SANM 560 - Week 2

This week we met with one of our mentors, Felix Jorge, over zoom to go over our idea and finalize a bunch of production details. I kept notes on comments he made tech wise for Unreal as well as topics I felt the team needed clarification on or needed to come back to. He helped us decide whether or not to have a physical train set, and the answer was no. He said to look into parallax as that is what will really sell the virtual set and wall. I talked with Danci about it after and she said there was some plug-ins she knew of that would be good for that. It was really good to step through each part of the project and get everyone on the same page. Even after the initial meeting we had to go over some of the core details to make sure we knew what was going on. I reemphasized to the live action producer, Weston, that without a physical train in the station there was still functional reasons for the story to take place in a train station because it is a makeshift bunker for the apocalypse. The story team has really had the pressure on them to get a script finalized. They asked for some ideas, so I created a new page in the master doc for everyone to put down their ideas and shared it with the class. Next class we learned the program Perforce, which will allow us to work live on a file collaboratively. It is a pretty finicky program, so I made sure everyone had ample access to the documentation provided by Aiden. I also jotted down some of the most important or confusion points in our documents for easy and quick referral. Danci and I then discussed a detailed file structure for the Unreal file. We will add more as needed but for now we have a solid structure to make it organized and navigable for others. We checked it with environment lead, Connor, and he gave us the go ahead. I also added the Unreal naming conventions to the naming conventions sheet. I volunteered for set dressing and help placing the foliage for the scene as I have a lot of experience with the tool as well as lighting. I am also tasked with research and development for tools as needed in the project process. I'm excited for when the planning stops and actual production starts, but I am also very nervous because I am used to working in small groups and this amount of people is scaring me a bit. People seem to be a little all over the place with what we are actually doing, the scope has been really cranked up, I have never done a project on this scale before.