sammi needham : cogitate

We at Visual Jazz have just launched a new microsite for the Channel 7 show Flash Forward. The Flash Forward Experience site.

Flash Forward the TV show is about a mysterious global event that causes everyone on the planet to simultaneously lose consciousness for 137 seconds (2 minutes, 17 seconds), during which time people worldwide see what appear to be visions of their lives six months in the future. The event results in some deaths and leaves the survivors wondering if what they saw will happen.

The site that we have built is a hype-piece that shows a sneak-peak of the show. It’s basically a trailer viewer, but presented i a unique way using augmented reality

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The instructions on the website inform the user that they must print this ‘marker’ and have an enabled webcam. Once you’ve got those two things you can start playing around with augmented reality. The show features a busted up city (which is the result of everyone falling unconscious for 1:17), and the marker that you are holding displays this city on top of it using some image recognition technology developed by our friends at Boffswana. The city itself was modelled in Maya and then brought into 3DSMax to be exported as a .dae file using a Collada exporter. We then use Papervision3D (via Flash) to import the model and display it real-time in 3D.

The image recognition works out which orientation the marker is on and so any direction it is facing in will always trigger the city to be directly facing the camera so that you can see it in it’s best view. Some of the nice little touches that we put into this city are promo billboards for other Channel 7 shows, a chinook circling the main building in the centre of the scene and a tiny video playing on a mini video screen on the main building.

You can twist the marker around in front of your camera to explore the city from different angles, but if you turn the marker around 180 degrees the back-drop of the city is revealed as a bigger screen with which to show the feature promo for the show.

It was a great project to work on with an extremely quick turn-around and a lot of technology flip-flops along the way. We were originally going to be using some hardware-based 3D technology that runs within a dedicated plug-in to show the city which would have allowed us to have a much more detailed city display and would have also allowed for natural feature tracking to be employed in stead of the high contrast glyph. This basically means that we were going to use a photo instead of the black and which marker to instigate the 3d scene. The spec ended up changing and we used flash with Papervision3D in the end. Which meant that we potentially had a wider audience using the site as there are no 3rd party plugins to install, but it also meant that we needed to re-model the city to fit within the confines of Papervision3D’s modest maximum polygon count.

At the end of the day i’m very happy with the result. Some may see it as a bit of a gimmick, and that’s fine, i respect that. in a sense it is, but it’s still damn fun to play with.

FlashForwardExperience.com.au

The latest instalment in Van Diemen’s Land’s ‘behind the scenes’ series.

“A sexy beard. A poetic beard. A beard that will meet you more than half way in a fight..”

It’s another insightful look into the serious world of filmmaking brought to you by the serious filmmakers of Van Diemen’s Land.

– Van Diemen’s Land Blog Feed

A mere 2 weeks out from the official launch now and Jonathan has just headed up to Sydney for their fancy theatre launch showing… thing. So please join the facebook group, send it to your friends, twitter about it, etc… we need as many bums on seats as we can get on September 24th and all that week.

Also: Empire magazine have just given the film a 4 star review, sweet!

Ocean Recon is a project that i have been working on for the last 12 months or so. We started planning this project just after i started at Visual Jazz. Trying to get a Submarine project off the ground is a process that had taken place a few times before and now we’d finally found an approach that everyone was happy with.

To show what life is like on a submarine is not an easy thing to do. It’s pretty hard to get on board one, and they’re not the easiest things to photograph in their normal state (underwater). So we set on a 3d approach for the sub and a whole lot of motion work to get a 1/2 sky/water look to the majority of the scenes.

The planning stage was meticulous. We went back and forth for a long time with actual Submariners getting the plans to construct the sub in 3D, getting the scripts right for the scenes and making sure that all of the details were accurate. This was really important as we wanted to give as realistic as possible interpretation of actual operations on board.

Here are a few examples of the kind of details that we adhered to, all based on facts:

• The sub tilts to 10 degrees as it surfaces
• The uniforms were real and displayed correct rank
• The dolphins sequence was taken straight from footage on board the HMAS Rankin
• The equation used to calculate a firing angle is the same trig that is actually used

…and a heap more.  But anyway, there were a lot of details that we paid attention to. It really helped us learn more about what goes on and how, so that we could then communicate that during the site’s presentation.

We incorporated 8 ‘activities’ into the site that intersect the scenes at poignant moments, they’re like little mini-games, but i think activity-points are a better description of them, as they’re not really games. These were also very true-to-life, or as much as possible given the simple interactions that we wanted them to have. Not designed to be sticking points for users, moreso to make sure that people are paying attention and to further explain the details of what is going on in a more interactive way.

Tomma from VJ, in one of the diving suits, getting extremely hot very quickly as i continually instructed him to climb ladders and jump off boxes. He was a sweaty, horrible, angry mess at the end of it, but his enthusiasm and awesomeness was never in question. Props.

Doing the sound mixing with Tristain at BangBang! Studios in Port Melbourne, these guys were really great to work with and always came up with the goods.

And here’s me, showing off the site at the media launch like a proud dad.

At the end of the day I’m really happy with it, but as always, there are things that i’d like to add and change. I’m working towards some of those things now. Stay tuned.

ps. Step it up.

It’s officially The Simpsons 20th anniversary.And we’ve just launched a new game for Simpsons Stick-ems.

Simpsons Stick’em – a 20th Anniversary Collection

I got a sweet hi-score.