sammi needham : cogitate

Just a little video that Shaun, Ryan and i put together for 2009′s St. Kilda City Presentation Night. We were Premiers (and champions actually) this year, and generally that spurs on a bit of effort for presentation night. The last time this happened we re-did a scene from 300 which i really need to dig up. It was all just stills manually keyframed onto the actor’s faces. It was pretty hacked together. And now here’s presentation night video 2.0, with shot video, motion-tracked onto actor’s heads. It’s still totally shit, but it was funnier working with video rather than stills this year.

We put it together over the space of a couple of nights. Along with some other stuff that i can’t upload anywhere because it’ll get pulled for copyright infringement. Namely the music video for Def Leopard’s ‘Rocket’ with a dude from the club’s head flashing onto the screen every time the word rocket is sung. It also has a credit roll of all the players and administration involved with the Premiership winning team.

Had we had a bit more time it would have been fun to clean this up a lot more and do it properly. But it is what it is. And here it is…

Somehow (and i have absolutely no idea how) the first time that i exported the audio from the trailer, it didn’t export Brad Pitt’s voice with it. I have no idea why, but it was pretty handy to be able to just plonk in the new audio track that we (very badly) ADR’d and still play the backing track underneath it. I needed some of the other voices from the trailer in at other times and when i exported the audio a second time it included them. If anyone can indulge me as to why this might have happened it’d be greatly appreciative. Maybe it was a left / right channel thing? Or maybe the vocal and effects track was actually separate in the original quicktime, but it worked out very handy for me for this purpose.

Barbie is old… Bratz are slutty… Introducing Liv. Real Girls, Real Life.

“Liv In My World” [ www.livinmyworld.com.au] is a newly launched website, designed and developed at Visual Jazz to showcase a new range of dolls distributed by Funtastic in Australia called Liv. Katie, Daniella, Sophie and Alexis are the girls that make up the complete range.

The website features Katie, one of the girls in the Liv range. You can outfit her with about 60 different combos of clothes and hairstyles and see her in augmented reality by printing out and holding up a marker to your webcam.

The site has had a pretty quick turn-around to meet a launch date for the sale of the dolls in store, it’s been a technically challenging job to work on with us trying a few different techniques for various features. We’ve now got a really great pipeline worked out for working with 3D collada models in Papervision3D and being able to test them in-browser with all their textures etc… It’s now very easy for our designers and 3D artists to update the models and textures and test them in the engine without having to engage flash. This is pretty important because of the intricacies of the Papervision engine. It seems to have some pretty bad clipping issues when separate planes are too close to one another, we first encountered this when working on the 3D submarine model for the ‘Ocean Recon‘ project. It’s a great engine that works well, but there’s some pretty serious competition out there and competition is only going to make thing better and cooler for 3D on the web.

Liv In My World is the 2nd augmented reality project that we’ve launched in a week (alongside Flash Forward Experience). It’s been pretty funny sitting at my desk going back and forth between these 2 jobs for the last month, almost as if i was some sort of dedicated AR specialist / fan-boy / loser… I’m not, honest. It’s actually been really good to get into this tech and realise that a really big part of getting this stuff right is the path that the user must follow to actually initialise something like this.

For this project it was important not to alienate all of the users that don’t have cameras connected to their phones. We gave them a way to get some sort of experience without it, by being able to play around with Katie by dressing the model in the website interface, young girls could still get a sense of the look of the doll and interact with the customisability of her. Only if they wanted to bad enough and were well enough equipped would they use the augmented reality component. And the demonstration steps were very blatant and (hopefully) very easy to understand and follow. Getting this right is in my opinion absolutely necessary to the success of an AR job. It’s a pretty foreign thing to do for most people (print out a weird picture and hold it up to your webcam) and it’s easy to forget working with this stuff all the time that sometimes users need a bit more hand-holding when trying things like this out for the first time, especially when your website is aimed at kids.

Overall i think we pulled it off really well. I think Katie herself is one of the best and most true representations of the human form that i’ve seen in Papervision3D to date. I think that the animations sync well even when changing clothes (which was no small feat) and that it performs very well even on a computer that’s not a super hot-rod. Now i just hope that kids enjoy plying with it. We had some young kids come in for the shoot for the demonstration and they seemed to love it, for me, that was one of the best parts of this whole job. Seeing people use the things that we make and having fun / finding them useful is one of the most rewarding parts of this job. Now go buy some dolls.