Getting Acquainted

This week had an overall theme of getting acquainted. From our initial meeting with Jesse Jones, the manager of Anti-Flag, to experimenting with the new equipment we will be using to film, it was a week of familiarizing ourselves. This week we were able to scout an office that we will be using for the filming portion. Delta Development (where Pat’s Mom works) has been gracious enough to lend us their office to use as the main office for the film portion of the experience. With that crossed off the list we have begun focusing on casting as well as prop gathering. This week we were also able to storyboard half of the film portion along with creating some concept art for characters in the game.

We also have been familiarizing ourselves with the ETC’s new camera we will be using by taking some test footage. It films in slow motion so we have had way too much fun filming mundane things and seeing how awesome they look in slo-mo (i.e. playing with water too much.) Taking the footage we shot, we then have been testing the editing and compositing in After Effects and Premiere. We are learning how to composite logos into a shot and how we can manipulate someone’s Facebook photos.

On the tech side of things, the rapid prototyping phase has begun. We have been testing an HTML5 game engine known as Construct 2. Frank and Himanshu have been getting familiar with making games with this engine. The team has been researching games in general by playing games and dissecting what exactly makes them fun. We are also playing with Facebook and will finalize what information we actually want to pull for the experience.

Next week we will be working on finalizing all the storyboards and script for the film portion. Along with this we want to finalize our schedule so we can set dates for filming and make sure everyone that is needed is available. Game-wise we want to start making a rough prototype of how our gameplay will work and start pulling information from Facebook and working it into some test footage. We are looking forward to Anti-Flag visiting the ETC!

Newsletter 1-25 (PDF Version)