Design 6400 Blog

11/24 Updates Before Break

This week I focused a lot on the documentation of my project and worked on getting my thoughts down on paper. I focused on putting my sources that I was referencing when building my system into one place as well as the quotes and research that I referencing within them. I also spent time documenting my thought process on why I chose to make certain decisions when building my system and why the 'final' UI looks the way it does.

Other than that, I spent some time doing some additional reading that has been recommended to me over the past few weeks. I started reading the book Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art) by Scott McCloud and looking at research from previous MFA students to get a feel on what they made and how they write about their work.

As the semester winds down, I want to spend the rest of my time really exploring the 'why' of my work and trying to plan ahead for the future. I want to make a complete ending to this work and start to figure out how I am moving forward for the rest of my time here. I'm hoping that Thanksgiving and Winter break will give me some time to think things over outside of the classroom and get a new perspective on my goals before the next semester.

🦃

11/17 Presentations

This week we had presentations for invited faculty of our current progress on our projects. I spent some time this week cleaning up my project a bit and doing some final testing to make sure everything was working properly. I also changed the background of my customization and placed my character in the scene to make the project feel more put together.

We spent some time talking about my project, but I spent the majority of my time with faculty this week talking about where I plan on going next and how to better adapt what I have now with my more storytelling oriented path. Some of the major highlights of these conversations included:

• Being story oriented is a plus, but not my whole thing

  • It’s the backbone of what I do, not every final product

  • Stories are apart of the things I’m making, not the whole focus

• Focus on telling the story in my own way

  • Right now that looks like customization but may not always stay that way

  • It’s not about the story but how to tell the story story

    • Agency and customization is telling the story differently

• If interest is in alternative methods of storytelling, then it may be beneficial to use a story that already exists and adapt it.

  • If we don’t have familiarity with a story, we can’t/it’s harder to see the benefit of alternative methods

• More major changes and customizations would have a larger and more apparent impact

• Does the location of customization (games vs movies vs books) change the association with these things?

• Comics world associations and 3D associations are different; different language and medium expectations

  • Personalization means different things in amount of the detail in medium

  • Scott’s book of comics

11/10 Preparing for Presentations

This week I started out by further building the environment for my animation. I worked on my models in Maya a little further and then brought everything over into Unreal. I decided to build out my setting in the same level file as the original character selection portion of the project to save some time learning about saving and complex character loading systems. I also worked a bit on experimenting with lighting and getting the scene to look the way I want it to. 

While I am still going to try to do so, I don’t think it’s overly realistic to have this project completed this semester anymore. I’ve been running into a fair amount of technical difficulties and learning curves taking longer than I was expecting. That being said, I now need to figure out what a reasonable goal for the rest of this project is and plan to accomplish that to the best of my abilities.

This upcoming week we have our presentations and talk with invited faculty. I’m excited to show what I learned about character customization and talk about some of the research I’ve been reading in that area. I also plan on talking about the ‘big picture’ or dreams I had with this project and what I’m thinking it means for my thesis research. I plan on making some sort of formalized presentation or at least putting all of my resources together in one place to better facilitate conversations on Wednesday.

11/02 Special Topic

1. How can digital animations be modified in order to positively impact the connection viewers have with the story on screen?

2. I am currently working on creating a short film using the game engine Unreal that focuses on incorporating and exploring alternative storytelling techniques. This project follows the story of a kid on Halloween befriending a ghost and sharing the holiday together. In this particular project, I am focusing on using Unreal's blueprint system to explore the effects of character personalization on story impact. I wanted to explore how additional agency to the people we are seeing on screen and the media we are consuming impacts our interpretation and ability to relate to the media.

3. Objectives: Define potential areas for customization, Determine what elements of of media/storytelling contribute to emotional impact, Identify effective research methods for measuring audience engagement and enjoyment, Learn about what research and/or projects are currently available in this field

4. Kyoung Swearingen, Matt Lewis, Mary Anne Beecher

5.  Questions/Topics: What kinds of stories do you find yourself relating to the most? What elements in them are you most drawn to? What is your ideal story/story experience?

