Weekly Workshop

Week 10

gallery.styly.cc/scene/8c450d27-ce7d-4ea8-b9d6-5a1f616dd7c8

Week 6

I decided to work on creating the materials that would help out in my midterm. I initially decided to work on only 2 but I enjoyed the process of creating materials using shader graphs so much that I went on to create 3. The materials I have created are:

Week 4

1. How well does it maintain their sense of enchantment?

I would say they maintain their sense of enchantment very well especially, Paper Birds. National Geographic VR felt like an extension of a form of media I had already seen, a documentary. I appreciated becoming a participant in it but rather than a sense of enchantment or disbelief, I just experienced a thrill. Meanwhile, Paper Birds felt like a whole new world opening up to me in the form of storytelling. I feel like the use of VR already creates a great suspension from the real world and hence when a fiction setting is put on top of it, the experience is compounded. In the end it might just have to do with the nature of person I am, someone who enjoys magical fantasy based settings more than real-world settings.

2. What types of immersive narrative structure and mechanics do the experiences use to tell their stories?

Paper Birds uses a sense of space that I really like. I had set my guardian boundary to room-scale to explore it and it actually involved me walking around to see the story unfurl. I liked the angle of the experience in Paper Birds too. Most VR experiences including NatGeoVR place you smack dab in the middle of the action as a participant but Paper Birds let you almost have a god-like/spectator view of the story.

I would say NatGeoVR had more interesting mechanics and utilized the controllers way better than Paper Birds. For example the rowing or the climbing of icebergs in the Antarctic adventure. To row the boat there was even an option to sit down. I enjoyed the exploratory nature and freedom to explore in NatGeoVR especially. It utilized the spatial nature of VR well. The narrative structure of the Nat Geo experience was us being an adventurer which I believe made it more realistic in some sense.

Plots are driven by actions: interactions between characters (use your animated 3d models) as well as with their environment (your scanned environment).

Choose a fictional world (different from the first warmup!) from a book, TV show, movie, video game, etc., and prepare a post breaking down 3 of the important actions that move the plot forward.

1. Be specific about how the action takes place (who performed it and what did they do)

2. what makes this action unique to the plot, character, or story world, and how does it move the plot forward

3. Focus on interactions that could be interesting if recreated in VR.
   

We will share and discuss them in the next class.

The film I will be discussing is the 1995 Crime Drama by Shanghai-Born Hong Kong-raised filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, Fallen Angels. The film takes place in the narrow, sketchy, shady alleys of 1995 British Hong Kong. Most of the action takes place at night out in the open and if it’s not in the night, then it happens in cramped indoors with poor lighting. The angles used by the cinematographer, Christopher Doyle are very wide highlighting the isolation of the characters from the outside world. The Low FPS fight scenes also provide a fever-ish quality to the film.

The three most important scenes in the film are the scenes that lead to the two characters being ‘Fallen Angels’, shadows of their former selves.

1. The first scene involves the hitman played by Leon Lai out in a kill job with his assistant played by Michelle Reis. The job is carried out professionally and it shows that Leon has been through this multiple times. There is almost a passivity or boredom to his actions. On the way back from the job he takes the bus and meets a former classmate who is now an insurance salesman. Leon had become very distant from his past and a line he said stood out to me, “Even if you're a killer, you still have classmates from grade school around.” He eventually refuses to buy the policy because he realizes he has no benefactor to put down, his life choices have ended up making him isolated and without any sort of permanence.

VR: The entire killing scene could be beautifully highlighted in VR as the area is very cramped and confusing to navigate. In VR, this sort of environment could heighten the panic if the player is out on some sort of assassination mission.

2) The realization from the meeting with his grade school classmate keeps cascading until one day Leon decides to quit this line of work. He tells Michelle to meet him in a bar but he doesn’t show up. He later tells the bar owner (hoping that Michelle will one day come back to the bar) to tell her to play the song 1818 on the jukebox, which is ‘Forget Him’. Michelle eventually plays the song and understands the message, Leon wants to leave. Michelle has developed feelings for Leon and is unable to cope with the thought of him leaving. She keeps coming to the bar and sitting on his seat to find some sort of warmth or connection to him. There are frequent shots of her masturbating from sharp and wide angles at a place Leon used to stay at. This arc finally comes to a conclusion with Michelle setting him up for a failed job and the death of Leon.

VR: The entire bar and Leon’s previous place of stay have a very dinghy, melancholic and depressing quality to it. Recreating this feeling of isolation using the environment and lighting in VR could be an interesting experience. The spatial audio with the Hong Kong metro running in the background and music from the bar sounding loud but distant could add to it. VR already has an effect of making some people dizzy and disoriented so I don’t know if it would be wise to add the sorts of shakes and jitters that Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer of Fallen Angels, adds to the VR world but it would nonetheless be an interesting experiment to simulate disorientation and the loss of a structural integrity in your life.

