XR Spotlight – Fully Novel
We talk to Sophie and Trevor Klein, the team behind Fully Novel, a small business helping production companies, startups, agencies and broadcasters to develop storytelling projects for TV and digital.
In October 2024, Fully Novel became residents in the XR Stories immersive research and development lab to explore the use of blended virtual and physical sets, and child contributors, in virtual production.
Sophie and Trevor planned to use the residency to test hypotheses around using a combination of animation and live action to create a new workflow for linear kids and family projects.
How did the work that took place during the residency align with what you originally planned to do?
We knew the plan was ambitious for five days – combining a stylised 3D environment, real-time motion capture ‘puppeting’ a 3D character in another room, a virtual set extension with an LED wall and then using them in a multi-cam shoot with a child contributor who has a physical controller to affect the 3D environment.
We gave ourselves an internal deadline of having all of the components working together functionally by the end of day three.
This meant aiming for ‘good-enough’ rather than ‘perfect’.
Fortunately, along with XR Stories’ in-house creative technologist Joe Rees-Jones, we were supported by a mighty (albeit tiny) team.
We got up and running on our first day quicker than expected, setting up our cartoony 3D scene (thanks to Stephen Da’Prato-Shepard!), and our 3D character (thanks to Mark Nicholas!).
One major compromise was with our physical controller affecting the Unreal scene. While we did have a big red button working directly in the Unreal scene as an input (thanks to James Hosken), we couldn’t get it working when mediated through Disguise. It became clear that resolving this would take longer than we could spare in the lab.
Our solution? Fake it. At the same moment as the child pressed the button, we’d trigger the effect ourselves ‘backstage’ with a key press. From the child’s perspective it still felt like they were doing it, and we were able to gauge their honest reaction (which was extremely positive!), knowing that we could fix it ‘properly’ in future.
We also went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to hack a moving mouth into our off-the-shelf 3D character which came with a giant motionless head (a bit like a sports mascot costume!). It wasn’t something we’d planned originally, and seemed so tantalisingly nearly in reach, but ultimately again we had to abandon it for time. While facial capture is something we intend to explore further in future, we were pleasantly surprised how little it ultimately mattered for immersion.
Those sorts of compromises kept us on track technically and meant we could spend day four fully on rehearsals with our motion capture performer, Livy Potter. This ended up being vital as there were many last minute and unforeseen workflow snags / improvements that we needed to work through. A long checklist quickly formed for our skeleton crew for each run through – from calibrating the motion capture suit, checking virtual/real eyelines, recording the animation data, framing up and hitting record on all cameras, syncing audio, etc.
It meant everything was able to go smoothly on our final day when a real life five year old turned up. We managed several full run-throughs of both our real-time 3D environment and green-screen scenes. There was also time for a bonus impromptu live-action/CG dance party, which ended up being some of the best footage we got from the day.
Overall, the work that took place over the week aligned pretty much perfectly with what we’d hoped to explore.

Photo by Fully Novel
How was the residency beneficial to Fully Novel?
We’ve gained confidence in how to effectively integrate these technologies into our future practice, helping our own projects and adding value to our client work.
It also helped validate our ideas to inform future development of new virtual production TV and immersive formats for (and involving) a kids and family audience.
What were the most useful outputs from the residency?
We had specific hypotheses that we wanted to investigate:
- That the combination of stylised/animated 3D environments in VP together with physical set builds/live action is an underutilised approach with great potential for kids and family content.
- Physical cause-and-effect interaction with an environment on an LED wall is technologically possible and visually exciting to capture live.
- Child contributors will interact in a more magical and naturalistic way with real-time characters in a VP environment compared to green screen, giving greater pay off for audiences, and require a unique workflow to authentically capture.
These were all validated during our residency, and beyond them was the benefit we gained from working with these particular technologies in combination. While we knew they should work together in theory, there is no substitute for doing; to understand their edges, capabilities and how to scale for real uses, without the pressure of a particular project delivery.
We’re now in the process of writing up the outputs from our residency, which we’ll then share more widely and explore the potential for further development/funding.

Photo by Fully Novel
How do you think that you might use the outputs in future projects?
This is going to be phenomenally useful whenever we need a performer to be interacting with a CG character or creature on a future TV/film/immersive project.
In particular, there are two main directions we want to explore further.
- Suitcase-scale: A performance-first workflow, where an actor is interacting with a work-in-progress virtual character/creature of a good-enough quality to help them get the best on-camera performance in the moment. The final polished virtual character/creature would be added separately later. This would be a more nimble kit and workflow designed for working on location in short bursts (get-in and get-out in a day).
- Studio-scale: A ‘Final Pixel’ quality workflow where what is captured on the day is good enough to go straight to audiences with minimal further VFX work. This would flesh out some of our ‘good-enough’ compromises to become ‘amazing’, and be a larger scale approach for longer shoots.

Photo by Martin Miles
Would you recommend the business residency to other creatives working in XR technology?
The lab setup is incredibly useful for speedy iterations – having all of the facilities in one room made for a very fluid and creative collaboration. A small team can be very effective in a short space of time.
The team at XR Stories are extremely welcoming and generous with their expertise and support.
For us as a micro SME, we would simply never have been able otherwise to get access to this breadth and quality of technology with the time and space to use it creatively, try things, make mistakes and learn.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with the XR Stories team and highly recommend the business residency to other creatives with ideas to explore.
XR Stories Creative Business Residency Programme
The XR Stories 2025 creative business residency programme is open to artists, freelancers and small business working in extended reality technologies in Yorkshire and the Humber. Visit the creative business residency news page to find out more and apply by 6 February 2025.
.Header image photo by Stephen Da’Prato-Shepard.
Published on 30 January 2025
Filed under: R&D Projects, XR Stories