International Spy Museum
The International Spy Museum was not only a pure joy to work on, but it is a blast to go visit. I highly recommend testing your spy skills and climbing through the sound-sensitive air vents. This museum was my first experience working on a decision theater as I helped design, edit, and animate the Cyber Rotunda interactive exhibit, along with my team at Cortina Productions. This exhibit showcases two decision-based experiences where visitor’s may decide if they would like to participate in one or both games. The main screen is projected onto a large wall with 8 kiosks in front of it for the visitor to use for interaction.
The first game has visitors making timed decisions after being walked through several scenarios. Their first decision drives the next scenario, meaning there is a web of possibilities for this game. When editing videos for this interactive, I had to create clips for each possible outcome and scenario. Keeping organized was crucial, as well as communicating with my producer and the programmer. The next game is more linear, but it also involved multiple clips to be strung out for programming usage. One challenge in designing the games was making it cohesive, but still relative to its content.
Museum opening: 5-12-2019
Location: Washington, D.C.
My contribution : design, video-editing, sound-editing, animation
Programs used : Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere
Pacific Visions Film
Working on the film, Pacific Visions, for the Aquarium of the Pacific was not only challenging content to create, but pushed the limits as far as scale. This film is 9K and is incorporated into a 4D theater. The main screen is 32 feet tall and 130 feet wide with a 180 degree curvature. One of my initial tasks was mocking the theater up in order to get a better idea of how the curve would affect our content. I used blue prints to create the screens within Cinema 4D.
The overall concept of the film is building a sustainable future. My team worked on creating a futuristic city to represent that future. We used pre made models and modified them to create our vision of a sustainable future. I was given a model of a building that I needed to modify in order to make a vertical farm. Growing up, you always try to picture what you think the future will look like and this project allowed me to create those ideas which was very cool. I started by altering the glass structure and retexturing all materials. I also modeled the shelving structures to hold the plants for the interior farm. A major challenge was populating eight buildings full of various plants. I first tried using a cloner which ended up being problematic when using a render farm. Working with render instances proved to be more successful.
Rendering a film at 9K required some research on where we could render our frames. We were initially exporting EXR files with an EXR multipass and were getting errors when trying to run it on a render farm. The size of the frame with the size of an EXR file were pushing the limits of each farm we tried. My coworker and I ran some tests on exporting PNG files and started to get better results.
While the farm (Pixel Plow) was pumping out frames, we began compositing. Most of the shots have water which involved creating massive water plates. I worked compositing ocean water and waves to immerse the city renders into the scene. The final step was incorporating people, cars, and trains into our city to really bring it to life.
This project was very fun in the aspect that we were visualizing what our future could look like; however, it took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to operate at this scale.
Opening: May 2019
Location: Aquarium of the Pacific- Long Beach, California
My Contribution: 3D modeling, 3D animation, compositing, render farm setup, texturing (Arnold)
Programs Used: Cinema 4D (Arnold), After Effects, Photoshop
Interactive Wall
For my undergraduate degree I had initially focused on character animation. After transitioning into working more extensively on visual effects, I missed the hours spent tweaking key frames and bringing images to life. When working on the interactives for Aquarium of the Pacific I was given the opportunity to animate an array of critters for a huge underwater wall that visitors would be able to touch and interact with. I was provided with pre-animated models, but ultimately had to re-key the majority of them to illustrate a more realistic and natural loop of movement. One amusing obstacle I faced was finding a reference video for a fast-swimming tuna fish.The attractive end result was that animals would appear when a visitor taps on a bubble providing an educational and immersive experience.
Along with sea critters, some of the bubbles bring up larger animations such as underwater turbines. I animated and re-textured them in order to depict a more blended image with the ocean floor. I composited grime and barnacles to present a passage of time while also projecting a caustic light beam onto the animations. Additionally, I animated a sea kelp model by using a wind deformer in C4D. I initially tried to animate it like hair, but was not getting the results I wanted. I created caustic lighting for the kelp by means of animating a plane with holes in it and then shining a light on top of that plane. I then took the rendered kelp and composited it into some footage of a kelp forest to prevent the scene from feeling sparse.
Aside from the underwater wall, there is also an interactive for visitors to explore the futuristic and sustainable city my team and I developed. We used models mainly from Turbo Squid and re-textured them to fit our vision. I altered the geometry of some the buildings in order to provide a better representation of what a sustainable structure could look like. Some of the issues when creating the content were compositing water as well as making it feel like the visitor is flying through the city (without making them nauseous). We had to incorporate a few creative camera moves and re-time a few shots to achieve this, but the result was a successful one that I am extremely proud to say I was apart of.
Opening: May 2019
Location: Aquarium of the Pacific - Long Beach, California
My Contribution: Animation, editing, early mock up, texturing and lighting, character animation, rendering, compositing
Software Used: Cinema 4D (Arnold), After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere
