Jacob Muff Josí Morgan | 05/06/2022
Communicator is the final project created for Virtual Production with Prof. Jesse Fleming by Jacob Muff and Josí Morgan. The story follows an astronaut who crash lands on a distant planet and must work together with an alien to get home, the only problem is that neither being can understand each other. For this project we expanded on the ideas and lessons learned from the midterms; we decided to use foreground elements and handheld footage to reinforce the illusion because they were so effective in our first iterations. Because virtual production in such a new field, we experienced many technical difficulties while working with the software. Fortunately, we were able to overcome these challenges by leaning into them and responding accordingly. For example, because we filmed MOS we decided to make our film more representative of a silent feature by de-saturating the final image and having text overlays. We also played with the audio and added lots of static and electric sounds to enhance the sense of distortion caused by issues with the footage. Although the final product is by no means perfect, it was a learning opportunity which provided ample opportunities for growth and experimentation.
