For the third Immersive Moviemaking class, we were asked to come with ten questions (five technical and five production-related). I ended up with eleven.
Technical questions
- What are the details behind Gspeak's "recombinant networking" features? What sort of work would it take to write, say, an iPhone app that was aware of Gspeak (and of which Gspeak was aware)?
- Are "point-and-click" interfaces to be considered harmful? It seems like overusing the mime gun for interaction could foster a sort of conceptual laziness about what gestures can accomplish. The mime gun is so natural for pointing that the use of other gestures for selection, picking, etc seems obtuse; but the mime gun is an abstract gesture at the same time, and doesn't necessarily map onto specific actions. For instance, if the mime gun is used to select items from a menu -- even if the menu is nicely contextual, graphical, and "tangible"-seeming -- it could be easy to fall into the traditional "point and click" paradigm.
- Is the camera data visual or impulse data? If the data is visual, can optical recognition be performed for potential markerless tracking applications (e.g. 3D videography of untagged objects brought into the scene)?
- Even though it breaks the legibility of other users' intentions, has any thought been given to using Gspeak with head-mounted displays? The rapid movement of the display surface in 3D space seems like a problem solved at RISD, but I was curious in particular about portable Gspeak systems or the easy visualization of objects registered in 3D space. A head-mounted projector would probably solve some of the legibility issues, but it seems like more surfaces would be necessary in that case (as well as a way to detect how far the surface is from the projector).
- What happens when a tag is occluded? Does the system guess and interpolate as to where it might be?
Workflow questions
- How can the tension between wanting high-fidelity previsualization (with actors moving around, high-resolution 3D models, and so on) and attaining the cost benefits of previsualization be resolved?
- In the pursuit of asset-oriented filmmaking, has research been done on using 3D cameras to capture multiple angles of actors' performances for later picking of distinct camera angles? Motion capture would probably get a lot of the way there for animated films. I guess the core question here is: What steps need to be taken to ensure the perpetual mutability of assets?
- In the past, how have filmmakers (particularly editors) collaborated on a single work? To what extent has this collaboration been done synchronously vs asynchronously? Co-located vs remotely?
- If each creator -- sound designers, environment artists, animators, voice actors, camera grips, etc -- can mutate or plan their performance in a collaborative digital environment, what sort of room would be best to stick all of these people into? How can their individual desires be funneled into a holistic editing workflow?
- In gestural interfaces, could it be valuable for "clips" to act like physical objects in terms of having inerta, etc? For example, if I perform a "toss this up here" sort of gesture and let it go, should the thing I'm tossing slide? Have there been tests done on user reactions/perceptions of the balance between physical fidelity and predictability?
- Asset-oriented moviemaking moves towards modern software engineering. What are the asset-oriented movie analogs to software features for planning and tracking purposes? How does the asset-oriented movie-making team get shaped and changed over time? How do you track workflow?