TEAM POSTER
PROJECT TRAILER
VIRTUAL CAMERA SYSTEM
From our talks with the professionals in the industry, we found that the main goal of our virtual camera system is to empower filmmakers to understand, prototype and control the cinematography elements in the story, namely the space and the camera movements.
To let the users truly understand the space of the set, we chose to implement an immersive VR experience to effectively convey the physical dimensions of the set. We are also running our camera system from the Unity Editor so we can easily rearrange objects to cater to the needs of the filmmaker in real-time.
For the camera movements, we strive to create an adjustable camera that can recreate the properties of real-life cameras and implement different navigation schemes in VR to enable filmmakers to experiment more shots in a fixed amount of time.
Features in the system:
- Vertical and Horizontal navigating
- Tilting & Panning
- Dollying / Creating Camera Track
- Adjusting Depth of Field & Racking Focus
- Saving and loading camera motion
MO-CAP SYSTEM
Traditional film previz involves either keyframed animation done by hand, which is time consuming, or motion capture, which requires a dedicated space and setup, and requires significant clean-up after. We are using a VR setup to quickly block out character motion using an inverse kinematics driven rig. The animation is expected to look rough and not intended to be a replacement for the real performance an actor would bring to a set.
Earlier, we designed our system to be used by 3 people, with one acting, one operating the controls and one directing the performance. After things went into remote, that changed. We had reserved controllers to capture hand poses, but we’re now using the trigger to calibrate, and to start and stop recording. We added a countdown so as to get into the right pose when animation begins recording.
We record one animation for one character at a time based on an animation list. Each clip is exported into a file. We do roughly 1 – 5 takes. Eventually, selected clips are imported manually into a Unity timeline to create a whole sequence of animations. We do not do any cleanup or post processing on the animation apart from editing the start and end times or repositioning the character in space. Since the mocap space is small, there are small time jumps in the sequence, which can be a limitation sometimes from the camera perspective, but it works in previz.
For scenes where interaction between two characters is crucial, we found it useful to record one performance and then play back that recorded performance at will. That way the second character can respond to the first, and match the positioning and timing better.
Here is the demo video:
VISUALIZATION CLIPS
Recreation Practice – Moonrise Kingdom
Final visualization clip: Se7en – ending scene