6.  Criteria: Flow of the experience, visual/style feedback, overall experience

7.  I just need a computer station. Anywhere is fine :)

10/27 Modeling

This week I started on the environment modeling and making some different props that are going to be used in the animation. I spent some time building out some of the bigger items like the haunted house and some smaller items that are going to be used like pumpkins, trick-or-treat baskets, and sunglasses as interactable with the characters. I've been UV mapping them as I go, but I still need to go in and add textures to all of them as well as continue making the rest of the environments. To get this done on time, and because I have cut out some of the intractability of the storyline (to focus on character and not putting too much into this project), some of the scenes and props are going to get cut. This should significantly cut down on what I need to make and make the project more manageable. I might also look in so asset libraries to see if there is anything I could retexture and repurpose.

This week I also had a meeting with my advisor and we talked a lot about my focus in storytelling and what that means for the rest of my time here at OSU. After this semester, I really want to focus in and narrow down on portfolio pieces that really showcase who I am as an artist and what I really want to create when I leave academia. I got a book recommendation that I am going to check out the focuses on the art of storytelling as a medium, but apart from that, I am going to spend some time the rest of the semester soul searching to find a project idea that both showcases me as an animator/artist and prepares me for the future. I am going to do my best to keep in mind that whatever I choose is just one project.  An important project, but it isn't the end of the world or end all be all. It's just something I'm interested in and passionate about.

10/20 Updates and Pivots

I've spent the past two weeks looking into and taking notes on the different modeling features in Unreal and how to do some basic procedural modeling with blueprints. While doing this, I've been reflecting a lot on what I want out of this program and what I want to be able to hold up and show people that I have accomplished with my time here. 

I've come to the realization that I have built up getting my masters into a really large thing in my head. When told that I had to do research. I thought that I had to change everything about what I was doing and conform it to some sort of greater life purpose and pick something super academic and theory grounded in order to succeed. I know that I still have to do some sort of research, but I now know that I have trailed far off the path of reality.

I'm still interested in the ways that different elements like character and environment impact story, but I am much more interested in the final piece and creating stories than I am about the nitty-gritty psychology and other stuff that makes that up. After a few different conversations and breakdowns the past couple of weeks, I'm starting to realize that focusing on doing the things I want to do and figuring out how it fits into a more standard definition of research later may be a better path for me. I've been burnt out and trying to create meaning in my work for awhile instead of actually enjoying what I am doing and allowing myself to be creative.

That brings me to what the plan is for the rest of the semester and moving forward after that. I want to create portfolio ready work that I am proud of. I want to make creative short films that tell stories that connect with people and make them happy. At the end of my time here, I want to have a small collection of work that truly encompasses who I am as a storyteller.

For this semester, while I'm still debating on some things, I think I want to finish what I started. However, instead of focusing on exploring more elements of customization, I think the plan is going to be to finish making the short film aspect of my work so that I can have a final film out of this project. I don't want to add more to the project than I can realistically accomplish and my previous plan has bitten off more than I can chew.

I'd also like to take some time exploring and brainstorming some stories and themes that I would like to tell next. I'm finishing this project because it seems silly to leave it as it is when it has so much potential, but I know that my heart isn't really in it anymore and it doesn't totally reflect myself as a creator. So, spending some time each week watching and rewatching the type of content I want to make, brainstorming my own stories, and breaking down exactly what I want for the rest of my education is going to be my goal going forward.

10/06 5-Week Presentations

This week we had our five-week progress presentations. If I could go back and do it again, I would spend a little more time practicing my presentation. It was a common theme among the class where we weren't clear with our intentions for the projects and it led to some confusion in the feedback about what was happening. I logically knew that people who hadn't heard about our work in this class were coming to listen to us talk, but I forgot to take that into account when making my slides. I gave some background to what I was doing but not nearly enough for people outside of our class.

That being said, the feedback I got was pretty consistent with what I've been thinking about and the questions I've been receiving. 

