have just seen a replica of his.
I know that this truth disappoints some people, but again, due to the limitations of the platform, either we made a concert only for 40 people, or we made a concert for many more people, but only 40 could see it live with the artist in the room. And since we wanted to make the biggest number possible of people enjoy this great moment, we went for the second road. When the VR platforms will let us have 10,000 people in a single room, we will be very happy to offer the same performance to everyone live at the same time. But I think this will require years.
Last time we offered an amazing experience to “VIP” users and a very mediocre experience to all the other ones, and this time we absolutely wanted to avoid it: we wanted everyone to have a very similar experience and enjoy this great concert. So, even if there have been 3 different kinds of rooms for PC, the experience in every one of them was very similar.
The rooms for PC were made this way:
- The official room, used for recording and streaming of the concert. The difference with the other ones is that this was the room with officially Jean-Michel performing live and with the highest levels of visual performances (so that the quality of the 2D video was top-notch). Everything played in sync for all people in the room, and we didn’t care about the framerate or the weight of the world, because it was a world for people that for sure had a very performing PC. In this room there was installed the complex system of cameras for the youtube videos and more “fake crowd” to give the impression of a more filled cathedral in the videos;
- Some VIP rooms. Almost identical to the official room, but with an avatar that was not the real Jean-Michel and slightly inferior visual performances to guarantee a better framerate to the visitors. The experience played in sync for everyone and the midnight moment was in sync with the real midnight;
- The public worlds. Almost identical to the VIP rooms with the only difference that the experience was not in sync with the other users, now with the midnight moment. The performance was recorded and acted as a music box: in whatever moment, you could arrive in the public VRChat world, hit “Start concert” and see the concert performing for you, from the first song to the last song. You could be there with other people in the room, but everyone was seeing their own moment of the concert, depending on when they hit the “Start concert” button. This was the best way to avoid the synchronization problems we had with Alone Together, and it worked perfectly.
I can guarantee you that the experience in all room types was almost identical, and we were incredibly happy to have been able to democratize this virtual reality concert for free, for everyone, on all platforms. And I’m happy to say, that this time, the experience worked for everyone and no one complained about the concert not showing.
As for the Quest version, it was impossible to offer the same experience. The hardware of the Quest and the bad performances of VRChat on mobile forced us to take the hard decision to limit a lot the experience on Quest. At a certain point, we had to decide if skipping Quest altogether, but Louis Cacciuttolo clearly suggested to us that since the Quest is so popular, we should offer something to Quest users. We all agreed, but the best we could think of was like a lounge where people could enjoy a video of the concert together, like an interactive version of Oculus Venues. Denis drew with Quill a simplified version of NotreDame, and people could stay inside there and enjoy this video together. The idea was nice, but the realization was mediocre.
The mediocre experience on Quest
The concert has been a success, and everyone in the team is happy. But while I’m satisfied, I’m not happy at all, because I keep blaming myself for the Quest experience of this concert.
The priority for this concert was the PC version, and the streaming based on it. The PC version(VR or Desktop) of the concert was the only one guaranteeing the true experience we wanted to offer, with Notre-Dame, Jean-Michel and the rest, so we focused a lot on it, and cared less about all the other experiences, that is the Quest version and the afterparty (that was cross-platform). While this makes sense, because priority must always be given to the most important things, and there was no time and budget to make everything perfect, I still feel unsatisfied with the service we offered. And as the biggest VR advocate of the team, I should have put more attention on the Quest worlds, also because I know that Quest 2 introduced many people to VR.
I received some critics for these experiences. Charlie Fink, one of the VR journalists I love the most, wrote me in private that the Quest experience was “janky” and Anne McKinnon wrote on VRScout that the afterparty was just filled with videos that became boring after a while. And they were not the only ones writing me similar things. And it hurts to admit that they are right. The experience on Quest was mediocre because there was just a screen showing a recording of the concert inside a drawn Notre-Dame, and the Afterparty was beautiful to be seen (Denis made a great job in drawing the Cathedral and the front plaza in Quill), but a bit boring, because there were few things to do apart from watching highlight videos of the concert.
Note for the next time: if you offer something, better making sure it is good and polished, otherwise, it’s better not to offer it at all. Maybe it could have been a good idea not creating an after-party world and focus all the energy outside the PC concert on creating a polished Quest concert experience. There was no time to make a simplified 3D version of the concert that could run on Quest (Notre-Dame was too heavy), so we could still just show people a 2D video, but we could have added more interactive elements, some chairs, some portals that could lead to videos where it was showcased some behind-the-curtains or interviews about the concert, etc… We should have offered an experience that was different from the PC one, but still amazing to be lived. Instead, we just made the poor version of Oculus Venues. Sorry, Quest users, next time it will be better.
