Production Sound & Video

Fall 2016

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29 To excel in the fickle gaming community, game engine developers know that they must harness every bit of a device's hardware capabilities in order to give the player the best graphics experience possible. To maxi- mize profits, they also need their games to function in a cross-platform environment. Knowing that the graphics I need to build for playback work essentially the same way as a game, it made sense to me to move my development work into a game engine and the one I ultimately chose was Unity 3D. It allows me to be able Above: Vincent Parker Left: Photo of a screen in the passenger spacesuit. Below: Photo of a caf- eteria set food dispenser with touchscreen tablet in a glass panel controlling the 4K monitor behind it. Opposite page: Photo still of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers. to display interactive graphics that can be deployed cross-platform and controlled either remotely or by the player/actor in the scene. While I've gotten a few funny looks on set for triggering playback with what looks like an Xbox gaming controller, at the end of the day, the only difference between gaming and this kind of playback is that my software does not keep score … at least not yet! When Rick Whitfield at Warner Bros. Production Sound and Video Services approached me to do the Sony Pictures movie Passengers, we both felt that it would be the right fit for what I had begun to develop in Unity. The sheer number of embedded mobile devices that required special interactivity with touch as well as remote triggering necessitated a toolset that would allow us the speed and flexibility to manage and customize the graphic content quickly. Early in pre-production, Chris Kieffer and his playback graphics team at Warner Bros., worked with me on developing a workflow for creating modular graphic elements that could be colorized and animated in real time on the device as well as giving us a library of content from which we could generate new screens as needed. Along with this, we were able to work closely with Guy Dyas and his Art Department on con- ceptualizing how the ship's computer would function, which allowed us to marry the graphics to the functions in a way that made sense. This integration with the Art Department's vision was further enabled by their provid- ing static design elements to us so that we could create a cohesive overall aesthetic. As part of the futuristic set, there were tablets embed- ded in the walls throughout the corridors. Everything from door panels to elevator buttons and each room's

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