Skip to main content

Week 7 - Ready Player One

The scene in Ready Player One, where Wade explains the 27 sectors of the OASIS is pretty essential, as it provides a lot of background and worldbuilding, context for the rest of the book. It would be a pretty good segment to produce in actual virtual reality too. As it’s just explanation, a lot of liberties could be taken with how it’s presented to the player. The creator could shuttle the viewer through each sector on a kind of conveyor belt. This would bypass one of the current limitations of VR, which is motion sickness, and the challenge of figuring out how to navigate a virtual space while staying relatively stationary in reality. Each sector could be presented as a single environment, surrounding the viewer, or extend in real scale. To enter the next sector, a floating doorway could separate the experiences. Because the world is supposed to be virtual, these liberties would be accepted more readily by the player. Because this scene is all about presenting the aspects of these separate “worlds,” it’s perfect to thrust a VR viewer into. Little interaction is required, all that is needed is to create a convincing feeling of space, and visual distinction between each environment. It’s an introduction, unfocused, to a world, which is exactly VR’s strength at the moment. It would allow the viewer to sit back, swivel their head, and just take it all in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 8 - Being Director of Photography for "The Graduate"

I read the screenplay for “The Graduate” and immediately was captured by the strange dynamic between Ben and Mrs. Robinson. I got a good idea of the framing of the two within the shots as I read their parts. What’s interesting is their emotional distance when alone, but their secret closeness when among an unsuspecting crowd. If I were the Director of Photography, I would shoot around these two characters during most interactions, regardless of if a tertiary character was speaking. These scenes are always about how Mrs. Robinson feels about Ben’s behavior around her family, or how he presents himself. I would attempt to shoot mostly at eye-level to get a level of intimacy, and get both character’s in frame at a time. These shots could be facilitated by one character having their back to the other, which works contextually because they try to maintain a sense of unfamiliarity when around Mr. Robinson or Ben’s parents. You could have interactions happening in the background, but have t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 11 - Twin Peaks

I watched Twin Peaks as an example of long-form television. I was already watching the series, but I continued with an analytical eye. Twin Peaks is primarily a crime/mystery/thriller show, but has undertones of the supernatural. The fact that it’s a visual media allows new clues and information, being revealed by the characters, to be segmented per-week. The story unravels slowly, but as the plot wears on many characters in the town Twin Peaks take a part of the spotlight. Some episodes will focus on some characters, and another on a different group. Most of the time it will feature at least some of the main plot-line and police force characters, but oftentimes episodes will be sprinkled in where the director focuses more on secondary characters, on a more personal narrative. I think this is how Twin Peaks became so popular, and how it really took advantage of it’s format. Television, specifically long-form, gives the director enough time to tell an, if not longer, wider story. A la...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 14 - Social Media (Why are we embracing studio culture?)

One cause which I really care about as an animator is the current state of the VFX industry. To understand the full story of how the industry, and the artist who work in it are being abused, watch the 2014 movie “Life after Pi” . Basically, every major movie uses VFX and digital art extensively, in every scene. Most live-action movies have at least one digital element in each shot, and this means lots of work for VFX artists. However, this large demand unfortunately means overworking respected VFX studios, or outsourcing work to countries where workers are similarly abused. The schedules that digital artists in the film industry keep are massively unhealthy, and the stress that these schedules put on them and their relationships are even more obscene. For anyone entering the industry, their choice is either to accept an unstable position under a director who won’t look at their work until post is wrapping up, and then give you changes to do with no additional pay and without shifting...
Post a Comment
Read more