Feedback & XR Stage Visit
Today (9/17), team Trailblazers presented our first pitch to the mentors. I had a lot of fun rehearsing and getting more comfortable talking to the professional people at the Mill. Below was our feedback, as annotated by Prof. Fowler (Fig. A);
Fig. A
- Ingredients; Emphasize pieces
- Show product enjoyment/fulfillment
- Motivation/reason for magic
- FX Note: Layer action of swirls for different styles and dynamicism
- Background(?)
Getting this feedback was very fulfilling. One of my favorite parts of being in this industry is the creative process, like today. I also enjoyed how a lot of what they said overlapped, like Incheol said we needed a background that wasn’t just pitch black space, and we are thinking of incorporating David (db)’s note about the ingredients into that by making the separate ingredients other stars or planets in the background.
One important piece of feedback was the product being enjoyed, which I think we might have to add another shot for. I would like to do one shot right at the end after the hero shot where the main character is seen floating in space or where the park has melted away except the bench to reveal space, and they are happily chewing away on the trail mix. This would also help drive home our message of “trail mix takes you farther than anything else” by actually bringing the character to space instead of just looking at it.
I was happy that my pre vis was able to help portray our story and timing and camera angles.
XR STAGE EXCURSION
After the meeting, I immediately went to the XR Stage, and sat in on another classes field trip, with my teammate Duck. Connor Witte, our Virtual Production assistant was nice enough to stay afterwards and go over our previz, as well as answer several questions I had about shooting on the stage... which may have secretly been my goal. I had a good time talking with him, and am excited to have another hand helping us shoot. Below is some of the info and notes I took from the meeting;
- Shared network folder for uploading project scene. USB drive works for smaller scenes (<10GB)
- Particle limit is very large as long as background is well managed and optimized - our shots will be fine. Don’t worry!
- The camera is a RED Komodo with a Super35 sensor, which uses 14bit.
- The available prime lenses are 15mm, 25mm, 25mm, 50mm, and 80mm. (They’re Carl-Zeiss lenses! Don’t drop them!)
- Turn off wind on geometry from the marketplace, specifically plants. Turn off all animation actually.
- Be prepared to spend a lot of time matching the lighting for the physical set to the lighting on the virtual set - this is where most productions get delayed.
Fig. B
Mainly, this just excited me! I really feel confident in my teams ability to shoot, and the only part that might haggle us is the lighting. Connor was excited about our previs, and we went over the challenges of lighting dark scenes. When a scene on the stage is very dark, the light will bracket across the panels, and look like this (Fig. B); I’ll get a better picture on the tour. This is because the panels aren’t curved, they’re flat, so between each new panel you get a sharp bar of new light level.
Connor has some tips and tricks to prevent this and he’ll show us next class, but worst case scenario, we shoot on a green screen or use only lights coming from the LED’s on the stage with no additional ones. This is a problem I will have to sleep on tonight.
My task for tomorrow are hopefully to try to set up a really rough scene just so we can test optimization and more as soon as we tour the XR stage as a class on Thursday. We’ll see if I can manage to fit that in the schedule :) I’m going to work with both Yilin and Soi to get particles into this scene specifically, and have different scenes ready to see around what geo count and particle count things start going haywire.
