Cutting Edge: Week Three

The Work This Week

During Week Three, we spent more time continuing our goldspikes and narrative research. Additionally, as our production design was needed this week, our artists, Yui and Shana, created a bunch of drafts for the logo and other promotional materials.

Internal Branding

We wanted something that might highlight our focus on cinematic language, and chose film rolls and film frames to represent that. These were the drafts:

This was the final logo design that we decided on.

Continuing Narrative Research

We continued to look into short stories and novellas this week. In addition to reading Ficciones, we also obtained a copy of In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut, as well as Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr. We also read some stories in the anthology novel Calypso by David Sedaris.

Ficciones (by Jorge Luis Borges): Of all the short stories in this anthology, the one the largest impact was The South. It is the story of a man who develops septicemia and is sent to a santarium to save his life. He is eventually released and begins the long journey home, through train and later by foot through desert territory.  He is eventually challenged to a knifefight by some locals, and feels that had he been given the choice to die like this rather than go to the sanitarium, he would have done it. It is left unclear if he died in the santarium and everything else was in his head.

In a Strange Room (by Damon Galgut): There are three approximately 100-page stories of Damon travelling across the world, alone, and developing friendships with other travellers along the way. There are certain snippets over the course of these stories, such as when Damon finds out that his friend Jerome has died, that would work for us.

Memory Wall (by Anthony Doerr): There are six stories in this novella dealing with the aspect of memory. The titular story tells of an elderly woman that undergoes an experimental treatment to scientifically allow herself to view her old memories in spite of her developing dementia.

Calypso (by David Sedaris): This anthology contains many short stories about Sedaris’s life. One of them, “Boo-Honey”, involves him thinking about moments when his deceased mother and sister approach him in his dreams. In another, “Why Aren’t You Laughing?”, Sedaris reminisces about his mother’s lifelong battle with alcoholism, dealing with his own impression of her over the years. Both of these deal with memory and a character thinking about the past that we liked.

Over the weekend, we will be developing our narrative shortlist of 3-4 stories that our top choices to adapt. We will present these choices at our 1/4 walkarounds next week.

Programming for Week Three

Crossfade/Blend in VR

Our programmers Sherry and Hongzhu implemented camera crossfade in VR. Usually, camera crossfade is a simple full-screen image effect. We can use render-to-texture functionality to get two camera’s render results, then use Graphics.  So render-to-texture is no longer a choice. We ended up using OnRenderImage on slave cameras to grab the render results out, then Blit it back to the main camera with a special shader that takes the eye index into account.

Playing with Unity Rendering Pipeline

Another problem we started on the new Unity lightweight render pipeline for its exclusive tool shader graph. It turned out the new render pipeline changes the whole rendering process. Some functions needed in traditional image effects are no longer being used. Furthermore, the new render pipeline is still in preview and relatively unstable. We decided to step back from this new technology for now which means we had to ‘downgrade’ the project back to the ‘normal’ rendering pipeline.

Contacting Epic Games

We had Epic Games visit our project this week. We mentioned that during our research not many explanations were found on Unreal Engine’s solutions for multiple scenes rendering.

After the talk, we sent our technical questions and they kindly replied that their material preview tool which will allow us to render a different scene with independent lighting and environment setting. It looks promising but extensive work is required to customize this tool to fit our production need. We’ll keep looking into it.

Next Week

We have 1/4 walkarounds next week, so we will be presenting our work so far to faculty and iterating based on their feedback. We also will finalize our narrative, so that we can begin work on our direct adaptation.