COP - Creative Responses

I decided to do 2 different types of practicals. The first was to edit out transitions of existing VR films and replacing them with straight cuts to see how jarring they are. This was quite fun as it was good to experiment with professionally created VR footage and see their decision making behind some shots. Once I found out that editing it was just like editing normal footage, it was actually quite simple. However, I had a little bit of trouble in 2 areas:

• The films I chose all had background sound/music, and therefore cutting would also cut the sound and make it sound jarring, which would detract from the visuals. I had to try and workaround this which made it a bit more complicated, and overall they came out more rough than I would have liked
• Exporting the equirectangular video as a normal .mp4 and then uploading it to youtube wouldn't result in a VR video, but I managed to fix this by ticking an option in Premiere, "Video is VR", and that would insert the metadata for me.

I think this practical turned out really well and was a great demonstration for cuts being jarring - especially when watching them through a HMD.

The second practical was to animate a camera pan versus a cut, and this was more fun but also a lot more challenging. The warping of VR made drawing and animating the rotation a lot harder, and I had to compromise the design a lot, such as making the background just black, and pushing the animation back in virtual space to reduce the warping. I was very happy with the results though, and they again demonstrated the benefit of different transitions to cuts.

Although I was happy with the result, I still feel that this last transition didn't achieve the camera pan effect, instead looking like the balloon rotated instead. I think to fix this I would need another reference point in the background in addition to the spotlight rotating. Maybe a door or something simple.

COP - Research Journal 2

Writing the second section up (Why can't vr do that/why cant cuts be used in vr) has taken up a lot more than I thought it would due to the practicals, therefore I need to cut the word count for them down, and I also need to change my plan yet again:

• Why is editing necessary/ what does it do? - done
• Why can’t vr do that/why cant cuts be used in vr - done
• Why it can be possible/compromises
• Practical of animating different transitions
• Why is it possible? - experiential editing
• Conclusion

COP - Revised Plan

I've realised that my plan has too many sections as I won't be able to fit it all into the word count while going sufficiently in depth to each point. Because of this, I've revised my original plan to focus more on that first section, while fleshing it out a bit:

• (Intro)
• Why is editing necessary/ what does it do?
• Why can't vr do that/why cant cuts be used in vr
• Why it can be possible/compromises - case studies
• Why is it possible? - experiential editing
• How timing is affected and how that affects the durations of shots before cutting
• Look at how to achieve disorientation as quick cuts dont work
• Different transitions and animations for it (morphs, pans, fades, perspective changes) what effects do they give? Maybe export them into vr - but simply.
• Conclusion

COP - Research Journal

• I found starting writing my research journal very hard despite having a structure, and found that it was taking me ages to link the points of each section. I decided to create another document to lay out all the points from my research within each section according to my plan for writing. This helped immensely with both the writing and structuring of my research journal. 
• I also found that I don't have enough pages for the number of words I already have. I need to somehow increase the number of pages without detracting from the project, but I'm hoping it will increase when I do the practicals and document them. I could also include more photos in my writing, to also break up the block of text as well.

COP - Plan

To help organise my writing, I created a plan for my research journal:

• Introduction - Editing in vr, why I chose it. First i’m going to look at some of the challenges of editing in vr (why traditional techniques dont work for vr, looking mainly at cuts). Then im going to look at what role editing does have (controlling what the viewer sees)

• How vr’s lack of a frame results in editing cuts not working and look at why they dont work/can work/can sometimes work. Use examples and case studies. Do practical by getting an existing animation and cutting out the transitions and seeing its effects. Draw conclusions about the value of cuts in 360 - should they be used?. 

• Then look at different techniques you could do instead of cutting, different transitions (when looking at a pan/change of environment, maybe design/ sketch a bg for the transition(practical)). Storyboard a 180 short for 360, replacing cuts with transitions (practical). Discuss challenges of storyboarding for vr. Draw conclusions about this.

• Look at how you can achieve disorientation with different techniques rather than quick cuts. (Quick cuts create disorientation in traditional cinema, how can you achieve the same feeling in VR). practicals could be quickly cutting and seeing if it creates disorientation effectively. And/or creating the new method (close ups) in vr OR looking at case studies of films that have used this.

• Other challenges vr editors need to think about; eye contact; subtitles and graphic overlays.

• Lead it with jessica brillhart’s probabilistic editing and “induced editing” into how to control what the viewer sees when you can’t control the frame. Why do you need to do this? (as the frame has been removed, cuts are no longer an effective way of focusing the viewer on something, there is a need for the director to manipulate what the viewer sees through different methods). How can you do this. Case studies.

• Conclusion - what I found out, talk and reference how vr is a quickly developing technology and new techniques/methods are going to be revealed as it progresses.

I think the second section has the most content, and is definitely the main section of the journal. This means that the last three sections (ignoring the conclusion) can be not included depending on the word count, as they aren't as important to my topic.

