Category: Mixed Reality Filmmaking

This week I wanted to make something that focused a lot on scale and camera movement. It’s taking me longer than expected to feel comfortable with building environments and working with textures. Here I placed a large ocean with my keyed out video of Santa with a laptop. I thought it’d be fun to frame it as a picture and enlarge the scale of the frame and then have a character run along that plane. To do so I added a racer character who dances, the camera swivels around him until he jumps off of the plane. Working with the animations was fun as well but hard to dissolve into smooth motion using keyframes. I look forward to continue to get more comfortable in Unreal.

This week we learned how to use the sequencer in Unreal and create planes with media textures for displaying video in the world. I brought in my favorite character from Mixamo to do some dancing for a virtual audience. I wanted to build cathedral like walls using Quixel assets as well. I had some technical hiccups this week but look forward to continue building more elaborate worlds as I get more comfortable with the software.

My name is Will Politan and this is where I will be documenting the work I do for Mixed Reality Filmmaking. I am a second year ITP student and I got my BFA from NYU in filmmaking with a background as a cinematographer. I’m very interested in understanding these tools for the work I already do, but also to experiment in creating 3D assets and new worlds as well. I took Performative Avatars last semester so I have some basic understanding of avatar creation and the Unreal Engine, but I’m excited to learn more about the production workflow.