Unit 9 was a very short unit. We were tasked with learning how to use Unreal Engine to create an interactive game or movie trailer. I chose the film "Spirited Away" by the Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli. I chose this film because it has always been one of my go-to comfort films and when deciding what film I wanted to recreate, I thought about what film I would like to step into. I initially I had decided I would want to create a Charlie Laufman-directed film because I loved how Kaufmann told stories. His films are never in a linear or chronological order and they always tell complex stories about interpersonal relationships. But the very reason i love his films is the reason they would have been impossible to recreate for this brief.
The interactive trailer had to be fairly self-explanatory and require little to no prior knowledge about the movie. Spirited away seemed like the better choice because my idea for it was to simply design the interior of the train and have the player explore the space, as if they were actually on the train to Swamp Bottom with Chihiro.
One thing that heavily discouraged me on this project was the fact that the Virtual Reality headsets would not work on the University computers and Unreal Engine would not work on my Laptop. So despite my grand ideas for a calming VR experience on the Spirited Away train, I'm a bit sod not work out the way I'd have liked it to.
Unreal Engine was difficult to get my head around at first. It had very slight differences from Blender but it had a lot of them. Surprisingly the most daunting task I first faced with Unreal was getting my head around navigation of the viewport
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