COP - Practical Ideas

My original idea for the creative response was to design and create a fully rendered 2D background for a 360 animation, however because my idea hasn't changed to focus on editing, this doesn't really fit my project anymore. Some possible ideas for the practical could include:

• Taking an existing 360 degree film or animation and replacing any non-cut transitions with cuts
• this would be very good for demonstrating the jarring effects of cuts, and it would help illustrate why the transitions are necessary. Could also be good for finding out how to edit VR footage
• Storyboarding a traditional animation for a 360 degree version, replacing any straight cuts with transitions to make it suitable
• I like this idea as it would show what animators have to consider in designing a 360 short, and how that differs to traditional storyboarding. It would be quite a big practical however, so I could just focus on the transitions and storyboard them instead
• Taking a traditional live action film and editing it to replace the cuts with different suitable transitions
• this expands on the previous idea, but focuses more on the transition side of things. If I were to use a live action film, it would allow me to show the effects better as I would be able to use actual transitions rather than storyboard them. The only problem with this idea is that some transitions may be quite hard to do for VR 
• Animating a transition for VR and doing another cut version
• I like this idea as it's like a combination of the previous two, and if I were to animate it in 360 degrees then it would allow me to explore different workflows for the process. Similarly to the last idea, it could be quite hard, and I would probably need to make the transition very simple
• Designing a background that can be used for a VR pan
• This would allow me to keep my original idea of designing a 360 degree background, but applies it more to my topic. This one would be a lot of work as I'd have to make a more complicated background version, and I'm not entirely sure how to do it. I'd have to look at the equirectangular files of existing animations to see how they're laid out.

I think I will definitely do the first idea as this helps demonstrate my point as well as gives me a better understanding, while still being possible in the timeframe of this project. I'd need to do more research into how to animate in 360 degrees for the others, however I'd like to do the last two the most.

COP - Case Studies

These are some case studies I can use:

• HELP Google Spotlight - slow camera pan throughout the whole short
• Back to the moon Google Spotlight - good use of 360 and has a transition to underwater 
• Ratchet and Clank and Edge of Nowhere - Video Games - Can compare the two as the director used cuts depending on their story
• Paranormal Activity
• We who remain
• Kiya
• After Solitary - they had a lot of trouble with cuts looking too jarring
• VRtually there - series that features a lot of quick cuts
• Reeps: One does not exist - music video that features a lot of quick cuts for edgy editing
• Climbing giants - a good example of induced editing
• Ted-ed cave painting - storyboard example and director talks about how he limited the environment to help focus on the animation
• World Tour - Probabilistic experiential editing
• Pearl - amazing animation

COP - Research

I researched this topic by breaking it down into these sub-topics:

• How to tell a story when you can't control the camera
• Why can't you use cuts
• How do you get the viewer to see what you want them to see? (what techniques can you use)

There was a lot of information in just the two books, with the Crafting Stories for VR book being a goldmine for interviews and case studies. The main element of editing in VR is the use of cuts, and in a lot of the case studies the directors had trouble with using them as they are quite jarring in VR. Storytelling for VR was very good for the theoretical side of things, and it had a lot of good interviews for the broader side of VR.

In the Blink of a Mind is going to be my main resource for why editing (cutting) is possible and how to do it, and I can use Brillhart's 'World Tour' as a case study for this. I think my method of splitting the research into sub topics really helped me deal with it, and my next steps are to continue finding more information about both sides of editing (the struggles and why/how it can be done), as well as looking at the case studies. I also need to make a plan for my research journal.

COP - Initial Research

I started the research process by reading and making notes from the two books:
 - Storytelling for VR
 - Crafting stories for VR

I sifted through them, looking for any information that falls under these three categories:

• Effective immersion in immersive narratives
• Multiple story lines and fear of missing out
• Film language of 360

I found this stage really hard as I was overwhelmed by all the different points and possible topics, however I ended up changing the topic slightly and focusing on just editing in VR. This was because I found a really interesting interview with Jessica Brillhart about her process of "probabilistic experiential editing", which led me on to how people have claimed that editing is not possible in VR.

This is a much more specific topic that I'm a lot more interested in. The next steps are to find more information from the two books on just editing in VR, as well as looking into Jessica Brillhart's process more, as she has a blog about it called "In the Blink of a Mind".

COP - Academic Writing - Referencing and Formatting - 07/11/19

Some key points from the workshop today:

• Label images with Figure # and refer to them in text
• Be selective with sources, make sure you know them in depth and choose quality over quantity
• When referencing Youtube videos, use the vlog format
• Bibliography should be on a separate page and in alphabetical order
• To help with phrasing, use Academic Phrasebank
• Don't use words you don't understand, use The Free Dictionary for unknown words.
• For any website, always use 'available at:' and then when it was accessed on

This workshop was very useful, and it showed me that referencing is fine as long as you follow the guide, especially paying attention to the punctuation.