First, they asked me what the plan was for my final thesis if this was my prototype (since I'm already making the system and not just reading about it). I didn't have a good answer in class -- despite knowing the answer to this -- because I blanked a little bit on everything I've ever worked on, but I do have an answer and want to share it here. The ideas for this project are to learn the technical skills to build the system, work out any potential bugs, getting a running idea of which personalization's work and which don't, and have something to practice different testing procedures on to find the best one. This project is meant to be an information gathering tool in multiple aspects. Ideally, I'd like my thesis to be a full length short film (somewhere between 8-15 minutes) incorporating these different elements and telling a story that is more impactful and personal to me than the silly prototype I am building. While I haven't picked it out yet, I'd really like to pick a more substantial theme and tell a story that really reflects myself as a storyteller and the work I want to do in the future.

Another piece of feedback that I think really applies here was actually something that was mentioned to someone else about scope. There are so many different elements at play here that I am building systems for and interested in testing, that it seems unrealistic to do all of them or include them all in my thesis. I need to be really intentional with the personalization's I am picking and which ones make it in to my final thesis work. I'm hoping that by making them and testing them out now that I will have a better idea of what works best for me and my goals and I can pick and choose when thesis project time finally comes.

09/29 Finishing Character and Presentation Prep

This week  I spent most of my time finishing up the character customization features and getting everything in working order. I spent a lot of time fretting and worrying about if I should change my story or themes to better fit other goals -- and then worrying about everything else that would change should I do that. I spent quite a bit of time spiraling about this, but I ended up deciding that at least for the five-week check-in, I would stick to the original plan and make the character assets that go along with the original story.

I made a few different character costumes in Maya and imported the assets into Unreal. I then spent some time updating the blueprints and getting the UI working to accommodate these additions. It was nice going back and redoing the steps I had done previously in testing. I had been worried that I wasn't going to be able to remember how I did certain things and I would have to start from scratch, but I did pretty well with working through it and problem solving.

I've included a short video showing the different outfit options, the available color shifting options, and the facial expressions moving.

There are a few bugs that still happen when I use this system, and things don't work exactly as I envisioned them, but overall I aiming for the goal of 'working' rather than 'perfect'.

I feel a bit like I am circling around some really great ideas, but I haven't really been able to articulate them or narrow them down enough to be proper research areas or questions. I've had a few good conversations this week about what I want to do after graduation, and I've come to the conclusion that I care much more about the culture and atmosphere of the place I am working than I do the specifics of what job I am doing. I care much more about feeling like I am making an impact and that I am valued in my role than I care about if I am a modeler, or a lighter, or some other place in the pipeline. This has made narrowing down my research topic and subsequent projects I am working on really hard, since it is challenging to tie them into future goals.

Ideally, I would want to be working on creating the type of content I enjoy. I want to help make great stories and make people happy and excited to watch the stories I am making. This has led to ideas of universal storytelling that I have been circling around and potential topics within it. I've been focusing on character customization as a first step because I had an idea for a project for it, but it isn't necessarily the thing I am most interested in. I am more interested in its implications to the larger story impact than I am on the topic itself. The same can be said about my ideas on procedural animation to make custom environments and non-consequential choices in narratives. I think the bigger picture is more interesting than the individual parts, but at the same time, the parts make up the whole and are important to consider and learn about in this journey.

I've also been contemplating recently if maybe a job in the film or game industry where I'm not directly being the creator of the work would be good for me. I want to create things and tell stories, but maybe I would be better suited to a job where I can put a little distance between what is being made and myself. I could still make animations and stuff on my own time, but in terms of paying the bills, maybe something different than what I have been imagining in the creative field could be a good fit.

Regardless, I've done a couple of readings on character perception and the different elements that go into it this week, and I also have a meeting planned for Monday to talk some of these things over with my advisor. Presentations are on Wednesday so I should have a better idea of what my next steps are then.

09/22 Character Updates and Readings

This week raised a lot of questions for me in terms of what this project is going to look like going forward.  I've been thinking about this project in terms of things that I want to learn and what I think is the best course of action, but not looking at what is actually happening in the field and the reasoning behind certain choices. I had a meeting with and gained someone for my advisory committee this week, and they brought up a lot of good questions. I brought up how my ideas for this project started from seeing the outrage and confusion that is coming along with a lot of the animated movie remakes that have been hitting the market. I also talked about how I wanted to explore what people really appreciate and connect with in the story and try to make something that can be 'universally' adaptable to peoples desires. That brought on an onslaught of questions to consider:

• Are people upset about aesthetics, perceptions of what (the movies) should look like, etc.?\

• What choices are you going to present and why?

