Jesse Vigil

That's Eric Furie helping me apply the facial markers to my actor, Frank, prior to shooting my scene last week. Here's what it's been like in my head leading up to this.

Wow, this is totally rad. I am going to love this!
I've had famous people teach or guest on classes here before, but Robert Zemeckis ranks very highly on my list of inspiring, helpful instructors. Aside from the cool rush of actually getting to pitch the story I wanted to shoot to him, he gave some of the best story/script feedback I've ever gotten from a teacher here, and it improves the final scene tremendously. That said, he and Eric have also been very patiently helping us re-train our brains. There are a lot of things about motion capture that are closer to theater than film, which is awesome for me because I spent my formative years very heavily involved in theater. So this mode of thinking is very natural for me and something I feel more instinctively suited for than traditional film production.

Oh geez, we're shooting WHEN?!! I don't know how to use the system yet! I don't have actors! I'm going SECOND?!! We don't know what we're doing yet! I'm SCREWED.

And we did come in a little hot. But fortunately, I've been getting some really good lessons in scoping myself down this year. And I wrote a scene that makes good use of the technology but isn't going to ruin my life. My scene is probably one of the more subtle ones in terms of content in the class, but my interests in the technology are very close to Bob's: I'm very interested to see how close we are to getting subtle, human performaces -> so my scene is written and the shoot was set up to get really clean facial data and was rehearsed heavily to coax a natural but energetic performance out of the scene. I approached it totally theatrically. I got myself the best, most expressive actors I knew who can do all kinds of great things with their face and body language, and we treated it like a stage performance.

My experiment: I think that slight amount of over-acting that you do for the people in the balcony of a theater is what you want to shoot for using the current technology. A little exaggeration seems to make a big difference. Definitely what we saw of Beowulf so far leads me to believe that film acting is too subtle to really translate well.

I think it worked. Also, I want to make movies this way.

I'll blog about this more, but shooting this - the scene is one of the best I've ever done. Great actors did a lot, a script I'm proud of helped, but technically, the way we make motion capture overcomes many of the limitations I have personally as a filmmaker. It went really well. More soon.

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wasn't going to blog this just yet because I honestly felt like I wanted to have something a little more solid in my head before I started throwing names around. It's not useful to anyone reading a blog if they don' know where I'm coming from, right?

But I did have these thoughts while waiting for the woman at Spudnuts to get off the phone and not use any kind of telepathy to get me the same thing I order twice a week from her like clockwork.

* I'm interested in creating an experience that puts players in a broad context, but leaves them very much in charge of their story. In many ways, this is the lie I buy into (foolishly by this point) every time I join an MMO. And I cite Star Wars Galaxies as a case in point for this.

I am very much in love with the idea that the Star Wars Universe exists somewhere, is persistent, and can be inhabited by me and my friends. Like the holodeck, I always stupidly anticipate that the world will be there and the only rules the world will have are the ones that hold the universe together. Instead, MMORPGs tend to create a truly hilarious number of rules that govern how I can play in that universe.

I feel like this is the equivalent of telling kids on the playground they can play tag, but they can't run and they can't shout while they do it and oh yes, if you haven't been playing tag for a really long time, you're not allowed to be "it."

So I don't get to live out the personal story I want for myself in the Star Wars Universe. Over the period of a year, I'm living out the same basic story as everyone else in more or less the same order. I don't totally fault the makers of the games for this - they're putting this out in the only format they can- one that is, as its name implies, designed to accommodate a massive number of people in an orderly fashion.

So I want to do something similar but on a smaller and more personal level. I think games like this should be about personal storytelling. You get to have your own personal adventure in a world that fascinates you and appeals to some level of your private fantasies.

I will need a lot fo help with this.

It doesn't directly speak to what I just said above, but when I think about the games that really made me think of this as a storytelling medium and not just a dexterity challenge, I immediately think of Tim Schafer. I think he gets it in a really linear way, and I feel like games have felt the absence of those glorious point-and-click Lucasarts games -- I would love to have his input on how to create that kind of experience inside a persistent universe.

On a more practical level, Rich LeMarchand has been a tremendous help and had really great design feedback on Original Fin. I think he'd also be a big help, and I also have access to him already.

Korba also mentioned that I might really want to seek someone on the Hollywood side since in a lot of ways I'm trying to bridge the experience of games and the story richness of movies. That's all worth thinking about.

Sigh. I wish it didn't seem like such a chore to sign in and comment on blogs. I'm really interested in the thougts of others. Even if you just want to give me a call or email me and say "I have five minutes to chew on your ear, that is swell, my friends. Swell.

