Alex : Interactive Movie
Introduction
For this project, the assignment was to come up with a product we thought would exist in the future and create a simulation to bring some of that future experience to our time. With the trend of gaming and movie crossing over more and more in mind, we thought of the concept where movies would get interactive.
Project Information
Project Type: School Project
Date: June 26th 2012
Team: 4 Designers
Concept
Figuring the power of computers would get more and more impressive, we thought that in the future it would be possible to actually play the main character in a movie. Depending on your choices the movie plot would automatically generate the following scenes of the movie. In addition to this interaction, the person watching the movie could choose between different perspective to watch the movie from, thus having the ability to choose to either have a lot of knowledge about everything going on on the scene, or just knowing only what the main character knows or experiencing the movie from completely different perspectives, like the murder weapon or the bad guy.
Simulation
This product called Alex, chosen for the fact that everybody should be able to play the main character in the movie, we decided to give it a name that works for both genders: Alex. The way we have chosen to simulate this experience of being able to influence the movie course of the movie, was by making a short movie of our own. In this movie, the “actor” would have several points at which he can make a decision, changing the further course of the movie. We also created a few different renders from different perspectives so the user could swap between those.
The Product
This movie we made was a 3D animated movie with several “choice-points” along its story, in the end all leading to nearly the same conclusion. The actor would control the movie by making an arm gesture to either chose the first or the second option or a different set of gestures to control what camera perspective he would play the movie from.
My Role
Everybody in the team worked on the concepting part of this project. After that was done, another part everybody worked on were the sounds, sound effects and dialogues. Then the thing I worked on most was the 3D part. Making a bunch of assets for the scene, creating the characters as well as their animations and creating the movie animation in its entirety. This was my first time animating anything more than just a flying camera, my first time working with bone structures and animated characters. Unfortunately, due to the tight deadline on this project, I didn’t have the opportunity to optimize the walking animation to stop the characters from floating, once I had worked out how the whole animation techniques worked.