Week 7 of team Mapo’s journey on Signal was a big variety of tasks to handle. First of all, we kept going with the animation of the old man. We continued blocking out his most important poses and started animating the first signs in ASL (American sign language), that the old man will be using to communicate with the viewer.
The animated signs work quite well, they look interesting and his hands are easily recognizable.
Animated Signs in ASL
However, we came to a point where we want to include some signs in the dialogue that are too complex for us to just translate online. The internet is full of easy English to ASL translations, but when it comes to translating a longer sentence or some more advances ways of saying things the online data base reaches its limits. That’s why we started to reach out to YouTube / instagram / social media channels that use or teach ASL. We gave them a brief introduction to the project and asked them for their help to translate and collaborate with us.
We also got in touch with a music composer, who really likes the project and confirmed he is on board. He will now work on drafts and will send us first ideas very soon.
Besides that, we started a rough animatic for the introduction and the in-between shots of our whole VR story to see how the transitions could work and how much time we have to calculate for each of those sequences.
Still of the introduction seuquence in the Animatic
And of course, we kept working in Unity. We tried new solutions for the game teaching the viewer signs and tested them with the headset.
Possible new idea for the in-game teaching
Last but not least we started to write a first draft of a script for the final delivery video. Together with our mentor Rafi we brain stormed and began to form a three part structre for our pitch video.
Ideas for the final pitch video