During the second week, the team had a few meetings with the faculties and came up with two pitches of the story. Due to the lack of background setting in the original pre-package, we would like to add more characteristics to the protagonist in the story and fasten the story pace.
The first pitch tells the story of a naive weak witch trying to borrow power from the magic ink. She tries the ink for a few times and the runes she draws finally lose control. She tries very hard to get everything back in order and then realizes her hidden magic power. This story takes references from Onward and we design it because we want our character to have some change throughout the animation. The second story happens in a future world, where the main character is a scientist doing research on the magic rune book she found and recording everything happening using the lab monitors. After discussion with faculties, we decided to use the first path because the second path goes too far away from the pre-package and it is hard to tell such a complex story in 3 minutes. While at the same time the team still needs time to concise the first story in the coming week and starts working on concept art and 3d blockout for the animation.
On the other hand, the programmers have a meeting with the tech team in ETC to discuss possible technologies the team could use to make the hand animation in the film. The team finally locks down the choices to leap motion and oculus quest. Both devices support hand tracking and we want to try them and check whether these equipment can fulfill our needs.
The team also decided to use Unreal Engine 4 as the main production tools because it has support for hand tracking devices and real time rendering so the team can save time on iterations. Before the week ends, the team connected the leap motion to the UE4 engine and did some simple tests on its performance. The result is surprisingly good. The tracked hand has some jittering when the lighting is dim but for most of the time it reflects real hand movement in time and accurately. For the next week, the tech team will spend more time researching and testing. We can export animation data from leap motion, modify details, and finally incorporate it into the film in the engine.