The importance of VR
If there is something for which I’m proud of having done in this concert, is having insisted that it happened in virtual reality. There has been a moment during the design stage when JMJ and other people questioned if it was not safer making just a 2D version of it, due to the limited time we had. I personally opposed this decision and talking with all the team, we all agreed that if this was a “VR concert” we should have really done it in VR and reassured Jarre that we could do it even in the limited time we had. He was happy with it, and trusted us we can do it. And that was the best decision ever because this way we have really made history by performing a huge concert completely in virtual reality for people inside and outside virtual reality. You can only do make something incredible if you are willing to take the risks to do that.
I’m happy also because everyone told me it was the best way to enjoy the concert. Since I was working during New Year’s Eve, my family from time to time came to see me in front of my laptop, to cheer me up and give me some food. They were also watching the Youtube streaming, and when they came to my room, looking at the screen, they told me: “It’s much better on PC!” I was not in VR, but just by looking at my pancake display, they could tell that the virtual experience felt more immersive, more interactive, more real. Everyone confirmed that to me: it was SO better in 3D.
Don’t misunderstand me: the video streaming made by Georgy and Maud was beautiful, but it was… a video. The interactive experience, even if just on a screen, could make people feel really inside Notre-Dame and that was much more immersive. Everyone that makes a concert marketed as a “VR concert” and that in the end is just a video should know it. I think that WTTOS has been important because it let many people have this sensation of feeling truly inside Notre-Dame living an amazing concert for the New Year’s Eve.
The problems of New Year’s Eve
Making a VR concert for New Year’s Eve is cool: you feel part of a big moment, and you celebrate it with many people from all around the world. But it has given us many problems I hadn’t thought about:
- It ruined completely the NYE dinner with my family: I’ve eaten super-fast and then flew away to my laptop to fix some problems with the after-party world. Also, my only celebration was going to the living room when there were 15 seconds missing to Midnight to say “Happy New Year” at midnight and then returned to the concert 30 seconds after. It was really sad for me not being able to celebrate with the people I love;
- Many journalists and influencers we contacted were on vacation and so didn’t noticed about our concert;
- Other VIPs that got our invitation told us that they had other plans for New Year’s Eve, and this was bad for our visibility;
- Many people missed the news of the concert and so didn’t attend it in VRChat. I’ve received a lot of requests for a replay: I’ve proposed it to the team… let’s see if we can do that;
- VRChat had organized its own official event for the end of the year, so it gave less importance to our one;
- Most of VRChat team was on vacation, so we had little assistance in the days before the concert and also the day of the concert when we had a huge problem during the final rehearsal. My friend Chris Madsen also told me that VRChat servers crashed soon after the end of the afterparty, so we dodged a huge bullet. This was a big risk for us, and maybe we should have asked VRChat to guarantee 24/7 assistance for the last 3 days including the one of the concert.
Honestly, it has also given us some advantages, especially for the combination with the pandemic. When we were already working on the concert, the second wave of the coronavirus started in France and so all the other physical events for New Year’s Eve were canceled. So this event gained always more importance: from just being a cool innovative event sponsored by the city of Paris, it became the main NYE event for Paris and one of the most important in the whole France. It went broadcasted on France TV, it got the patronage of Unesco, many sponsors, it was featured by EBU and it found space even on Italian news channels! We found many responsibilities on our shoulders, but we were sure we could deliver a good product and we were happy with the visibility we had. Seeing an Italian news program mention “virtual reality” to the mainstream public because of a project I was working on was a huge satisfaction for me.
The missing opportunity on visibility
This project had enormous visibility both in the VR communities and on the mainstream media. But while in the first ones more or less anyone knew that I was working on it, in the mainstream only my friends knew about it. In the TV channels, in the written magazines, everywhere there were always mentions of Jean-Michel Jarre and/or Notre-Dame. Often there was a very brief mention to VRrOOm, and there was never a mention to New Technology Walkers, Skarredghost, or whatever brand I identify in. This hurt me regarding the Italian media: Italian media are always ready to tell that there is something Italian in everything cool that happens in the world (“the 4th-grade cousin of the best friend of the wife of Biden is Italian, so Italy won the US Elections!”) and it’s a pity no one knew that in the team of this innovative concert there was a good share of Italians (me, MID Studio, Jvan Morandi). The result is that I got no personal gain in Italy from the visibility of this event.
