As we have reached the submission date for our collaborative project, there were several enjoyable and informative aspects which I learned of during the course of several weeks. As well as these are some areas which I personally believe could have been improved for future assignments, both from my own workflow and as a team.
The three of us settled on the idea of creating a music video, interlaced with footage from Unreal Engine 5, 3D assets, and live action footage as well as green screen for composition. This allowed us to have sections of the video where each of us could use our skillsets. As we were first developing our plan, At first I naturally presented ideas which related to game design, such as controlling a player character for a short time. Looking back, I realize now that these were not very fitting to our design, but the suggestions were taken well by my teammates. The idea of working on a music video is something I had not done before, and I wanted to try something new.
We took on roles that we could most comfortably perform, which while being a positive when coming to familiarity, may have somehow taken away some learning opportunities from this assignment. Still, as I was already on unfamiliar ground when taking on this project, this may have gone either way when coming to finalizing. As Robin is an aspiring level designer, his platform of choice was Unreal Engine 5. This also suited me, as I am also fairly comfortable with using UE5 and importing assets and textures into the editor. Dominic, who also arranged the artist and music track, has a good amount of experience with creating music videos with motion graphics and composition. I was comfortable with my usual range of 3D software and employed these skills into the assets I had been tasked with.
There were many positives with working with my teammates, as communication and updates were frequent, and meetups were long and productive. With a good amount of ideas coming from being present under a social working environment, there were undoubtedly key developments which occurred in this space. Additionally, troubleshooting each others issues and bringing them to the table was a regular happening, rather than turning to YouTube. There was a clear and constant workflow to our project, and seems to have gone without any issue other than technical problems, and a slight delay in finding a rap artist.
Issues which were a slight detriment to my role were the amount of quick paced footage, as many shots lasted around 2-3 seconds which is something I was not used to. With the large amount of live-action footage, it seemed unclear to me how the composition would work but this was most likely due to my lack of understanding music video composition. Also slightly confusing were some changes in development, as the bus was originally going to be crossing over a bridge in a quick panning shot, which was changed to a much closer angle. Additionally was the mouse rig and model, which was decided against around halfway through development. Whilst these were not imperative when it came to the final project, perhaps a bit more clarity may have been good to avoid wasted effort.
As a whole this project was fairly interesting and a good learning experience, as it also allowed us to collaborate with others in the field of design, and made us aware of the many processes which are necessary for a final piece including finding an artist, obtaining the necessary footage, working with green screens, compositing footage into Unreal, and also as an interactive development experience.