This week, we officially started our exploring in real previz practice with the Butch Cassidy script! To previsualize the first scene of this masterpiece, the team worked parallelly on tech tool developing, scene blocking out, storyboarding, and 3D asset creating.
MOTION CAPTURE SYSTEM
First, our programmer and technical artist Varun continued work on the VR motion capture system that we will be using to block in animations quickly. Varun spent time on making sure the avatars can be easily swapped, and animations can be exported for use across Unity and Maya. Also, Varun started work on our gold spike scene from Inception (the ending dialogue scene) with characters, for which he is writing scripts to seamlessly export camera information from Maya into Unity. Speaking of the next step, he started brainstorming the character customization system and got really excited about it.
VR CAMERA PROTOTYPE
Currently, our goal is to provide a virtual set and camera system for the director to prototype camera angles, blocking and editing within. This week our programmer Kevin worked on prototyping our VR camera system. First he imported Arnav’s grey model for the Butch Cassidy and set up the VR teleport system using SteamVR’s built-in interaction system, then bound a simple RenderTexture -based camera to the a Vive controller and rendered the output on a quad above the controller. Finally, Kevin used Unity Recorder the output the camera view into a video file. At first, the video from the recorder looked a bit too dark. This is because the RenderTexture is in linear color space while Unity Recorder expects a gamma space texture. Kevin solved this problem by simply adding a CommandBuffer to Blit() the convert the texture into linear space using a shader. At last, screenshot capability was added to the Vive controller so we can more easily capture our tool in VR.
Speaking of the next step, the top priority is to add a focal length adjustment feature in VR. Then, we plan to add a camera placement and movement system to let the camera smoothly lerp between user-authored positions.
VR Camera prototype 
Teleportation
STORYBOARDING
Back to the Butch Cassidy script — To understand the script thoroughly and get an initial image in our head first, we kept on researching about old west environment and what do some specific old-west objects look like. After we got an overall sense of the space and the blocking, objects like bank door, barred window, bank safe and gun holster become clearer. Also, we looked into some clips from classic western movies such as the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and Quick and the Dead to see what kind of camera language are commonly used in them. Based on these, Angela drew a rough version of storyboard to convey a basic idea of the shots. Overall, the scene we’re doing is the beginning scene of the whole movie, so the pacing shouldn’t be too intense and the camera movement shouldn’t be too unstable. While giving the details using close-ups to introduce the protagonist, some wide shots to establish the environment is also important.
SCENE BLOCKING OUT
For the scene layout, Arnav worked on the bank interior and the other assets needed to visualize the opening scene of the script and worked with Angela to block out camera and light positions for the shots to address some specific details mentioned in the script. The exterior of the bank had to be modified a bit too, to match the interior size and positions.
Gun 
Bank safe 
New bank layout 
Bank interior
FINALIZING BRANDING MATERIALS
In this week, we got our branding design reviewed by art faculty Shirley Yee, Moshe Mahler and John Dessler. Our designer Shera illustrated the design concept and discussed about different iterations for the design. We received a lot of useful feedback and started finalizing the materials.
Design Concept review by faculty
The logo combines two key elements of our project’s theme: film roll and lines of script. Shera chooses red-orange color with black so that important elements would be stood out, like the F in red-orange, which represents the first letter of our team name, Foresight.
The inspiration of the poster is from 3D drawing, as our project is about script to screen, so we believe it would be an interesting idea that some stuff stand up alive on paper. So Shera typed down our team name, Foresight, and changed a few letters into film objects, such as O to film roll, T to clapboard. After that, Shera added shadows and textures to make it more like a real paper cut.
QUARTERS IS COMING!
All in all, we are pretty excited about our first previz practice and everything ramping up and going well in track. For the next week, the 1/4 walk-around is coming, and we are going to present what we’ve done so far to different groups of faculty members and get feedback from them — TEAM FORESIGHT ARE READY!
