For my final project, I worked with Kenneth and Kennedy to present Extinction: A Commentary on Urbanization in Natural Settings, which showcase the animals of the African Safari going extinct, until we see these animals again as an exhibit in the Shanghai Natural History Museum.
My primary focus was the visual post-production of the project. From the 360 video we took from inside the museum, I took some still frames from the shot and used Photoshop to change the environment to a full landscape. I did this several times, with each iteration removing an animal, until the final image was just an empty landscape. I then used Premiere to cut together these images with fade transitions to provide the effect of the animals disappearing.
Some of the difficulties I ran into while working on this project was that I had issues with creating a stereoscopic image. I attempted to edit both eyes individually but there was too much discrepancy between the two images that there was weird artifacting and graininess from this. Because of this, I chose to leave the final video in 2D, until it fades back into the museum, which is 3D.
I feared that the 2D shift into 3D may have looked strange, but based on the expressions that people made afterwards, most were quite pleased with our work. I knew that if I wanted criticism, the most genuine responses were going to be the reaction of children. Based on the results of the show, I can say most of the kids really enjoyed our project and it was amazing to see their fascination when they see the animals dissapearing.
In terms of improvement, I would hope that there is another method as to actually making the image stereoscopic. Perhaps there is a way, but my Photoshop skills is not to that caliber. I would hope that I could improve on that. Our 360 audio also was not functional, as it played a mono channel in both ears. The ambisonic sound was a final and last minute decision and went without a lot of testing and debugging. In terms of that, I wish we had started working on audio earlier. I would also wish that the first portion wasn’t static. For example I would have preferred to see some moving animals as a video rather than a still image. I think if I were to redo my project differently, I would have made my own environment and added 3D models that moved, but I felt that my current skills in 3D game engines are not good enough to realistically do this.