I think that the next time we do such a big event we should hire some PR agency to give more visibility in the mainstream both to VRrOOm (and the amazing work it does) and to our individual brands in our respective countries.
The problems of being in a Cathedral
The setting for this concert was the Notre-Dame Cathedral, a masterpiece that is not only pure art, but also a religious place. This created some problems when we had to decided what to put inside.
When we discussed what interactions to add, we had to scratch our heads many times. In Alone Together, Jarre asked us to add some “magic pills” that triggered fuzzy visuals and many people loved it. We knew he would like to have them in this experience too… but… could we hud drugs in a church? Of course not, so the pills have become “Magic Glasses” that you could wear to have different visuals. We wanted to make an easter egg to slash the fake crowd, but could we do something violent in a church? So, we had to make them burst into colored stars like balloons. We wanted to add champagne, but we thought it could have been not appropriate…
So, being in Notre-Dame was cool, but it has also been a limitation for the creativity of what we could showcase there. It forced us to make a certain number of compromises.
A team working well together
If there is something I’m very happy about, is the team that worked on the project. There is not a single person in the team about whom I can say that he/she worked badly. Everyone made a great work, and the stunning final result is proof of that.
With Alone Together, we got to know each other, and so we already knew how to work together, and there was also more confidence when we were speaking in the calls. This time there was also a project manager (Maud Clavier), that was missing last time, and this was good to handle better all the calls, the communication between the members of the team and to set some priorities. I still think we made too much confusion on Slack (people kept writing in random channels) and there should have been a bit more organization with the tasks, but in the end, the organization was way better than in Alone Together.
Jvan Morandi was maybe the only newcomer and he was a great addition. He never worked in VR, never worked in Unity or VRChat, and in the beginning, he had many difficulties in adapting his usual job of designing the choreography of lights and visual effects on a real stage to virtual reality. But it was good seeing him learning fast and being able to design in the end a great lightshow for the concert. He is the living proof that whatever artist working in real-life events can adapt pretty fast in working in virtual events, giving new professional perspectives to people that currently have no way to work because of the coronavirus.
We all worked always to help each other: we tried to figure out how to work together the best, and as soon as we found our way, we went on really fast.
The better coordination of the team was also visible during the concert. We had a zoom call open while the concert was live and so we were able to notify immediately to the others of all the problems we faced. This was an idea of Georgy Molodotsov (a great professional I’m really happy I’m working with) and literally saved us when we realized we were in a room while the VIPs were waiting for us in another one. It was a great idea, and we will keep it for other future events. The only problem was that I had only one monitor and on the same PC I was speaking with my friends in VRchat and my colleagues on Zoom. So sometimes I was screaming “HEEEEEEEEYYYY CHRISSSS WHAAAAASUP, I LOVE YOU!!” to my friend Chris in VRChat but this could also be heard by all the Zoom participants, whose ears started to bleed. I should manage better the mute buttons in both chats 😀 .
If you are the organizer, don’t do that from VR
Since I’ve talked about the Zoom call, let me tell you a trick that I’ve learned from my past events:
If you want to enjoy an event, do it in VR; if you want to manage an event, do it in 2D.
While being in an event in VR is much more beautiful, having to care about problems that may arise while you are an organizer is more problematic. If you don’t have a headset on your head, it’s easier to answer to people in chat, to look for problems on the web, to have a phone call if you need it, to switch applications (like from Zoom to VRChat). Also, you have less fatigue (having a VR headset on your head for hours is not comfortable) and no issues with batteries that can run out of power. Being in control on a standard PC is much better than doing it in VR.
I’ve started attending my own events in VR, and since the first day I did it on a 2D screen (it was during an event in ENGAGE when I had problems with my Rift), I have never come back. So unless you really want those fancy moving hands, attend it on a standard computer.
Learning from past errors
I personally think that this concert was a success thanks to the many errors we made this year in all the other events. We learned a lot from the errors we made in our past events, like Alone Together or Venice VR Expanded, and we avoided them in WTTOS. It was a success because of our failures.
When making this kind of performances that are at the cutting edge, the experience is much more important than technical ability. Platforms like VRChat are new and innovative, and they hide many problems. We had to face many issues here and there and we had to find many compromises to solve them. I say this every time and I will never be tired of saying that doing VR at this moment is all a matter of making compromises between what you want to do and what is possible to do. You have always to be ready to find a solution to whatever problem that you will have to face, and find it fast. Sometimes it means delivering something worse than what you hoped for, but you’ll have to adapt to the art of compromises.
