Group Project- My part
Tital and inspiration
At the beginning of the project, I needed to find a suitable theme that I could use to create a project based on my own experience as a hearing-impaired person. This gave me a simple theme, and then I found a team member to work with.
The next step was brainstorming time. I wrote down all the details I encountered in life in the form of sticky notes. Although I had rich first-person experience, this was also troublesome because these stories covered too wide a range. We needed to choose a clearer direction from them to facilitate the development of the project.
Among the many experiences, we see a clear and story-rich experience, that is the musical dream.When I was a middle school student, I dreamed of becoming a pianist, or even a musician. But around that time, my hearing began to deteriorate. After two years of trying various methods, I couldn’t recover. It was time to rethink my approach. I realized music wasn’t my only future; I could pursue other avenues. This didn’t mean I had to give up music; it could still be a hobby.
Then we started looking for references, and it was a story about a musician who suddenly couldn’t hear the bass, which was very similar to our story.
Storyboard
When creating the story, we first conceived the script according to the traditional three-part structure.
Production process- UE 5
This project is a team project, but we are good at three different processes, one is Blender, one is Unreal Engine, and one is C4D. This means that collaboration within the software is more difficult for us. After communication, we decided to produce different chapters separately. For example, the first part will be produced by me using the UE process, and the second half will be produced by others using other processes.
My job is not difficult. I just need to create an interior scene and a simple dream scene.
The bedroom scene only has a single shot, a close-up of a human figure. Even though I used metahuman, rendering the figure was still quite complex, especially with regard to the textures of the skin and hair. Initially, using the default Lumen lighting, the shadows and lighting always had some artifacts. So, I tried using Path Tracing, which resulted in a much better rendering of the hair and lighting textures. Comparing the two renderings, I found that each had its own advantages, and it was difficult to choose between them.
But after consulting other team members, I decided to use Lumen rendering.
Another scene is a dream world. It is not a complicated scene. It only needs a few simple elements and some fog to make it look very mysterious.
The facial capture in the film was recorded using LiveLinkFace. I was the only one who did this process. The biggest difficulty was that I couldn’t perform while looking at the screen, so I had to record it many times each time and choose the most suitable one.
Music
Music was a key component of this project, as it was all centered around music and involved some musical adaptation. To avoid copyright issues, I chose a classic piece called “Flower Dance.” I found the sheet music and gave it to a team member to adapt.
The score was a symphonic score with a comprehensive soundtrack, providing many ready-made chords for the arrangement. However, the sheer volume of information also made the arrangement team member quite troubled. I needed to find a way to convert the five-line notation into a MIDI format that he could understand. Fortunately, after some effort, we successfully extracted the MIDI format, and then I told him the required soundtracks and the arrangement requirements.