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The above was a short pencil doodle in class I just wasted valuable time here at home turning into a real comic. But given the discussion, I couldn't resist doing a take on Perry's patient instruction in the style of Frank Miller.

That's because I made this jitter patch, which is still in progress, which lets you route video into the system and record it on the fly in Frank Miller-vision. Controls in the brcosa let you adjust it or invert it for those Sin City night shots.

Here it is: Download file

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This from Jordan's design challenge last week to choose a favorite painting and "bring it to life."

I'm reposting this explanation from the wiki so that the department's other distribute narrative junkies can play.

I think the paintings of Edward Hopper are so significant to me because of the deep emotional connection you can form with them if you're in a particular state of mind to connect with them.

Hopefully, most of us are not in that state most of the time, but if we ever are, man, that's powerful.

So I wanted to design an experience that would help you get into that emotional state and have a deep experience with the work but also not plunge my audience permanently into a big state of loneliness. So... I built a little story into the painting that if you get involved in it, helps lead to that experience.

I thought the best way (and this is in no way sucking up - I actually agonized over doing this but decided this was still the best method) to ensure that people got really involved int he story would be to set it up as a distributed narrative tied to the painting. Also, there's a prize if you get to the end.

I swear it's not hard to solve. The requirements are mostly that you spend some time looking at the painting and thinking in new ways.

There is a hint about the order to solve it all in the frame as well. And the thing in the middle, that's kind of significant...

http://www.girlinthemuseum.com

thanks to Jenny Krochmal and Matt Jensen for the acting, Jared Yeager for the support, Doug Spice and Julian Bleecker for the VXML assist.

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the request of Julian, who was a big help to me on the project I'm about to describe, I'm blogging a quick how-to on one aspect of it. It's longwinded and contains examples, so read on for the full story.

At the request of Julian, who was a big help to me on the project I'm about to describe, I'm blogging a quick how-to on one aspect of it. It's longwinded and contains examples, so read on for the full story.

The project on the whole is a distributed narrative. You can find it at http://www.girlinthemuseum.com

One of the clues to uncover is a phone number which leads to Todd's voicemail. Certain clues you find from unlocking videos elsewhere in the painting provide one of three PIN codes to Todd's voicemail that deliver the final clue in three parts that leads to the prize. This was a very good idea of mine on Tuesday and by Thursday night a very big source of personal woe.

Automated phone numbers run on a version of XML called Voice XML. If you know a little about XML, this is not so challenging, but if it's your first run at it, this can be a little daunting. To set one of these up in a hurry you need some good working knowledge and also, ideally, a hosting environment to test this. I had an initial account with TellMe - it's free to set up an account so long as you have a non-free email address, and they have a great scratchpad to quickly cobble code and try things out. It's not suitable for deployment, though, because the only way to use the number for free is to distribute your developer ID and PIN.

So Julian turned me on to Voxeo . They'll give you a local phone number for your app, plus you can also Skype to it. And unlike TellMe, Voip hosting is instant, instead of waiting a few business days.

Now we're to the nuts and bolts of creating the app. It needs to answer automatically, play a greeting, prompt for user input, then accept a 4-digit code, then recognize if it's one of the three correct PINS and play a corresponding message for each correct PIN.

I set up the first part with very little trouble. Voxeo and TellMe both have good resources for rudimentary things like this and text-to-speech is next-to-automatic. The tricky part is the prompt and getting it to listen to the proper response. This is handled by grammars, which you more or less have to define or link to from someone else.

As an example, here is what Julian gave me to help with that part:

As it turns out, Voxeo has a TERRIFIC beta application that is a visual designer for rudimentary voice applications, called Evolution Designer. Just as I was mastering the grammars, I discovered this and because my app was actually quite simple, Evolution Designer was perfect. It lets you lay out your network in a tree, very similar to how i'd done it in a notebook earlier that day, and then use menus and libraries to construct the inner guts of the sucker. It's far from point-and-click because the tool still assumes you understand the mechanics of how an app like this is set up and the nomenclature is not for laymen. If I hadn't spent time trying to force my brain to learn the language and had Julian's help to understand the grammar and the names for the handlers, it would have been much harder. But assuming you know enough, it's a big time saver. Publishing and then tying it to a phone number is not documented too well but I figured it out, and it's accessible via a (310) number which I'm not giving out because my class is playing the game, via 1800 with a PIN, via Skype, or VOIP. If you really want to test it, though, the clue to the number's hidden in the door. :)

I'll blog the phone number at the end of the week when the game's over. In the meantime, if anyone has any questions or wants to mess around with it, feel free to give me a shout. Having it all working by Saturday made me feel pretty darn cool.

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)