ABOUT

The Dilla Dimension is an interactive, short film that tells the story of two sugarcoated souls and their psychedelic journey through outer space. Each step of their voyage is crafted to a selection of tracks from J Dilla's classic album, Donuts.

An alternate universe, blanketed with hypercolor sugar and fluorescent glaze, gives birth to an unlikely cluster of donut holes. Suddenly, they are split apart and scattered across a sea of hypnotic, interstellar chaos. But the impossible takes shape when a love is sparked, leading to a desperate search across the universe for one another.

The Dilla Dimension was launched on Dilla Day 2015 to celebrate the 9th year of the album's release and the life of one of hiphop’s most innovative & influential figures. It uses a league of new technologies to create a completely digital film that's made with real-time, generative effects.

TECHNOLOGY

The Dilla Dimension is built off of WebGL and the Three.js library, the latest in 3D in-browser web technologies. The experience is made up of 100% generative effects with all animation being coded by hand, nothing is rendered. It uses a combination of custom vertex and fragment shaders to generate shape-shifting tunnels, psychedelic gases, clouds and planets.

Custom particle and emitter libraries were built to generate fluorescent explosions, multi-colored vortices and stars. Extended path modules were also built to allow us to track and swap 3D meshes, particles and cameras to a library of splines - this along with spline extrusion libraries were used to create a variety of camera and particle routes.

A custom audio API keeps all the visuals tracked and synced with the Dilla mix that was created for the experience.

IMAGES

GIFS

VIDEOS

Dilla Dimension Trailer

Cartelle Interactive, Shook Amsterdam & Red Light Radio celebrated the life and legacy of J Dilla Saturday, 7 February. The event took place at the Red Light Radio studio with the live premiere of the Dilla Dimension. The radio program was hosted by the Shook Amsterdam Crew, laying down four hours of guest mixes, sample digging, soul and beats, dedicated to Dilla.

Track Listing

Donuts (intro)
Workinonit
Hi.
Airworks
Lightworks
Bye.
One Eleven
Stop

CREDITS

All music produced by “J Dilla” Dewitt Yancey  Created by Cartelle Interactive Studio  Directed by Johnny Slack and Stevijn van Olst  Art Direction Stevijn van Olst  Creative Technology Johnny Slack  Animation Johnny Slack and Stevijn van Olst  3D Modeling Stevijn van Olst and Fredrik Weinestad  Special Thanks THREE.JS Team