Motion Designer
Dongxin Jiang
Week 2 Research and Idea Development
Reference
"Always - A VR Story
An approach to achieve the goal using UE4 Engine
Week 3 Research and Idea Development
Books
1,“Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future”
I hope this book could inspire me of some basic knowledge and ideas about future human and society
2, "Smart Energy in the Smart City Urban Planning for a Sustainable Future by Rocco Papa, Romano Fistola"
This book describe the future city from the perspective of energy sustainability view and I think it could be very helpful for me to depicting future cities.
3, "Virtually Human The Promise---and the Peril---of Digital Immortality by Martine Rothblatt, Ray Kurzweil"
I believe human in a virtual form could be one of many possible in human evolution, so I hope I could gain knowledge of this idea from this book.
Week 4 Idea Development
For this project, I've always been looking for breakthroughs from traditional artworks like film and opera and transform the story in a totally immersive audio-visual performance.
During the presentation, Yifan suggested a film called "Elephant", using nonlinear narrative method to tell a crime story in the school. In the film, each character has its own story, intersected, inter boosted, and together give the audience a well-rounded or full-fledged story. The first time I heard of this idea from Yifan, it downed on me that audience in VR can be one of the characters, and experience an intersected, inter boosted story just like the film. What's different is this project brings audience into the film and let audience to actively explore and feel the worlds.
Week 5 UX design in VR
After sharing the idea of the intersected storytelling, Andrea feels it could be very creative to using this way to tell the stories in VR. Also, It could be very time-consuming because after the storyboard I have to animated every character, let alone those environment buildups.
Instead of controlling what the audience sees in VR, I found VR artists work with probabilistic areas of user attention based on ergonomic data.
The following diagrams use data from Mike Alger’s must-see video on "VR Interface Design Previsualization Methods", which references Alex Chu’s informative presentation on "VR Design: Transitioning from a 2D to a 3D Design Paradigm".
As for the tool for storyboard, I found a powerful tool called "StoryboardVR" that helps with creating a VR storyboard in a comparatively fast and effective way.
Plan for item placement:
This gives us a sweet spot between 0.5-meters to 10.0-meters where we can place important content.
For 360-video, where the direction the audience is facing at the end of a scene, is the first place they’re looking at the beginning of the next scene; There is an informative article from Jessica Brillhart’s: In the Blink of a Mind — Attention on how to edit to match on attention.
VR Storyboard Template:
As for the story, there are three main characters who represent human, robot man and virtual man. Next week, I'll draw some templates base on the story and hopefully get it done by next week so that I could build some 3d environment models in UE4 on the week after next.
Week 6 Story
There are three stories involving with 6 main characters.
Chapter 1: What remains forever
Mike and Lisa are very poor and love each other, one day after school, the cop is taking Lisa away because Lisa is found an virtual virus(virtualman invaded a live body), Mike killed the cop. Knowing the government wouldn't let him go, they decided to escape from the city. After telling Mike if he hands in her body to the government and pretend to be the one who caught Lisa, Lisa committed suicide.
Chapter 2: Recycled
After recycling and renewing from Lisa's body, a robot servant was assembled and published with a new name of XII39. In the robot store, Mrs Victor is looking for a driver for his husband. As the most advanced model, XII39 was picked and his duty for everyday is to carry Victor to his workplace. Years of years have passed and Victor knows it's time to die, he decided not to upload his data to the cloud. Victor apologize for using him for so long and told Victor to go find the true meaning of his own existence.
Chapter 3: Freedom
There's a public machine which is used for fulfilling those lower-class people's boring lives. After plug tubes from the machine into the body, virtual maid will appear in the human's mind to fulfill their sexual desire. Victor always buy medicine in the store on the other side of the road of the machine. Maybe because the connection with Lisa, he can see the other people's virtual illusion without access to their bodies. He knows what those man have done to the virtual maid. After sending off Victor, XII39 decided to go back to save the virtual maid. After he rushes there, only to find the machine is stolen. XII39 find the man who stole the machine and took it back brutally. The man threatened XII39 that he is gonna call the cop and fix XII39 before he left. In the end, XII39 decodes the password of the Marina, and escape from the city.
Chapter 1: What remains forever
On the grass
It begins with an enchanting sound of Ukulele. After a few seconds, the player seems to be distracted by something and stop playing.
"Hey, You sleeping?" said Lisa.
"Er...oh no, I'm not!" Mike didn't realize he's fallen asleep, "How was I fallen asleep, I should have been enjoying the beautiful song!" Mike was complaining to himself. They know they both love each other, but neither of them would like to say the word.
"You know how hard I've been practicing? I should have play it to Jimmy!"
"Oh come on, it's a cyber dog!"
"Stop calling him like that! At least he wouldn't sleep like you!"
"Alright, after the class!"
In the classroom
Mr. Robinson is teaching in front of the room.
"By the way, I won't be your teacher from tomorrow and the school will be shut down. Well actually our educational system is reforming all the time since they forbiddened school from teaching science and technology because it's easy to upload from our personal terminals but they kept the art parts in order to remain students' desire for creating, but now, it seems they also want cut off the the other part too. Emmm, I will miss you guys."
Week 6 Story
This 45 seconds demo describe the view of Lisa's living place.