The third arc of this story involves a mute ex-convict played by Takeshi Kaneshiro. Takeshi works at a restaurant wherein he sometimes has to help the restaurant owner record videos and send them to his home, as the owner lives away from his family. He sometimes lets Takeshi take the camera back home and this is where Takeshi records everything his dad does. He lives alone with his dad and their bond is very strong. His dad often gets annoyed at Takeshi who keeps recording him all the time but one day Takeshi catches his dad watching the recordings of him and Takeshi, and sobbing quietly. Takeshi is on a fair path in life, having left a life of petty crime behind but the sudden death of his father sends him spiraling back into the Hong Kong underworld.

VR: an interesting experiment in VR to tackle this would involve the presentation and representation of archival footage like VHS footage of Takeshi and his dad. In the movie, they just watch the footage on the TV or sometimes we get a first person view with the camera overlay. I would like for the player in a VR experience to be able to jump into these archival footage and feel them. To differentiate between the real story and archival footage though, I will add a sort of grain-y jagged vintage look to the archival footage so that it keeps its vintage and surreal element. To cope with the death of his father, Takeshi also goes through a lot of his old belongings. Tying into our readings of our previous weeks, I would like to create an environment in Takeshi’s father’s room wherein we could get a sense of this man, his story and his relationships all through his personal possessions.

Thanks Aakarash, intriguing and playful! I'll ask on Tuesday to talk about your scene.

Story Board/ Mood Board/ Scenario etc.

I started off by thinking of locations accessible to us that might suit my purpose. I didn't wish to do it in an indoor setting or something calm for example. I wanted it to be a dynamic, exciting location that sparked youth energy. A tunnel that exists behind campus came to my mind. It has a lot of graffiti on it and I sometimes go practice skateboarding there alone/with my friends. I wished to do something around young kids skateboarding in rough locations. My main inspiration for this were the movies Mid 90s and Skate Kitchen.

• Describe what you did.

I took a 3D picture of the tunnel behind the campus using the Google Street view app. I then made that as a skybox. Then I took a 3D scan of one of my skateboards using the Scenario app and exported the .obj file to the computer. Then I placed that into Unity. Then I added a terrain and made it slightly bumpy like an actual rough skate surface (the tunnel surface is very rough like that). The scene felt a bit bare so I added a few ramps, another skateboard, another skateboarder (lizard) into the scene to fill it up a bit. Then I added first person controls.

Then I started setting up the camera. The first view I wanted was a top-down view to establish the scene. Then I wanted to do a cinematic shot that would focus on the lizard. Then I wanted the player to regain control of the camera.

• What did you find challenging?

I downloaded the lizard and ramps from sketch fab as .fbx file and whenever I would import them into Unity they would appear without textures. I looked online and tried extracting textures from the folder provided with the model as well but Unity would always throw an error saying the textures are embedded. I struggled with this for quite some time and in the end I had to leave the lizard and ramps texture-less.

• What did you find exciting or inspiring?

I think this assignment made me finally quick how powerful as a medium 3D/VR stuff is. I could already feel some level of immersion after implementing the skate tunnel skybox. I have a lot of good memories from that place and placing someone in that same environment would bring me a lot of joy. To recreate the same kind of skate environment where I had so much fun and self-growth, and recreating it in VR was inspiring.

• What did it prompt you to want to know more about?

I wish to learn to make my own models and textures. I know that is a very complicated process but I was frustrated by the lack of good free resources. The only good models I could find were paid. I could 3D scan items from my daily life but I wish to gain some sort of artistic control over my models by crafting them as well. It also prompted me to understand prop placement in scenes as well as I realized from our readings, the objects in the scene make the scene.

I imported all the assets in the scene and started playing around with them. The first scene is a narrow alleyway from Akira. A lot of action in Akira takes place in these narrow alleyways in the start as we learnt in the video, narrow spaces are great for building tension. The second scene is a bigger main road. I wanted to play around with more lighting effects but I struggled to make the traffic lights illuminate as much as I wanted them to. I was still able to play with directional lighting to create a sort of dark, neon lighting look. The materials are either dark and grimey or bright and futuristic. This contrast helps bring focus to the dystopian and futuristic nature of the city.

Hi Aakarash,

Thanks for your quick response. Actions such as destroying or shooting the objects covers in the game design class. I know, FPS is the best. There are some packages available but not free.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/game-toolkits/neofps-fps-controller-template-toolkit-150179

However we will talk about controller as player in the class soon.