Week 1: 1/11/16 – 1/15/16

This week was the first of our semester long project with Legendary Pictures. We set up weekly faculty meetings; our meetings with our faculty instructors, Brenda Harger and Chris Klug, will occur on Mondays from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm.

Together, the members of the student team came together and chose a project name that would represent our team for the semester: Phantasm.

We set our weekly core hours, where all members of the team will be together to do work on Inksmith. They are as follows:

• Mon: 1 PM – 8 PM (7 hrs)
• Wed: 2:30 PM – 9 PM (6.5 hrs)
• Thurs: 1 PM – 3:30 PM (2.5 hrs)
• Fri: 11 AM – 8 PM (9 hrs)

We have also set up a scrum board and have begun to put small tasks up. Stand ups will typically be at 1 pm, barring scheduling conflicts.

On Thursday afternoon, we got the opportunity to speak with a representative from Legendary for the first time: Matthew Kinsella. The team introduced themselves, and we got our first guidelines for the interactive VR experience that we would be creating this semester, giving us the IP we would be working with as well as some very high level story concepts. However, Legendary has given us almost full autonomy in the rest of development, particularly in the ways that we can make the experience interactive, both in real life interface and in the way events play out in the experience.

Next week:

Phantasm will begin weekly sprints next week, now that we have a clearer idea of our goal for our narrative and product. We will start brainstorming and quickly prototyping different interfaces for our VR experience, including things like the Myo armbands, phone screens, and more. We’ll also be brainstorming different plots and storylines that can more fully utilize the VR medium, and hopefully receive some resources from Legendary to allow our artists to begin working on our product’s aesthetic. We will also begin Phantasm’s branding art for our poster, half-sheet, and logo.