Entry 7: Pulling it All Together

What I did this week (March 1, 2021 - March 7, 2021)

This week has been a busy one! I’ve done three major things. First, I finished modelling the cathedral. Then I organized my actor and got some test readings of some test lines to help find the voice of the character. And then thirdly, I got the Unity project set up and imported the floor and the back wall from Blender to get a good sense of scale… and… well the video speaks for itself… but it’s gigantic. As I expected, the scripts I wrote for my bedroom came right into this project, and the first person movement works like a charm, saving me a bunch of coding time already. I also discovered a whole different rendering engine in Unity called HDRP, which has more texture and material controls, as well as much more high fidelity graphics capabilities, since it is the protocol used for PC and console games, versus the “any platform” approach of the default renderer. One early hurdle I did hit is that, rather than baking every texture, I am rebuilding my materials in Unity. However, on the back wall, I have all that detail baked into a normal map which uses a different tiling scale than the rest of the texture, so I do have to figure out how to apply that and not have it tile. HDRP has a node editor that should allow me to do this.

The voice lines featured in the audio clip above were from a document I compiled which include direct song lyrics from some of the artists mentioned in previous entries along with my own writing to quickly make some things that might look like the final memory audio clips. I sent these off to my lovely talent, Jack Trembath, who did a couple of reads of them after listening to my descriptions of the character. We are working in a collaborative process to find the character over the next few days and then put in the real voice lines which aren’t plagiarized from song lyrics.

Reflections on the Week

This past week has really been about clarifying what needs to be done, what can be cut out and saved for later, and what is the fastest way of getting to a working beta. While I still want to do mini environments around the memories, I just don’t have time to do it this quarter, so it has to wait, for example. Figuring out how to avoid baking textures as much as possible will save hours on the transfer process from Blender to Unity. It is the final stretch of the quarter, and I have no delusions about what can and cannot make it across the quarter finish line. A lot has needed to be cut or slimmed down in order to be able to survive the next week of work, and come out with something presentable, but just not the full scope, for the end. There really isn’t much to say. My thoughts are very procedural, I need to do this, then that, then the next thing, and try to balance the two other finals with it at the same time.

This Week’s Inspirations

Artist Profile

This week, I want to highlight someone who is heavily influencing the writing of the character I am making, rather than someone necessarily working in new media or art games: John Lurie. John Lurie is primarily known for his music with The Lounge Lizards and the John Lurie National Orchestra. His jazz is experimental and lively, but the music is not why I am choosing to highlight him. Rather, it is his contributions to television, with his shows Fishing with John (1991) and Painting with John (2021). John has this goofy introspective way about him that takes the viewer off guard and forces them to, in between laughs, think about things they have not thought about before. On the first episode of his painting show, he cuts to a sunset and challenges the viewer to create their own poetry about it. A couple episodes later he’ll show you the same clip over and over of a tire rolling down a hill. He uses the medium to push the viewer into a more interactive engagement with the work, which I wan the audio memories to do as well. Also, he is precisely the age and demographic of the character I want to build. So, I have been fixated on his way of talking about his memories, and the way he oscillates between opening up his emotions and closing them back off out of distrust of the camera. At one point, John talks about someone close to him who died suddenly, and how it still affects him to this day. He says, “Im confused about losing them and I think about it all the time so..." really quickly and harshly, as if it is such a struggle to admit it and then he walks away in anger. That is exactly the type of way I want my character to handle unresolved tensions about their life, and things they don’t understand. That is why, in the test audio clip above, I included the story about the film that made sense to everyone else but not him, and the frustration about that disconnection. There has to be that instability and that state of being unsure in order for the character to feel real, though his words may sometimes have a poetic nature to them, much like John’s do.