GOLD SPIKE
In the first week of working remotely, we set a gold spike to test if everything is working under the new situation. We picked a shot from the movie Shawshank Redemption, recreated and redesigned it with our systems.
(Starts from 01:43)
The camera starts from a bird-view angle, cranes down to Andy, and then dollies to the cop. This is used to show how close to the edge of the roof Andy is and how far the drop is in itself. This is once again used to keep the viewer engaged in the action and helps them to notice the sheer magnitude of what one wrong word could mean for Andy. The dangerous situation for Andy and the tension between two character are essential for storytelling in this clip.
The steps of gold spike:
- Identify the key visual storytelling elements in the shot
- Create assets based on the observation
- Import the scene into unity
- Record the performance of main characters in mo-cap system
- Iterate on the scene layout and performance
- Import the scene with animation into camera system
- Shoot in the camera system
- Iterate on the shot
The camera movement matching the original shot:
The variations of the shot:
During the process, the iterations on shots proved to be valuable. We created a couple of different plans for the same conversation – to crane up instead of crane down, to crane from a different side or a different character, or to use a wider of closer composition. These shots provide opportunities to visually compare the pros and cons of different plans. Also, it helped build a foundation of our future remote creation of shots and make sure we can continue to creation of a full sequence under this situation.
UX DEVELOPMENT
Another main topic in this week is the user experience improvement of the camera system. We started to build a main menu and modified the interactions to a more friendly way. Also, to ensure our tool can mirror the way that the filmmaker works in traditional media, we decided to provide the freedom to choose from a set of common film lens in the industry, instead of using a slider to adjust focal length.
Here is a video of our current prototype.
For the next week, the team is going to implement visual design of the interface and program the new depth of view feature.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
The team also made progress on the character we plan on using for our previz. The high poly version was finalized and Arnav started work on the retopologized version for use in VR before Varun and Shera work on making the model fit the variety of body types we plan on developing for the project.