• What do people really care about? What do people really want to see?

• Where in the story do you want to give people a choice? Does the placement of this choice change how the story plays out and how people perceive it?

• What is the point of customization? What does it add to it?

From there we built off of what I have already been doing and talked about ways to instill more meaning than visual appearance into what I have made so far. For character customizations, we talked about making the outfits that the player is able to choose from reflect a deeper intention.

• Costumes could reflect a specific emotion like happy, depressed, reserves, dorky, etc.

  • example: an American flag costume has very implicit intentions

    • have a deeper intention -- go below the surface

  • color tones: brighter colors = happy vs darker colors = sad

  • triangle shaped body vs circle vs square

  • change the size of the eyes or face -- big = innocent

All of these are huge things to consider and any choice I make really impacts how the rest of this project plays out.

For reading this week, I decided to look more into literature around character identification. I read Does Character Similarity Increase Identification and Persuasion? by Jonathan Cohen, Dana Weimann-Saks, and Maya Mazor-Tregerman. Cohen et. al. performed two different studies in order to break down possibilities for what people are connecting with in stories and what part of users identification makes an impact on the connection and understanding of a story.

They started by asking participants to look at and rank the different things they perceive as important to their identity. Their findings were that people rant personality as number 1, their name as number 2, their sex and number 3, and their nationality as number 7. Hair color and eye color were ranked amongst the lowest out of the options given.

It should be noted that one of the biggest takeaways in this study is that similarity is not the same thing as identification. People are able to see themselves on screen both physically and in personality or situations similar to their own, and still not feel connected to a character. In particular, the first study looked at sex and nationality, and the second study in the paper focused on the age and city similarity between the main character and the audience. It should also be noted that this study took place in text based literature and nothing visual.

Despite these findings, the paper does acknowledge the logic I and many others have been following regarding character customization in games and connecting to being able to see yourself on screen. The paper suggests that there is something more to the connection than just visuals, but can't contribute just having similarity to being able to identify with them.

"... identification is a response to the narrative ..." (12)

Some things to look into from the reading:

• Cohen's identification scale

• Green and Brock's transportation scale

• Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) model

Questions:

• inclusion on set color options or pick your own -- color sliders (identification is related to additional control of character rather than appearance?)

• focus more on personality (and maybe name) than physical appearance?

• does not ranking your physical appearance as a major part of your identity mean that you don't identify or connect with those characters when you see them on screen?

I guess all of this has left me a little stumped on where to go. This is the second paper I have read that has pointed me in the direction of visual similarity between characters and players isn't what is being connected to. It seems to me like the things that people are saying are big parts of their identity and what they connect with aren't what is actually happening. In terms of what direction to go next, I had a good conversation with a classmate about how just because some research says that something isn't the case, it is important to work out the nuances of that and see if there is some truth in other contexts I can draw upon. For example, the lack of visuals in this study could mean if people were actually able to see the distinction, they could be stronger?

I wonder then if it is worth using this project as a chance to test only the character customization to try and get some more answers. What if I were to make two versions of this story and test it with two different groups and rate their connection. The first version of the story could be a completely featureless and blank character and the other version would allow the user to customize the character. Testing these two against each other could give interesting results.

I also wonder if the act of interacting with the narrative is what allows identification to occur rather than appearance. When allowing players to choose their characters, not everyone makes a character that looks like themselves. Everyone chooses different options for a variety of reasons, so I wonder if I should focus more on the 'why' of building a particular character and the reasoning behind the choices than the choices themselves. In connection with the readings, this seems like a good place to start.