For instance, in the after-party we spent a lot of time to make the flying umbrellas: you could grab an umbrella and fly all over the plaza. But for a bug of VRChat, when you exited the umbrella, you couldn’t walk anymore. We spent all the last days trying to solve it, and in the end, we decided to remove this beautiful feature Victor had spent so much time on: we substituted it with a magic umbrella that made you jump very high and see the city from above. It was painful to take this decision, but it was the best thing to do to deliver.
Another example is the fact that the concert was recorded and de-synched in the public VRChat worlds. That’s been a tough decision, but the alternatives would have been either developing a concert with a horrible avatar of Jean-Michel or developing a concert where at least half of the people could not see the experience starting (like last time). Some people could tell me that they are disappointed by this, but my answer is that you should try to do this yourself: working on it, you would realize that we took the best compromise possible. It’s only with experience that you can understand the problems and find the solutions to them.
We also took care of many other aspects. We created more VIP rooms and allowed fewer people inside per room because in some past events we noticed that too many people in a single room may lead the world to have terrible performances. We didn’t rely upon VRChat “Master User” system, because we noticed that you never know who is the first person entering a world (and this completely saved us for this concert). We worked on several backup plans: for instance, Georgy was controlling his room with two accounts, because so one could work as a backup if the other got kicked out of the room, and we had also a plan in case both accounts were kicked out at the same time. We made many tests to ensure that the experience was working for everyone, even in real-life conditions.
Please, if you have to make an event of this kind, make a lot of tests with the room filled with real people and prepare yourself for possible failures of your system. Please, please, please. In Alone Together we didn’t test enough the public rooms and in the end, the experience was a disaster there. Never skip the testing phase: try to keep a minimum of some days to see if everything is working before the event.
Another important thing that we fixed is the design stage. This time we spent more time in the design stage, so before starting developing, everyone had clear in mind what we were going to build. It was also important doing the design stage to do some little prototypes so that to verify if something was possible or not in VRChat. And also, it was crucial for the artist, that is JMJ, to see the soonest possible what was the look and feel of the concert. Until we arrived at the moment when there was Notre-Dame with all 3D assets and videos and spotlights, even in a crappy desynched way together, he couldn’t get the real feel of the concert, to see if it was what he had in mind. I’ve learned that this is very important: the customers must see the soonest possible even just a rough version of the event so that they can understand if they like it. If it happens soon, there is still time to change something. In Alone Together, we had no time, so this happened too late and then we had to change many things last minute. Please please please, keep this in mind.
BUT notwithstanding all these improvements, we still made some little errors. For instance, the midnight moment was not perfectly in sync with the real midnight for an error in the computations of times. We made tooltips and messages to make some features of the concert clear to everyone, but people didn’t read them and didn’t understand them the same. For instance, some VIPs found themselves locked into the initial cage, and while in the cage there was written “Please wait until we open it. It may require some minutes”, they started thinking they were locked there by error. Next time we have to make all the things easier to understand, maybe with a mix of strong visuals and audio messages, together with a more user-friendly experience. New lessons learned for our future events.
The Parkinson’s Law always hits
If you, like me, like to read about productivity and personal growth, for sure you know about Parkinson’s Law. If not, well, it is pretty simple:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
And a personal corollary of it is that “whatever the time you may have to finish a project, you will always finish rushing the last 2-3 days and deliver at the last moment”. This verified to be true even for this project. Notwithstanding the fact that we organized our work very well, the last week was a hell. Lots of things to tweak, to polish, to fix. The last day I slept very little and we were all very stressed. During the Zoom Call I seemed like a psychopath: on one side I was enthusiastically screaming in the party room in VRChat “I’m so happy for this party! Let’s all celebrateeeeeee” while on the other side, I was on Zoom two seconds later, worryingly saying “F******ck, how the f*ck is going the upload of the afterparty?” while Victor screamed incomprehensible vowels in Russian. The problem was: we fixed the last stuff in the afterparty in the evening and we were having big issues in uploading the afterparty for the usual lovely problems with VRChat servers. We finished to upload it 15 MINUTES before it went live. Another photofinish upload like… well, every project I’ve been in in the last years, with all the teams I’ve worked with. I realized that it is a constant of every project, maybe I should call it the Ghost’s Law 😀
The personal problems
Talking strictly about myself, I’ve been criticized mostly for two things: being too busy with other things to do and being not enough communicative.
