Summary of Team Progress
We are definitely at 45% completion now (if not more), and have entered production mode!
Writing progress this week: Two writing meetings, and we completed penultimate drafts of ALL SCENES -> ~90% done with the script after cutting one scene out. We wrote look+feel cues and audio cues for most scenes, and got feedback from a friend and the sound team on the narrative development.
Animation progress this week: New card designs, 3D modeling for Scene 6 and meeting with Prof. Ian Hales to verify approach, animated 2D sketches for journal scenes, initial animation team meeting with Caileigh to brainstorm a good collaborative workflow using AfterEffects.
Technical progress this week: Set up interactive VR Table of Contents scene in Unity, + had a brainstorming session with Prof. David Lobser on how to approach the match striking interaction.
Audio progress this week: We held our first ever sound team meeting and defined, assigned, + began work on our audio tasks. Xavier produced some great song demos for us, and Xavier & Phu gave us a lot of feedback on where to add audio cues in our script.
Stuff I Did
This week was a TON of organization and coordination work for me. I set up + facilitated both initial team meetings, formatted the script to get it ready to show to the team, worked with David to demo the matchstick interaction for the Intro to VR class I'm his TA for, met with an author friend for 2 hrs. to get feedback on the script, and spent quite a bit of time working with our lead sound designer Xavier to identify initial tasks and clarify our vision for the project's audio. This project is becoming a huge test of my leadership skills, and while all of this work is paying off extremely well, I am exhausted.
On my own, I also spent more time than was perhaps advisable writing/refining the script and coding. My other professors probably lowkey think I was abducted by aliens.
Script is 90% complete!!!!! Oh sh*t, it's more than 5000 words long.
Table of Contents progress: Switch scenes, gaze-based raycasting, implementing David Lobser's interactables system, lerping around.
Team Steps for Next Week
Writing: 100% done with the script will never happen, but 97% is necessary.
Animation: Probably storyboarding, give Caileigh something to work on
Technical: Implement reveal/conceal for menus in ToC and add real UI elements. Implement David's match strike demo + grabbing interactions. Think through logic for scene management & order of story elements
Audio: Give timing demos to sound team to play with and assign tasks from the spreadsheet to everyone at our next meeting. We also NEED to find some voice actresses, STAT.
Excerpt from Emily's Post
In the same vein of sound design and production, we began developing some timing tests of the scenes so that we could get a sense of how long each scene will be, so that we can plan for song creation as well as animation. I did a test of the Prologue of our story by voice recording myself reading the script at about the pace our future voice actor would, and then I searched online for examples of character motifs I could sample as a background track. I found that a song from Fantastic Mr Fox seemed to have a similar pacing and tone, so I used differing speeds of the track mapped to different moods of the scene, and then put in some animated elements and written sound cues to act as a visual component.
This included an small animation I made which will be projected onto an animated flipbook, hence the rotoscope style and sketchy coloring. I did this by importing a video into Procreate and animating it frame by frame. The bear was not rotoscoped (drawn frame by frame), but I altered its position slightly every other frame to give it some motion.
I also designed the special symbol we will be using throughout the story on Procreate, which I then image traced in Illustrator. I also used this symbol to design the faces to the tarot cards we will be using for the main menu. I then rendered the cards in Blender and UV wrapped the design to the card.
