Glen Keane on the Making of “Duet,” Now Available on Moto X and Moto G 4G LTE

Starting today, "Duet" is available globally as Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group third Spotlight Story on the new Moto X, Moto X (1st Gen.), and Moto G 4G LTE. "Duet" is an interactive love story that brings the timeless art of hand-drawn animation to a new mobile format. Animator Glen Keane spent 38 years animating some of Disney's most beloved characters for movies like "The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin, "Beauty and the Beast" and "Tangled." Today, Glen Keane shares what it was like to work on "Duet" in his own words. We hope you enjoy. 

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Duet is an interactive animated story. It is a synthesis of the most ground breaking virtual world technology and the most ancient of all art forms—drawing. From the beginning of this project we knew it would be a celebration of life through line. The entire production was a creative adventure. We are a small team of artists and programmers working together to accomplish the charge of ATAP’s Regina Dugan set before us. “I want you to make something beautiful and emotional,” she said. “You push yourself creatively and that will push us technologically.”

Duet is a love story between two characters, Mia and Tosh, whose paths cross throughout their lives. Different than the traditional linear story, Duet employs a multi-layered approach that could best be described as a double helix in which the characters’ story arcs literally spiral around one another. Figuring all of this out was enough to make our collective heads spin! Fortunately we were blessed with an incredible ATAP team of technical engineers led by Rachid El Guerrab. The artistic half of our creative suite was led by our producer Gennie Rim and Production Designer Max Keane. Together, my assistant Sarah Airriess and I drew over 10,000 drawings to create the animation for Duet.

Again and again, we were surprised by the freedom this interactive storytelling provided. Jan Pinkava, who pioneered and directed the first Spotlight Story, “Windy Day”, continually encouraged us to put the camera into the hands of the audience. However this is not an easy or natural thing for a filmmaker to do. The tendency is to want to control the visual composition, but with Duet we learned to coax rather than control. Because of the nature of this virtual world technology there were no individual shots cut together. It is all one continuous living moment. I think of it less as a traditional film and more as a visual poem.

Our music composer, Scot Stafford, may have had the greatest challenge of all. Not only was he tasked with creating an emotional score, but it also needed to respond at any moment to the viewers' choice and seamlessly switch themes from one character to the other. Duet is in every way a partnership between the visual and the musical.

Throughout my 40 year career as an animator I have benefitted each time new technology crossed my path because it invariably forced me to become a better artist. In a similar way, Duet has stretched all of us creatively who worked on it.

We have learned that when it comes to storytelling, everything is possible. There still remains so much more to discover.

We are thrilled to share Duet with you today.

Glen Keane
Director / Animator of Duet

Editor's note: We made a mistake in earlier version of our blogpost when it said "Duet" would be supported on Moto G (2nd gen.). Unfortunately, that was incorrect. It is currently only supported on Moto X (1st and 2nd gen.) and Moto G 4G LTE. We're very sorry for getting that wrong.

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Disney Legend Glen Keane Joins Motorola’s Spotlight Stories

To animate means to bring to life.

Glen Keane’s work seems larger than life. As the creator and animator of beloved Disney characters such as Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and Tarzan, Glen has drawn more than figures on a screen. He has made the stories and characters of our childhoods. He gave us imaginary friends, admired heroines, misfits in search of understanding, and at least a Halloween costume or two.

At Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, we believe in the power of storytelling, so we’re building new stories made specifically for mobile. Not stories made for the big screen but shown on a small one. Not flat content. We’re building interactive, immersive stories made for your smartphone.

So we’re excited to announce that Glen—the artist behind so many classics—is working with us to push the future of animation with an original Spotlight Story.

Expected to release the middle of 2014, in this third Motorola Spotlight Story, Glen is going back to the drawing board. Literally. Together with the engineers who unlocked the graphics technology that made our first Spotlight Story, Windy Day, possible on the Moto X, we’re pushing new edges. The raw emotion of the hand-drawn line brought to life in our technological world. And yours.

What will happen when a master animator of the big screen jumps to an innovative, mobile canvas? We’re excited to see.

Stay up to date with Spotlight Story happenings on our Tumblr or join our Google+ community.

Posted by Baback Elmieh, Technical Program Lead, Advanced Technologies and Project (ATAP)

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Introducing Motorola Spotlight Stories™ - Storytelling Designed for Smartphones

Smart phones have become deeply personal devices, indispensable in our lives.  Storytelling is the most timeless and human of activities.  Yet the stories that live on our mobile phones are mostly adapted from other media -- like TV shows, movies and books -- merely shrunk down to a smaller screen.  Why is that?  We decided to change it.  So, we created a new way of telling stories, one designed specifically for smartphones, where the capabilities of the device are part of the experience itself.

Together with our team of Motorola engineers and Oscar-winning director Jan Pinkava, we’re happy to announce the debut of Windy Day, the first immersive, interactive story made for mobile phones, launched using a first-of-its-kind storytelling platform called Motorola Spotlight Stories.

Motorola Spotlight Stories aren’t games, movies or videos. They’re different.  New.  Here’s how some of our first audience members reacted when they saw Windy Day for the first time:

When the first Android phone came out almost five years ago, it had roughly the same graphics computation performance as a Nintendo Gameboy Advance, which came out five years before that. Since then, the performance improvement of mobile processors has been astonishing.  The graphics chipset on the Moto X has 600 times the computation capability of that first Android device, and next year mobile graphics processors will surpass the computation capabilities of video game consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Where is all that graphics power going?  When we measured it, we found that outside of a few graphically advanced apps and games, it’s barely being used.  It was a graphics-processing treasure chest hidden in plain sight.

So, we decided to make something new.

We tuned the Moto X so that, even in the most stressful user-interface conditions, up to 60% of its graphics capability is accessible. We took advantage of that access to build a powerful creative canvas for storytellers, incorporating a real-time 3D graphics engine, an advanced rendering technique from Pixar called OpenSubdiv, and sensor algorithms adapted from the landing systems of interplanetary spacecraft. Really.

We invited some of the best storytellers of our generation to paint something on this canvas.  Jan Pinkava, the Oscar-winning director of Geri’s Game and co-director of Ratatouille, Oscar-winning producer Karen Dufilho, animator and Academy Award nominee Doug Sweetland, Caldecott-winning illustrator Jon Klassen, veteran animator Mark Oftedal, composer Scot Stafford and artists from eight different countries joined us to build the first Motorola Spotlight Story: Windy Day.  It’s our gift to you.  We hope it makes you smile.

Motorola Spotlight Stories are featured exclusively on the Moto X. Stay tuned for more, because we are continuing to work with award-winning storytellers.  There are a lot more stories to tell.

Watch what happened when one of our own product managers, Kevin, showed Windy Day to his 2-year-old son—then check out Windy Day for yourself.



Baback Elmieh
Advanced Technologies and Project (ATAP) Technical Program Lead

Visit our Tumblr page to stay up to date with future Stories and further information on the technical achievements.

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