In this week, we recreated a 1-min clip from the movie Moonrise Kingdom using our workflow and tools.
To record multi-character performance and allow characters to interact with each other, we came up with the workflow that an actor will go into VR and act one character’s performance, and then we can quickly play it back for the next actor to go in and respond to that. After finishing all the performance, we went into camera system and used the new tilting feature to Finish the shots. Here is the videos of our recreation.
During the process, we found that the following are what worked well:
- The free navigation in our camera system helped with getting good bird-view shots;
- The setup was easy enough to allow quick block-out and iterations on moving objects/characters in real-time;
- The workflow allowed the team to do prompt discussions and get better decisions.
However, there were also things that worked not that well, and this is what we learned:
- The tilting didn’t look natural since our virtual camera doesn’t have weight;
- Controlling the speed of dolly must be done manually;
- In our mo-cap system, body turning caused some weird poses;
- Our previz didn’t seem to successfully capture the energy and punchiness, so coming up with alternate actions or beats is important when there are technical challenges. (For example, we changed the gestures of Scout Master and his assistant from handing scarf to saluting, which also build the relationship clearly and meanwhile avoid the time-consuming scarf animation.)
With the clip we created and the learning process we went through, we are ready for presenting our project in halves presentation, and the next stage of visualizing more stories : )