Regardless, in terms of tangible progress I have made this week, I worked some more on getting the character customization technical side of things working. I changed the UI to switch between a few preset 'natural looking' skin tones since those were challenging to create with the RGB sliders. I also made a singular button to cycle through the material choices. Additionally, after some thought, I added back in the RGB sliders so that the user can have ultimate control over what color their character is. I figured if I am going to go down the 'interaction' based research rather than the 'similarity' based research that the user having more control and creativity is going to be important I also plan on looking at which of the systems people use most often and like using the most.

I also figured out how to animate the face on the character. This took a lot of trial and error and working through a few different options, but I think I have a system in place that is going to work really well. I manually drew out all of the facial expressions I think I'm going to need (I can add more later if this is not the case) and added them to a duplicate of the face plane placed right in front of the original characters head. Since the rest of the material is transparent, it looks like the face is actually on the characters head. I tried using decals for a bit, but those had some weird issues with tiling and scaling that I couldn't fix, so I'm happy with the method I used and result I got. Now that I've done it, I'm second guessing the purple color I chose, but that can be easily changes later so I'm not going to worry about it right now.

I also took some time to write out a bunch of questions surrounding my work and think through some different trains of thought. I've included those brainstorming sheets below as well.

09/15 Mechanic Trial and Error

The first thing I did this week was go back into my Unreal project file and see if I could debug one of the issues I was having. In trying to set up the clothes customization mechanic, I ran into a problem where the input would put on a piece of clothing, but wouldn't switch through the different options. After reviewing my node structure, watching a tutorial, and some trial and error, I determined that what I had originally thought was the issue was not actually the problem. I was missing a particular node that allowed the array to access the index of different clothing options. After adding that in, the system worked! :) (I circled this node in red).

I then started on a UI system to be able to control the clothing changes without having to use a game character and navigating with WASD. Here is where I ran into a lot of problems that pretty much put a halt to everything I was planning on working on this week. Apparently, connecting a button to an already existing system isn't as easy as I thought. I went through several different tutorials and tried implementing their suggestions, but all of them were for making a button connected to the playable character, not a separate blueprint. None of their ideas or nodes really matched up with what I was trying to do as I don't know enough about the software right now to make the specific adjustments I needed.

After a week of trial and error, I decided to ask the Unreal forum pages for help. They have been relatively quick at replying in the past so I'm hoping they will be able to help me. If that doesn't work, I took a class with someone last semester that knew a bit more about Unreal, so I will try and track them down for some help if it doesn't work out.

Overall I'm really frustrated with the amount of progress I've made this week and the problems I've run into. Monday started out so hopeful but as I got further this week I grew really discouraged. Failure is a apart of learning, but I guess it hurts a little more when it's something I really care about getting right and being able to do. I'm not giving up, but this means I really need to rethink what my plan for this semester is going to be to accommodate these struggles that are most likely going to be there for the whole process. 

(the above was written after a breakdown on Friday, and I'm feeling better about the project now... I think I just needed to let it out a bit)

Asking the forums for help ended up working out. After going back and forth a bit, I was able to figure out my issues and make a button system that works :). I worked on refining the system a little bit and added in a second system for the pants part of the costume to practice waht I learned.

I went on to work on some other parts of the project. The next thing I tackled was making a camera setup that focused on the character selection rather than the thirdperson character since that isn't going to be apart of my final mechanics. After some research and trial and error, I was able to add it. I had originally wanted a couple of different camera and to move through different angles of the character with a button, but the levelblueprint in unreal is more finicky than regular blueprints. I realized that it would be easier to just rotate the character than the cameras.

I also started to work on getting the skin color of the character changeable. I found a few different ways of doing this and after testing them out, I decided that for now a slider system is going to be the best bet. Originally, I wanted to focus on purely real skin tones, but doing so would require me to make a new materials for every single skin tone and switch between them as opposed to changing an existing material. While I would still like this, with the way I was inteding to make the face animations, it is important for the material itself not to change color, only the color node within the material. I'm still researching this and looking at alternative methods, but the current system technically works so I'm going to focus on building other things first and come back to it if I have time.

