SCAD 2016 - VR Research
During my Senior year at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), I was invited to join a experimental class to research film and story telling through the use of VR.
GOAL
The course at SCAD know as the "Short Shorts" is a team building course where students submit their portfolios and demo reels to be accepted into the course. The course is 10 weeks of working with a team to produce a short film. This helps to expose students to a more industry environment and learn the animation pipeline and workflow. Each year, there is an element the teams must follow when producing the film (ex: film must be inspired by a noise). For the 2017 course, the element was virtual reality and how it effects story telling.
Being a brand new area that is still being researched, virtual reality artists from Magick Lantern, Floyd County Production, Trick3D, Secret Sauce Studios, Turner, and Tiny Monsters aided the class with their knowledge of the field during the 10 weeks.
CONCEPTS
Each team was first asked to come up with 3 strong concepts that could be presented to our clients as a possible Virtual Reality short film. The twist to this though was the concept had to be inspired by a sound. This sound could be anything from background noises to everyday sounds such as coughing.
At this point my team had gone over everyone’s strengths and weaknesses to better develop a concept around our strong points. When doing so, we discovered our team was equally split by those who worked 2D while the others worked 3D. We decided to use this collaboration to toy with the idea of a hybrid film with a mix of 2D and 3D elements.
For my teams three concept pitches we came up with the following:
Spirit Train
This concept was inspired by Atlanta’s own transportation service called MARTA and the sounds heard while riding one afternoon. The concept was based around the main character, Jay, who is the young girl on the train riding alone for the first time and we as the viewer are a fellow passenger. When the train was out of a tunnel the passengers would be normal, but once inside of a tunnel would turn into spirits. This concept was to reflect on the idea of being young in a scary world/environment and how sounds can be perceived.
Virtual Reality would have been a great way to go about this story telling as the car train would have been the enclosed space filled with many characters and objects to encourage the viewer to move around in the space. The young girl would have been the focal point to give the viewers something to lead them through the experience/story.
Game Arcade
While an ambient noise of an arcade would come to mind with this concept, the one was born from everyone’s love for video games. We noticed in a few of the sounds our team had collected contained the same 8-bit noise of a video game arcade in which this concept began to take form. Since this could go many ways story wise, we sat down and thought of ways the story could be specifically for virtual reality and how it could benefit from this technology.
The concept became about a father and son who take a day to play at a local arcade. While the child is engrossed in playing, the father (who is the viewer) is not and tends to look away. But in doing so, the father notices characters from the games coming out of their systems.
Haunted Bedroom
The final concept ended up being the concept that one the pitch from the clients. When presenting the three concepts, this one sparked many memories from the clients of being in a similar situation at one point in their life.
This concept came from the sound of a howler monkey. The scary noise drove the idea of a child in their bedroom being frightened and going on an adventure to find out where the noise is coming from making the viewer a friend who is over for the night. Though the noise would end up being a sound from an everyday household item or a family member, we wanted to play with the idea that the young girl, Autumn, actually encountered monsters in her room.
Along with this concept sticking well to the clients, it also had more potentially to grow as a child’s imagination is unlimited and outgoing.
MEET THE TEAM
To tackle the assignment and spread the research amongst the students, the class was split into 3 teams. Since virtual reality is an area that is still being researched, forming teams helped in expanding the research field and to split the work load amongst classmates.
The teams were designed in a way that an artist from each area of study was present including illustration, story board, animation, and visual effects. The teams were then tasked to focus on creating one film but to share their knowledge and skills with the other teams when needed. The best example of collaboration came down to the virtual reality research in which the renderers from each team would collaborate once a week on the subject and share their knowledge and experience.
For the class I was placed on the team "The Flaming Otters" to produce the short film "Bedtime Rumble"
Amanda Davis- Director, Producer, 3D Animation, Character Modeling, Character Design, Sound Design, Lighting, Rigging, Storyboards
Kristal Hartfield- Sound Design, Lighting, Rigging, 3D Animation, Modeling
Shomari Harrington- Concept Artist, Character Design, 2D Animation, Composer, Sound Design,Texturing, 2D Rigging, Storyboards, Illustration
Tehniyat Shaikh- Director, Producer, 3D Animation, Character Design, Storyboards, Renders, Sound Design, Lighting, Modeler
Sarah Howell- Compositor, VR Research, Rendering, Lighting, UV Mapping, Textures, Modeling
Ai Zhang- Concept Art, 2D Animation, 2D Rigging, Texturing, Storyboards, Character Design, Illustrator, Compositor, 3D Animation
Ryan Adkins- Rendering, Lighting, Texturing
RESEARCH AND STORY BOARDS
Once we had a concept down, next came developing the story further as well as tie down art direction. Since our film was going to feature monsters and could be a bit scary, we wanted to take away the fear factor in our film especially with it going to be a VR experience. To help with this, our concept artists took inspiration from mainstream media that was able to successfully turn a theme that was dark in nature and lighten it through art direction.
For this our biggest inspirations came from the cell shaded style that is normally found in comic books and referenced examples of this style in 3D works such as Borderlands, the Wolf Among Us, and the Back Water Gospel.
During this time our team had split off into different research groups in order to speed production. Since our main character was going to be a young child, wanting to take inspiration from real life events, we went searching for a child who would be up for some story time. One of our team members had a 4 year old niece who she watched once a week. We wrote some conversation starters for this team member to help guide certain responses from her niece during recording. What she brought back was surprising.
Originally in our pitch of the concept, we had the young girl frightened of the noise and monsters. But the young girl who we had recorded when asked about monsters responded that she would punch a monster and "rawr" at them. This completely changed the mood of our film and many other aspects such as the character designs and story boards.
CONCEPT ART
Now that we had established who our main character is, we began to story board the film. Story boarding for a VR film was the same work flow as any short film story board process. The only difference is while boarding, the artist must remain aware that multiple stories can be going on in the space as the viewer may not always be looking where they should. The story board artists split up their tasks to cover all areas of the room by having two artists work on the main story while the other two boarded for events that could happen around the main story.
To help with the boarding process, I along with another team mate began to block in the room space in Maya to help the story board artists decide on objects and events that would transpire.
Story Boards
PRODUCTION
Production of the VR film at this stage was the same workflow for any short film. While the animators began working on characters I along with two other began working on the environment. Since the film was based off of a 4 year old, we looked at real world references of children’s’ rooms to get an idea for objects and theming.
Below are some of the models I created for the film:
The models were then placed in the environment and handed off to the animators to begin blocking the animation for the characters. During this time we made sure that all parts of the environment were of interest and strong since the film was going to be rendered in VR. Areas that were dead or had too much going on were addressed during this time as you never know where the viewer will be looking when experiencing VR.
Since we had an established look we wanted for the film, we had decided on making the textures by hand using illustration techniques in Photoshop. This would allow us more control over the look of the cell shading and emphases certain areas.