Week 12: 4/4/16 – 4/8/16

Phantasm spent Week 12 preparing for our visit to Legendary’s office in Burbank. We kept most of our updates between the previous playtest and the trip out fairly minor, changing things like the instruction screens on the interface and fixing bugs in the character AI. In preparation for our trip down to show our work, we fully uploaded all our project files onto Box, where Legendary was able to bring them down into their version of Unreal and play the build. We also downloaded our project onto an external hard drive for safety’s sake.

We flew into LAX Thursday night, with travel and hotel provided by Legendary, and visited Legendary’s office on Friday morning. The team was taken around for a tour of the offices in the morning, then we got the opportunity to meet many heads of Legendary’s departments, such as the comics department, VFX and post-production, marketing, analytics, and more. We learned a lot from their descriptions and conversations with them about their work.

We were then able to have lunch with Matt Geiser, Matt Kinsella, and Ethan Stearns, where the team was able to speak about our experience making our product and the opinions and expertise we’ve formed over the course of the semester. We got a lot of positive feedback from our client, with comments about how alive the environment felt, and how the scope of it was structured. We were able to continue talking with the VR guys after lunch, where they showed us some of the virtual reality demos they created for Pacific Rim. We had a private movie showing in Legendary’s personal theater, and were able to go out for dinner and drinks to end the day. We were sad to only get to spend a day in California, but were glad to get to go out and talk to our clients in their environment, showing off what we do and learn as ETC students.

Next week:

Phantasm will be having another playtest at the end of Week 13, in the run up to the ETC’s soft openings. We hope to have new character art implemented, with a restructured climax to test out. We will also have new audio in for effects and voiceover, and will be playtesting with the ETC faculty and students again.