Storytelling

For this assignment, I wanted to have a narrator that talks to kids about art history as if he's telling the a story. The kids would sit around and listen to the narrator talk about the history of art and how it has evolved over time. The narrator would be talking off-screen, but the kids would be on-screen in a half circle to see all their faces. For audio, I would use an AI generated voice for the narrator and I planned on voicing all the kids by manipulating my natural voice for each one. In order to make it more interesting and not just a blank screen with kids talking, I wanted to do something with the background that was interesting but also not just a few pictures of what is being talked about at that time. That's when I landed on doing realistic flyovers of cities that were pivotal to the history of art. This adds dimension to the video as well as gives the viewer something to look at while the narration or dialogue is happening on screen.

To make the flyovers possible I had to utilize my knowledge in Unreal Engine. I used a standard blank game template and the true magic came from the Cesium Ion plug-in. This plug-in is an API where it connects to Google Maps and generates realistic depictions of the world. You're able to travel anywhere and everywhere as if you're doing a virtual tour of the city or landmark you input. All you have to do is input the coordinates of where you want to go and the plug-in will generate the real-time view of the city. You can also adjust the Sun Sky which plays with timezones so you can adjust the time of day. For example, if you are going to Rome they are 7 hours ahead of us so it will be dark over there if it is 3pm here. You can adjust the Sun Sky to a different timezone and mimic what Rome would look like when it is 1pm local time. Adding this feature really enhanced my video and was a cool way to show the viewer what they city looked like while also hearing the history that was made there.

I ran into a major problem when doing the project, and that was the file got corrupted when uploading it to dropbox to finish at home and I lost the file. The work I had done on the video was gone and it was truly a bummer because I had big plans for it. I took screenshots of the flyovers and rendered some small clips of them which are attached below, but the master video is lost in a void. The characters I also used for this assignment as shown below as well to give a sense of what they would've looked like. In terms of content and information I would include in the video I was going to touch on quite a few topics we discussed in the lecture. The topics I planned on including are below as well. 

Although I didn't get to see the full video come to fruition, I was happy with my idea and outline for the project. I feel like I had a solid idea for what I wanted and I'm content with that.

Deliverables:

Flyovers: 

Characters:

Topics to Include:

• Alberti's Treastises
• Impressionists
• Picasso
• Cubism
• Industrial Revolution
• Surrealists
• Duchamp
• Jackson Pollock
• Dada
• Fluxists
• Post Impressionists
• Black Square
• Nam June Paik
• Bill Viola
• Fauvism
• Abstract Expressionism
• Photography
• Realism
• Etienne Jules Murray
• Muybridge- Zoopraxiscope
• Other artists who contributed to art evolution