The next big questions I have on the horizon or making a final decision on if the story I outlined last week is truly the story I want to go with. Changing that would result in the changing of animation data, assets that I need to make, and how customizations work, so it's a big thing to consider. I'm meeting with my mentors and trying to schedule meetings with potential advisors this week as well, so I'm hoping that they can all give me a either confirmation of my ideas or a little bit of redirection if I need it.

Overall, I need to do a better job of deciding when a problem isn't worth solving and it's better to just work around it. I have a tendency to want to do everything and it's just unreasonable to be able to do so. This week really worked as a check in for how this project is going and how what mindset I need to be in for the rest of it.

09/08 Storyboarding and Mechanic Testing

The goal for this week was to get started on all three parts of my animation (character, mechanics, and story) and dip my toes into the beginnings of this project.

To begin this week, I decided to start with the modeling of my character so that I could start looking into the mechanics of character customization. With the way the node structure system works in Unreal, there are some parts of the process I wouldn't be able to build or test unless I had assets to use as reference points for the software. For the purposes of building and testing out mechanics, I made the base model for my character, and then made a couple of variations of simple clothing. This included two shirt (one long sleeve and one short sleeve), 2 pairs of pants (shorts and long pants), and two shoes. These are not intended to be the final assets in the design, but they are building blocks for me to build other clothing assets and will probably still be incorporated in some way.

As for the character design itself, I decided that I would do minimal sculpting and physical features on the model itself. This included not having hands/fingers, and leaving the face mostly blank. For facial features, I hoping to be able to use interchanging materials or blend shapes to make facial expressions rather than having to animate a full 3D face. Based on the style reference photos I shared last week, I think this will also contribute to a more cartoonish and simple look to my digital world. It also simplifies a lot of the animation process and scales down my project into something a little more manageable for a single semester.

As a side note, I was also able to fix a problem in modeling that I have been having for years. Sometimes when you bridge faces in order to connect different meshes together, the smoothing and visibility of the faces will have problems, resulting in obvious and sharp topology. I ended up finding the button that fixes the visibility issue in Maya. When I imported the assets in Unreal, the shading remained fixed so I'm counting it as a win!

Another thing I did this week was start to test building the character customization feature. I imported my rigged (by Mixamo) character and clothing assets into Unreal and started blueprinting. I was following a YouTube video to help me with this part. The system works by using arrays that are connected to the different assets I built. When the blueprint is triggered, it increases the number in the array. Each asset is connected to a different number, which is then connected to the array. So, when the array number increases, the clothing item is switch out. 

As of right now, it is not a fully operational system. There are a few different glitches happening that I need to address.

The first I think I have already thought about the solution to. I am able to get the character to put on clothes, but I am unable to get the character to switch out clothes. There are also a few more nodes for things like setting the array back to zero when it reaches its end. It does this by determining when numbers are greater than or less than the amount of items set in the array. I think I may have accidentally forgotten to set the number of items in the array and that is why it is having issues. I plan on testing out my theory early in the week when I get back to the lab.

A second issue I'm having is a little more complicated. I've set the customization to happen on an independent character blueprint separate from the playable character when you press play. I originally did this because I wanted to be able to apply animation data to the static model and treat it like puppet. I don't intend to allow the user to walk around on their own like they would in a game, so I didn't want anything attached to the third-person default character. By doing this however, I don't currently have a way of testing out or viewing what is happening without entering 'play' mode. I'm also wasn't able to get the system to register my keyboard clicks as the imput for changing clothes, which I think is an issue with the third-person character system since an 'enter-trigger box' system of input did work. All that being said, I'm hoping that connecting the customization options up to a widget UI system will eliminate the need for the third person character and will allow input other than trigger boxes.

This week I also worked on fleshing out my stroy a bit more. I drew out some basic storyboards (see below) of a general outline I want for the story. After reflecting on the types of stories I enjoy watching, I found a few consistent themes. These things were not present in every animation on my list, but across enough of them for the similarities to have weight.

1.  A story centered around friendship or family.

2. Silly, lighthearted

3. Heartwarming

With those basic characteristics in mind, I drew out a story of a trick-or-treater on Halloween coming across a sad ghost in a graveyard. The kid leads to ghost through a series of Halloween traditions and explores what the holiday has to offer. In the end, as the sun begins to rise, the ghost and child part ways in a bittersweet departure. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the general idea.