The second point is due to the fact that I prefer doing things than talking about things. So I hate calls, I hate meetings, I hate emails. “If I’m always in calls, I can’t do stuff” is a sentence that I always tell to whatever project manager (and yes, they all hate me :D). I feel that in many projects, the team members lose too much time speaking, and too many meetings are just a waste of time. The problem is that I risk swinging to the other opposite, that is working by not communicating enough with the other team members, and so we risk not coordinating well enough. I have to improve on this side, I know… but at the same time, I will always hate Zoom calls 😀 I think that the project manager Maud Clavier has a voodoo doll with my face in her home, and I can’t blame her for this 😀
The first point is due to the fact that… I actually do too many things: the blogs, the consultancies, the projects, etc… I love everything about VR, and when I get proposed a project, I always want to say “YES, LET’S DO IT!”. But I have only 24-hours every day, and soon I realize I can’t do everything. This year, I’ve got better with this, but the problem is that two big projects I agreed upon doing (one was this concert) ended up unexpectedly with a delivery date close to each other. And since it was 2020, the cursed year, I also found myself in the same period with enormous personal problems that took me a lot of time and energy. Basically, from October I started getting super-stressed, I worked a lot, I slept very little, I ruined some personal relationships and other cool things like that. Not to mention the fact that since I always try to be very honest with the people around me, everyone knew I was working on other things, and so I got some complaints from people of both projects for not being “100% focused on the project”. Not exactly the best situation to be in.
I managed to deliver well in both projects, but it’s been very stressful. Personally, it’s a risky situation I don’t want to be in anymore, so my advice for you is to make sure to know the exact delivery date in advance before accepting a big project. Also, don’t talk too much to the other people about the cool things you are doing with other teams. I like to hear the other projects people are working on and I also find it quite normal that a professional doesn’t follow just one project at a time if he/she has the possibility to do that, but this doesn’t hold for everyone: if people know you are working on other things, they’ll worry you can’t deliver in time. So, avoid speaking about other things you are working on: just guarantee your delivery dates and go on with that, if you can.
Some people ask me how I manage to do so many things together, and my answer is twofold: at first, you have to work a lot of hours and with a strong discipline: if you work focused, 3 hours of yours are worth 6 hours of a non-focused person; then, you have to understand when to prioritize what. I mean, when I was doing the big projects I cared less about my blog, and I wrote fewer and simpler articles, while now I can afford writing this big long post; when I had some important tests to do for JMJ, I worked less on the other project, and when I had the delivery of the other project, I worked less on JMJ, because I could afford to accumulate a little delay in that period. It’s all a matter of alternating the push on one project or another, because very rarely in a project you’re required 100% of the effort 100% of the time 100% of the days for months, so it is possible to exploit the dead times of a project to work on another. Of course, you must be sure that you are working on projects in which you can do this kind of game.
In all this mess, I want to thank from the bottom of my heart Louis Cacciuttolo, for having always believed that I could perform a great work, and Lapo Germasi and Victor Pukhov that always supported me and helped me in performing my tasks in the most complicated moments. I love you guys.
Drink but not get drunk
A final advice comes from Georgy: as a Russian man, he spent the event with a bottle of Vodka on his desk. “If you drink a bit before the event, you will be more relaxed and everything will be better”.
Ok guys, but just a sip.
The big success
In the end, let me celebrate a bit our success. The event was available on all possible media: VR, PC, Quest, Web streaming, TV. It was free for everyone, and available in the West and also in China, where it became one of the top trends on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) also because JMJ’s wife is Gong Li, one of the most famous actresses in the whole country.
All of this has big possible thanks to a great group of professionals that worked very well in these months and I’m very happy to have been part of this team. I think most of the merit goes to the artists, that have made stunning visuals, and to JMJ and Louis to have made this project possible. I’ve just made my little tech part, and I sincerely think I’m the last one that should receive any compliment, but I’m proud the same of having made this great performance possible.
In total, among all mediums, Welcome To The Other Side amassed 75 million views (!!!!) and more than 17,000 views came from VRChat. (75 Million was counted as the total views/visits until now of the concert. The number is so big because it includes TV spectators and Chinese users, that are many)
The feedback from the community was enthusiastic, to say the least:
And even Kent Bye, a person that I esteem a lot and that strongly criticized us for Alone Together, made us his compliments:
When the event finished, I felt free and I screamed “IT’S OVER!”. But no, actually, it’s not over, this is just the beginning.
I hope you liked this post and that it may help you if you have to deliver your future VR events. If it is the case, please connect with me on Twitter, Linkedin, or donate to me on Patreon. And if you want to organize a virtual event, feel free to contact me via e-mail. Have a nice VR year!
(Header image by VRScout)