This past week I was able to accomplish the first pass of my storyboard thumbnail sketches. These took me a little longer than I anticipated because I ran into a challenge with "framing the shot." As we learned at the bootcamp, users now have a full 360 degrees with which to view the world, which is really great for the user, but poses a unique challenge to the director when trying to frame the shot. I've uploaded my storyboards below with some notes I made as I worked through ideas for how to frame key moments of the Gettysburg Address.
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I would rely on a combination of peripheral sound, slightly exaggerated animation and manipulating the depth of field to create a rack focus (the practice of changing the focus of the lens during a shot) to guide the user's eye and trick them into framing the shot themselves.
I also did some research this week on several subjects in an attempt to gain some more insight on my topic and to better inform my decision making as I prepare to move into the 3D modelling and development portion of this project. I watched a couple of Lincoln portrayals in film (some on Youtube, black and white films, and even Daniel Day-Lewis' interpretation in the 2012 Lincoln movie) for some inspiration on the mannerisms actors mostly commonly attributed to him, to help me decide how I wanted Lincoln to ultimately be animated. I also completed the research on the Gettysburg, VA cemetery and am ready to start in on some background and environment sketches. For some inspiration and reference around interactive animation and framing, I did some research on the work that Oculus Story Studio and Baobab Studios are doing with their immersive animations in VR (which, by the way, if you haven't tried "Invasion!" yet, its available on the Gear VR!)
Week 4 Next Steps:
Armed with some more technical and historical knowledge, my plan for the next week is to finish some color scripts, complete at least one background drawing, setup both my Unity and Blender files, and begin modeling in Blender.
Has anyone else thought about framing the shots in their piece? If so, how did you work through the challenge to find a solution?