I'm hoping that by keeping the focus on the customizable character and one other character, that it will easier to measure how well or unwell users felt transported into the story and character and if they felt connected to the character they are physically representing.

There are also a few readings I did this week for another class that centered around emotions and how they are tested and measured. 

• Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (2000). Measuring emotion: Behavior, feeling and physiology. In R. Lane & L. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

• Nielsen, L., & Kaszniak, A. W. (2007). Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Issues in Inferring Subjective Emotion Experience. In Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (pp. 361–375). essay. 

While the use of biometrics, heartrate, and brain scans are a bit out of range of what I'm wanting for my project, they did give a lot of good insights on different scales of measurements for self reporting emotions. For example, both readings talked about the idea of a dimensional approach where emotions exist on a sort of graph. This graph measures the relationship between valence (positive or negative) and arousal (how intense or present the emotion was). In addition to this, they also talked about a categorical system to help pinpoint more unique properties of specific emotions (fear, joy, sadness, etc.). I'm thinking that a combination of these approaches is approapriate to get a full understanding of what people are feeling when they watch my films.

These papers also talk about how it is important to consider what is conscious emotion and what is raw emotion. When reporting how they are feeling, are people looking back and analyzing those emotions or are they reporting how they felt in the moment? How does giving conscious thought to what you are feeling change what the results are? Is there a time limit on measuring results?

Something they mention that I need to look more into is the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Apparently, this is a series of standardized images used in research studies about emotions that are used as a baseline to understanding what people are feeling. The results from these images can be and are compared to individual research studies to better understand results. Reading about this was super interesting and I think it could have a lot of implications for what the design of my film this semester and in future projects looks like. I'd like to take a look at the images themselves and not just the general results of the tests before making any changes in my animation, but I loved learning about this.

As for next steps, for the upcoming week I am going to focus on fixing the bugs with my mechanic system and start to build real clothing assets to use in my animation. If time allows, I will also test out the facial animation I was planning on using and see if it could actually work or any changes I need to make. 

09/01 The Start

This is my journal! 😀

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to get out of this semester and this project in general. I'm hoping to use this time to test out some ideas that have been in my head for awhile and make a mini prototype of what I am envisioning for my thesis. I'm hopeful that I can work out the bugs, learn the mechanics, and figure out where my interests truly lie while creating this project.

My initial idea is to create a short film (about 30 seconds) in Unreal that integrates different game mechanics to test of audience connection to the story, emotional enhancement, and a better absorption of narrative themes. I'm also hopeful that these tests will allow for more inclusion in diverse and minority communities and an overall more universal experience in film.

I want to start to explore this my looking at character/avatar customizations, how they can be integrated into film, and what the impacts of doings so are. I've decided to do this for a variety of reasons. There have been a lot of talks in the media recently around representation in films and a call for more minority representation. At the same time, there has also been a lot of backlash for Disney creating live action remakes of movies and changing the characters within them. The biggest example I can think of is with the creation of the live action movie The Little Mermaid. I have a low of conflicting thoughts on the situation, but it got me thinking a lot about what I means to see yourself in a movie and what factors allow people to relate to characters and the stories that are being told. Given this and my interests in personalized animation and emotionally enhanced narratives, I figured avatar integration into films was a good place to start.

The goal for this week (and possibly part of next week) is to start to create and brainstorm the story and figure out the logistics of what this process is going to look like.

I've been brainstorming a bit and thinking about what kind of story I want to tell, what kind of stories I enjoy, and what kind of story is going to fit into my research inquiries. I've known for awhile that I really love and want to work on stories that make people happy. I want someone watching my films to be the highlight of someone's day and I want them to look at the work I've made and smile. While I also enjoy watching things with heavier and darker themes, I tend to grow very attached to the work I'm making and I fear that -- like in the past -- I won't be able to deal with super heavy topics. So my goal here is to create a story that is light, has a happy ending (?), and includes the ability for the viewer to change what the character looks like to their preferences.

