SESQUI is a multi-faceted storytelling experience that aims to provide a new, inclusive perspective for understanding Canada and exploring the pillars of Canada 150: diversity, Indigenous reconciliation, youth and the environment. SESQUI is an immersive journey into the beautiful, friendly, quirky heart and soul of the expansive country that Helios calls home.
Sesqui.ca is the online hub for all things SESQUI. A place to find dome locations, VR screenings, quizzes, celebrity Sesquatches, and education materials celebrating this creative, quirky, diverse and wonderful country called Canada.
Wait, what’s a Sesquatch?
Funny you should ask.
As a Canada 150 signature project, SESQUI wanted to playfully explore the collective ideals and individual experiences of Canada.
In collaboration with the SESQUI creative team, we crafted an interactive experience designed for kids to explore their own unique Canadian identity and featuring a quirky mishmash-ed monster lovingly called “sesquatch” (a portmanteau of sesquatch and sesquicentennial).
For a campy interactive experience targeting kids in grades 1 to 6, we got to play around with some pretty neat technology:
The seven unique Canadian habitat biomes that make up the mini planets the sesquatches call home, were created in 3D Studio Max and imported into Blender for conversion into a web friendly three.JS readable format.
The base layers of individual sesquatch pelts are drawn from Google Earth satellite imagery corresponding to a user selected map location.
And getting the sesquatches to animate across their respective biomes while performing reaction gestures and different walk-styles based on personality types required leveraging the massive open source Carnegie Mellon University Graphics Labs Motion Capture Database.