Hi team! My name is Sarah, and I am a Creative Producer in the Bay Area, with a background in Animation and Illustration. Since Launch Pad, I went on a trip to Disneyland (yay!) and experimented some more with the GearVR. As a designer and producer, my next steps are to continue learning how to use Unity and Unreal Engine. I am already comfortable modeling and animating in Maya and Blender, so to bolster my skill set I've been following tutorials on both the Unity website and Microsoft Visual Studio to familiarize myself with C# and some JavaScript.
My idea is to recreate historical experiences in VR through immersive animation. The demo experience will be Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, or "The Lincoln Experience", as I've been referring to it. My end goal is to develop several famous or memorable historical experiences from different times and parts of the world, and allow the user to experience the moment from a first-person POV. To achieve "Lincoln", I've been doing a lot of research about his character and mannerisms, and watching pretty much any film portrayal of him I can find. I was especially motivated by Yelena Rachitsky's talk from Oculus Story Studio, the progress they're currently making with Immersive Animation is inspiring, and I have picked up some helpful tips from their blog!
Like some of the other participants who are not comfortable programming, I will focus mainly on the pre-production work: storyboarding, scripts, colorscripts and modeling. By the time the scholarship period comes around, I'd like to have all of the visual development work done, as well as an environment and character model completed. (Also, if any of you know any talented voice actors, please send me to their portfolios!) My goals for Week Two are to have the first storyboard pass completed, as well as some preliminary color scripts to share.
Thanks for reading, and I'm so excited to be part of such a talented and enthusiastic group!
Great idea. One of the cool things about VR is how it seems to have the potential to fulfill lots of childhood superpower dream... like flying... or in this case, time travel!
I just wanted to say I love this! I love thinking about all the amazing scenes you could re-live or time travel to. I wonder if it might be interesting to thread a narrative between each experience in the series that you're a part of... just a thought.
Thats a good idea @AshtonK , Im still trying to decide if I want to be purely historical with minimal interaction or go the gamification route. If I go with the latter, that would be a nice common thread!
@therealvr I did consider actors initially, but I thought in the long run, it might be better to work with 3D models, so users wouldnt get distracted by either an actor they recognized or looked somehow physically "off" from the historical figure. I would say it definitely has its merits though either way! 🙂
