Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/756621
32 Right, photo of our crew: (From left to right) Sal Palacios, Chris Kieffer, Vincent Parker, Rick Whitfield. Above: Pratt & Lawrence Passengers photos courtesy of Columbia Pictures. had to run the devices solely on battery power. This required me to build into the software a way to display, without interrupting the running program, the bat- tery's charge level as well as Bluetooth connectivity status so that we could choose the best time to swap out devices so as not to slow down production. One of the bonuses to working in most 3D game engine environments is having the tools to write cus- tom shaders to colorize or distort the final render out- put. This gives the ability to interactively change color temperature to match the shot's lighting as well as adding glitch distortion effects in real time without needing to pre-render or even interrupt the running animation. Many of our larger sets like the bridge, reactor room and steward's desk needed to have all the devices and computer displays triggered in sync. Some scenes called for the room to power down, then boot back up, as well as switch to a damaged glitch mode based on the actions within the scene. Although I had been developing a network playback prototype, due to the production's time constraints, we ultimately ended up having to trigger the computer displays and mobile devices on separate network groups. Though I've since worked out the kinks in cross- platform network control, this served as a reminder that when working with new and untested technology, things can and will fail you. Especially when you're using development tools that weren't designed to function as an on-set playback tool. However, the growth of technol-