So much great feedback from our sessions, where to start..?

I used a modified version of my midterm presentation to give an overview of the concepts and goals of my project, which gave everyone a good idea of where I’m coming from, I think. That said, I streamlined it throughout the day, in order to have more time for discussion.

Technically, I’m still at a very early stage, so any input to that end is extremely valuable, and I got plenty of leads on great resources. Admittedly, it’s still a very steep climb with Unreal, so much of it won’t come into play until further down the line, but motion capture like Radical and the Quixel suite of super high-res megascans and design tools look like they could open up a world of possibilities. I expected that Kat Sullivan and Matt Romein would have plenty to offer, and they sure did.

As much as it would benefit me to do endless tutorials covering the basics, I also need to get some targeted lessons on areas that I’ll be spending much of my time on now, so some of the more immediately applicable suggestions revolved around skills and lessons to strengthen those fundamental areas I’d be working with right away: certain types of animations and blueprints, as they’re called in the software. Short, sweet, “how-to-do-this” lessons.  Ultimately, taking the harder route will pay off.

Conceptually, I got some really powerful ideas to mull over. One of my concerns was that even though I’ve been generally very purpose-oriented with my projects, I’m trying to embrace the idea of creating a thing just for its own sake, to experiment with it and see what questions or ideas it stirs up. So I’m trying to toe a thin line here, but I had a nagging worry that this project would end up being not much more than an audience “simulator”, and leave users with a sense of “Cool… so what?” So  it was great to have the question posed to me directly by Aidan, “Is this going to be a performative tool?” While an audience simulator could certainly be useful to some, I never saw this as a “tool” per se, so it was good to be able to define that clearly.

Matt also referred me to some related works that touch on audiences, and that’s really what got me thinking. I saw the project following a certain “narrative”, rather than being an open-world experience, and to that end, I had to really start shaping what that experience would be. If not a “story”, still it would have a beginning, middle and end – so what would that be?

I should mention that the “thing” I showed was not what I had hoped – a first-person user avatar in a 3d-scanned performance space that could look around, but was stuck in place. Everyone was very forgiving about it, and said that they still got a great idea of what I was aiming for, so it was nice to get supportive reactions to what I saw as a big fail. That said, I’m already starting to fall behind on my projected production timeline, so back to the mines…