Class: Motion Capture
Instructor: Kat Sullivan + Todd Bryant
Lab 4 Objectives:
Use last week’s scene and avatar or create a new one.
Create 3 different interactions.
Have the avatar (recorded) interact with the world you’ve created.
Process
1. Getting ready for some directing and acting. We decided to create 3 scenes with 2 avatars.
2. Rehearse and recorded the scenes:
- Scene 1: reenacting the dodging flying bullets in the movie Matrix with a twist
- Scene 2: reenacting spider-man movement of crawling on a building and another person pulling a rope to climb up the building.
- Scene 3: acting out monkey-like movements and behaviors to demonstrate non-human creatures or animals.
Challenges
1. Getting comfortable with directing and executing ideas for body movements: being a director sounds like a big responsibility probably because it truly is. Between navigating the group in terms of ideas for a scene, to prioritizing what needs to be done, how it is done, can become a demanding job for someone inexperienced like us students. However, putting ourselves in the shoe of a director helps educate ourselves on what to do, how to do efficiently yet efficiently.
2. Imagining the characters' movements and externalize its logic through our own body motions: it seems easy enough until you actually do it and realize how much research, observation, practice, and learning from others you'd need in order to capture close enough what you're trying to express or imitate. From the lab, I realize doing this also requires, to certain extent, getting comfortable with our own body movements, letting go of the stiffness to start embodying other types of body movements that may not be of our nature.
3. Storytelling: Telling a good story is often a subjective task. What details are considered important to include, what are the key scenes in a story or in each scene to convey the intended story and the associated emotions to the audience required what can only be offered by the human factor. The Game Engine and other supportive softwares to assist in building a storytelling world are all great, but only secondary to a good story to tell, being told by humans.