Overview of the filmmaking process

- [Narrator] Filmmaking as you may or may not know is typically split in three stages, whether you're making a film being released by a big studio, or in our case a film in a virtual world. And these three stages are called pre-production, production, and post-production. Let me introduce you to all three, and if you ever consider making any kind of media delivery project, this knowledge can help you. The first stage is pre-production. This is where you prep all your story elements, define what the visuals are going to look like. You also need to design concepts for all scenes and characters, and in many cases draw storyboards so everyone involved have a good idea of what is the direction of each scene in your project. This is the stage where the look of your project or film will be defined. The more time you spend defining all aspects of your projects in pre-production, the better the final product will be. In VR, we need to consider a few elements while we storyboard or write our story. What will be the interactive elements where the audience will be engaged? This is a very important aspect of VR filmmaking, considering how your audience will interact with the story. The next stage is production, where your scenes will be created, and in 3D nonetheless. Based on your designs and concepts in pre-production, your team or yourself will create all 3D models and textures for all the characters, scenes, and props for your movie. This stage for a VR film is very similar to production of a game. However, the main difference is the level of interactivity and movie scenes, in between the two that will be different. Then you will work on the scripts that will allow the interactivity for a specific point in your story. Once you have all the elements, you'll start seeing your vision realize, yet, without being the final product. In the end, the goal is to have all your elements into a scene and be able to see your scene with your interactions and experience them for the first time in sequence, sort of a mock-up of the finalized film so you can make iterations or changes before you do the beauty pass. And finally, post-production is where the final product is finished. Once we have settled on a specific scene and we've got our interactions scripted, we can start polishing all the aspect of the scene. The final textures of the models will be completed, the lighting will be finalized, and all the effects of the scene to provide some type of mood. Once the scene is ready, we send it for rendering, which is where you'll see the final product in all its beauty. Needless to say this is a good place to test the film further by having it screened by a group of selected people to make sure the final product will hit all the notes you had in your mind when you first started this project. So as you get started with your project, follow this structure closely, and it should provide a roadmap for you to follow.