Zenith

Hello and welcome to my zenith project explanation, let me first start by saying what my project was. My project started out as a completely different idea as what ended up on the screen.  Originally I wanted to do a more traditional approach to film showing off different film techniques and how they can be used to tell a story without dialogue.  Alexander David Beattie later approached me with his idea for a Zenith project and it intrigued me so much that I decided to abandon mine in favor of his.  This project would revolve around using digital backgrounds in favor of traditional shooting locations.This was obviously a huge jump out of my element, new software, new techniques, and new ideas.

reflection

My project started out as a completely different idea as what ended up on the screen.  Originally I wanted to do a more traditional approach to film showing off different film techniques and how they can be used to tell a story without dialogue.  Alexander David Beattie later approached me with his idea for a Zenith project and it intrigued me so much that I decided to abandon mine in favor of his.  This project would revolve around using digital backgrounds in favor of traditional shooting locations.This was obviously a huge jump out of my element, new software, new techniques, and new ideas.

 The research process began with looking at new software, we looked at Unreal Engine how to use it.  We also looked at several TV shows including “The Mandalorian” that use the same techniques that we were hoping to use.  Quickly we realized that we were in for a lot more work than we thought,  when the lock down started we weren’t sure how we were going to get the work done. Collaboration became very difficult between the three of us, trying to figure out ways to communicate and also to get things done in a productive manner.  Overall of the project could be done again I think several things could be improved upon. Some things were out of our control such as being under lock-down and not being able to interact with each other,  but some better planning and a more solid script to stick to in the beginning would have made this process easier. 

The challenges of this project were not far away.  Having a computer on my end that was unable to run the software necessary in order to conduct experiments and filming as well as asset building  was a big limiter on what I could personally achieve at home for the project.  And as a true sign of the times being under quarantine made it impossible for us to work with each other without the aid of screen sharing software.  This project had to go through multiple changes and iterations in order to become achievable with the resources that we had available to us, our computers, unable to run as well as the computers in the film room, meant that we had to scale back heavily on what we plan to make.  But the concept surrounding our project was sound, we wanted to use real film making skills that we learned out in the world and put those into a computer program.  In that way the spirit of our project never changed, we still were able to make assets and backdrops in order to have a location to film within a digital landscape.  In the end it came down to simulating a handheld camera within a digital landscape by using certain mapping points in real life to almost put us within the environment with a camera.  The parts that we had to film in real life were filmed in front of a green screen and sometimes if the green screen wouldn’t work we would go into Adobe After Effects and manually rotoscope out the actor. All in all this project really came down to being able to roll with the punches, my partners and I went through several iterations and changes but in the end we were able to pull it together.  Like I stated before the concept is sound, many movie and TV studios have used this concept  and it works wonderfully.  I would love to personally come back to this concept at some point in the future and do something more with it,  for now the project we have is something we can all be proud of.