It has been exciting week here at Ripieno. After all our hard work, we finally feel ready to begin the prototyping process. By Tuesday of next week, we are aiming to have a full 360° blocked out version of our story. A lot of different factors had to be resolved for us to get to this point in our production.

Concept Development

After multiple iterations and a few dramatizations, we finally settled on a script and have moved into story art. Our protagonist, Manny, is going on a journey of self-discovery through his interactions with multiple cultures. The goal is primarily focus the viewer’s attention on the beauty of each dance, with the climax of the narrative being the dance Manny produces with what he has learned from all three.

In addition to the script, the cultures were determined based on a combination of narrative demand and response from outside organizations with whom we will be consulting. We will be using India, Ghana, and Brazil – more specifically, Bharatanatyam, Kpanlogo, and Capoeira Angola. Finalizing that decision gave the concept artists freedom to get started on the designs for the character and environment.

Preparing the Technology

Starting last week, our environmental artist and designated “Render Defender” began experimenting with Arnold spherical rendering in Maya. We had yet to get the render farm up and running, so we were using an online service with the sole purpose of figuring out whether we could do it…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7PiYV1d0XE&feature=youtu.be

…turns out we can!

Now that the render farm is online (a whopping 46 servers reserved solely for our use), we have begun starting up our pipeline in order to make our first test clip. In order to do that, we needed some character animation – requiring a visit to the motion capture studio!

Thanks to our volunteer dancer, we were able to get a walk cycle and samples of various dance motions. We then integrated these into Manny’s character model:

By the end of the week, our environmental artist was able to take the information she learned from her spherical camera test, and has begun to set up the room Manny will be exploring for the block reel.

Going forward

We can’t wait to see what next week has in store for us. Getting the chance to view our story inside the Oculus headset is going to open us to the opportunity to test how effective certain aspects of our film will be. Because directing in the 360° space is relatively new as an art, we only have so much reference material to guide us. Therefore, learning by doing is going to be the key to success.

See you all next week!