Hello week 6, nice to meet you. I hope your day has been nice. I’m still coming off the adrenaline rush from accidentally video calling my friend in the bathroom. I’ve accidentally called people before but this was the first time they picked up before I could end it. I’m not easily embarrassed but wow, that really got me.
Alright, onto the week. I’m actually writing this exactly one week late, last week was a little busy with traveling to the film festival. Mondays class David showed us different forms of interactive media. The one that stood out the most was Chris Milks work. Some of it was very rough but I figure anything this new/cutting edge will have its quirks. Nothing is perfect right away, except for pigs. Pigs are perfect little animals. I’d consider them one of the worlds 7 wonders if it was up to me. The film festival was fun. On the first day I went to a workshop on directing comedy. The speaker was Tom Kingsley, a comedy director who directs the tv comedy Ghosts as well as a few others. I enjoyed this speech a lot as I hope to be some form of director some day. Some of my notes are as follows: 1. Each character should be blatantly established. 2. Do anything you can to make it easy/comfortable for your actors. You want to enable what they can do. 3. Gently steer someone who is already funny to be funny in the right direction. 4. Being efficient enough to film everything before people get tired and unfunny. 5. Everyone has an idea and your job is to filter in the good ones. Even though these were mentioned in regards to comedy, I feel like they all can be applied to directing anything. I hope to direct music videos one day so I will definitely keep these in mind when I get my first opportunity. Later in the evening we went to a VR lab where we got to put on VR headsets and experience 360 films. My favorite was Genesis, a 360 film about the history of the earth. It started out with the earth being completely covered by water. Then the first organisms appeared. At first it was just liken and bacteria but soon was giant fish. I loved this part particularly because of the sheer scale of some of these creatures. Then it brought us through different environments that the earth would’ve seen, my favorite was one where a T-Rex was being chased by an even bigger creature. You couldn’t see either at first, you could just hear the earth shaking thuds of its footsteps as it got closer. I really loved this. The next day I went to a talk about exploring narrative through VR. This was my favorite talk and I took a lot of notes on this. 1. “We did stuff that had the ability to fail but also teach us a lot” 2. “You shouldn’t make a VR film unless it has to be VR.” 3. Try to think about VR as new real estate. For instance, you could have a boat in the TV then it flies through the screen into the room you’re in. Or have the boat in the TV but the perspective changes as you move around the room. Kind of like a mini version of virtual production. 4. “When we put people in VR, we don’t actually PUT them in VR.” She was talking about how if you look down you don’t see your body and it sort of takes you out of the space. She talked about an experience where the VR headset could somehow detect her and it generates a cloud of pixels so when she looked down she could actually see herself. 5. “Use tech for a particular reason, not just for the sake of using tech”. 6. “Start with determining how you want people to feel”. 7. I had an idea for a VR American football game where you are the head coach watching from the sidelines. You have to call plays, talk to media, give prep talks and call timeouts and stuff. I think it would be fun to see what a life looks like for some of these rare popular jobs. Another example would be you are an up and coming musician and you are trying to make it big. So you have to record music, do promo, do interviews, talk to media, do concerts. And I suppose it wouldn’t be the real experience if you didn’t also include the groupie side of things. After the presentation I talked to Richard Nockles, one of the speakers. Richard is the CEO of an immersive company called Surround Vision, he is also the creative director for Sky media. I talked to him a bit about VR then got his email. Since then we have been in contact and and hopefully an opportunity will come of this.
Somehow I got the idea to make an AI generative program specifically designed around 3D models. This would be hard because there is a much bigger pool to choose from when it comes to images vs 3D models but I still think it would be cool to explore. Like if all you had to do was write “mountain, spruce, arctic, lake” and bam, it generates a rough model. It wouldn’t be a finished product but I feel this could be helpful for inspiration or even just a base to work off of.