After thinking it over, one idea I had for the story was for it to be about a kid on Halloween who meets a ghost in a graveyard. The animation would follow the story of their friendship and play out in sort of a montage of watching them do different things together until the night ends and the ghost has to return until the next Halloween.

In terms of customizations, I intend to have some basic things like skin color and maybe a feminine versus masculine body type, but with the idea of Halloween, it will also be really easy to integrate different costumes and outfits for people to choose from. It's simple and yet opens up a large range for me to be able to improve my modeling skills and create a variety of character assets.

There are a few different questions I need to research on the technical side of things in order to make this a reality though. 

• Can I control variables of assets without making a new asset? For example, if I wanted to change the color of a shirt someone is wearing, would I have to make completely different shirt assets to switch out their appearance, or could I make some sort of parameter that would only change the material and not the asset itself?

  • The answer is probably yes, but I'm unaware of how to do so at this moment.

• How do I go about adding the animation data to the character? Can I use existing data or do I need to make my own?

  • I know a friend who has worked with this a bit before, so I plan on scheduling a zoom call to work through it with them closer to the time of adding animation data and movement.

• What is the UI system going to look like for getting to control the characters appearance?

  • As of typing this, I still need to figure that out.

• What costumes do I want to include in the customization?

• Is this storyline a good enough starting place for my research? Or should it be something more complex or different to get a better result on impact? 

• Does having the character wear a costume take away from an audiences connection to what they are seeing on screen since it is not a direct reflection of themselves anymore?

This week I read one research paper that contained three different studies that related to my work. It was called To Walk a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes: How Narratives Can Change Causal Attribution Through Story Exploration and Character Customization by Nathan Walter, Sheila T. Murphy, and Traci K Gillig. For the purposes of this week, I mainly focused on the third study in this paper. Here, the researchers focused on the integration of customization of character appearance into a set story meant to improve awareness and empathy for people surrounding Islamophobia.

In short, the findings of this paper surprised me and differed a bit from what I had originally assumed and read in other journals. In their tests, they found that interactivity with the story -- even if it was of no consequence to the story -- did help increase audience engagement. However, they also noted differences between narrative engagement and identification. They linked the ideas of narrative engagement to interactivity in the narrative (choices) while they linked identification to mainly coming from customization (characters).

In the end, they found "when combined with exploration, customization tended to increase involvement with the narrative, whereas when customization did not proceed exploration, the interactive experience was counterproductive"(Walter et al., 2017). Meaning, just customization of the main character on its own probably isn't going to be enough to achieve what I want in my project. They did mention a few different reasons why they think the results of this are what they are, and I am going to take them into account moving forward, but this does have me rethinking some of my ideas for this project.

They mention that open possible reason for this is because just customizing the character without any other form of interactivity feels too disconnected with the narrative. It also implies that there could be more things going on leading to the users being bored or focused on the wrong things. In this study specifically, it also implies that it highlighted the physical differences between the user and the narratives of the people they were trying to advocate for (Walter et al., 2017). 

Walter, N., T. Murphy, S., & Gillig, T. K. (2017). To walk a mile in someone else’s shoes: How narratives can change causal attribution through story exploration and character customization. Human Communication Research, 44(1), 31–57. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcre.12112 

That's just to summarize things, and they go more in depth into it, but that's the gist. It makes me wonder how I want to approach this going forward. I wanted to stray away from a branching narrative because I'm not overly interested in those, and I wanted to stay away -- at least in this project -- from making some sort of game because my end focus in research is films. So where does that leave me?

I think next steps are going to be to look into potentially using a camera to change what the character looks like on screen. My theory is that this will take away some of the implications that having a customization menu might imply. I'm not sure how to do this -- especially if I still want to build this in Unreal -- but I am going to ask around and see what I can find out. If that doesn't work, I think that figuring out ways to incorporate options for the character without them interrupting the story would be the next. I'm imagining that that would look like indirect questions in the beginning that lead to different results on screen or just inconsequential choices (i.e. what flavor of ice-cream the characters eat). I need to read more studies to expand this knowledge and fully understand the results of this research and see if this is a one off instance or not, but this is where I currently stand with my thoughts.