Project 2

As Seeing Clean could be viewed as what many would call a 'tech demo' our main target audience is with fans of CGI short films. As Unreal is being utilised more in the film industry, a lot of interest over it's place in the production pipeline has been increasing in the last few years (Arts Management & Technology Laboratory, 2020). By using this technology we could not only create a full film using a realtime game engine, we would also attract an audience also looking for content made with bleeding edge technology.

For the story we drew inspiration from various post apocalyptic films such as Blade Runner (Fancher et al., 2017) and The Fifth Element (Besson & Kamen, 1997). These were films that successfully created immersive and believable futuristic environments (O’Falt, 2017). Characters in the world acted believable, the technology leap was not about how cool it looked, more about how would it actually affect society. As technology changes, so does our society and how people interact with the world and each other (Heller, 2012). This was the idea that we turned into the plot of Seeing Clean where the main character finds out the world is not as perfect as he though it was and he was being tricked through the use of highly advanced technology embedded in his eyes.

We also took some inspiration from Mad Max (McCausland et al., 1980), The Book of Eli (Whitta, 2010), and The Road (Penhall & McCarthy, 2009). The worlds from these movies have been ravaged by climate change and we believed would serve as a good 'true world' for Kevin to discover and contrast the fake utopian world he thought he lived in. This is also something that concerns us as a species on Earth and by using it as a plot device we can create a connection to our audience by demonstrating what could happen if we were to ignore such a climate catastrophe heading our way.

The utopian world is supposed to be a representation of our 'ideal' world where everything is clean and people live in luxury and seeing the dysopian version of the world is when we want the audience to feel shocked at what such a thing would look like. We were able to utilise many assets from Kitbash 3D which suited both of these aesthetics. The assets are high quality and made with extreme detail so they will look good no matter how close they are to the camera. As these assets were already production proven we could trust that they would help us deliver the environments we wanted to display to the audience to help immersive them in the world.

When we were writing the first few drafts of the story, the main feedback was to reduce the dialogue and keep it simple. Dialogue can be quite time consuming and as we only had a team of three, this was important to take into account. We reduced the dialogue and kept the number of characters very small with Kevin, Karen and two police robots. By the end of last trimester the feedback we were receiving was that the story was pretty much where it needed to be and to start work on planning the actualy production.

During this current trimester we didn't any feedback at all on the story, so we focused entirely on asset creation, motion capture animation and building the world in Unreal Engine.

References

Arts Management & Technology Laboratory. (2020, October 15). An Introduction to Virtual Production and Its Use in the Entertainment Industry. AMT Lab @ CMU; AMT Lab @ CMU. https://amt-lab.org/blog/2020/10/virtual-production-an-introduction-to-its-use-in-the-entertainment-industry

Besson, L., & Kamen, R. M. (1997, May 9). The Fifth Element [Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi].

Fancher, H., Green, M., & Dick, P. K. (2017, October 6). Blade Runner 2049 [Action, Drama, Mystery].

Heller, P. B. (2012). Technology and Society Reader (pp. 83–84). University Press of America.

McCausland, J., Miller, G., & Kennedy. (1980, March 21). Mad Max [Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi].

O’Falt, C. (2017, October 3). How Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner’ Changed the Look of Sci-Fi Forever. IndieWire; IndieWire. https://www.indiewire.com/2017/10/blade-runner-influence-cyberpunk-sci-fi-ridley-scott-1201883053/

Penhall, J., & McCarthy, C. (2009, November 25). The Road [Drama].

Whitta, G. (2010, January 15). The Book of Eli [Action, Adventure, Drama].