It's ALIVE | Scene 13 - Episode 1

The purspose of scene 13 is that Tim and Yuki finally get the Nuvitta Network back on after months of hard technical problem solving. This scene is pivitol to the entire story because this is their moment that sparks everything else into action for the entire rest of the episodes. If the network signal didn't work at this time they would have never gone on their future adventures.
The inspirations behind this scene was to see if Amber and I could act out all the characters individually then blend the performances back together to feel as if four characters were actually interacting at once.
The visual of this scene was inspired by the reference photos from the script book. We wanted to get the moody lighting vibe with the large server racks behind them.
We actually added a few lines in this scene that wasn't in the original screenplay just to add some more spice. Which line you think was added? Let us know in the comments.

Tim & Yuki know this could be a huge communication signal to help find more survivors but Ji isn't interested in any new changes.
This scene develops the relationship between all four characters to show that Yuki & Tim are more connected and see Ji as a grump. Oli meanwhile is keeping everyone on task as the un-official bunker mom.
The character choices that were improvised during production was at the end where Yuki & Tim high five each other. We added that while shooting to show their excitement and connection... but also secretly to see if we could animate the two character interacting inside of our 3D softwares. What do you all think of that frickin' hand clap!?

The technical aspects of staging this scene was tricky from a production perspective because there's only two of us at our home studio, but we need to perform all four characters... It was fun to learn how all the separate performances needed to be captured for everything to line up properly. It was a challenging problem to try to solve.
The challenges we faced with this project was lighting the scene properly. I don't think we captured the exact vibe we were going for but it still works. There's still a mountain of things to learn about 3D lighting characters. The journey continues.
The main tools and software we used for this scene was Rokoko for the body motion capture, MetaHuman Animator for the face mocap, and Unreal Engine for putting the full scene together.

The setting of the world is in 2123, two years after a zombie pandemic, and our characters are trying to find literally anyone they can talk to. Anyone!
This scene is really the catalyst for the entire rest of the season and was an epic challenge to bring to life from the page to the screen.

A specific AI technique we used for this scene was changing all the actors voices. Amber and I acted out all the characters then we used Eleven Labs to transform into the actual actor voices.
We got the look and layout of the server room from our script book photos that were generated with MidJourney & Stable Diffusion. This made set design so much easier and faster!
We usually use an AI overpass as the final look of our scenes. But this is one of the only scenes we didn't add the AI overpass layer at the end. The picture is straight out of Unreal Engine. Can you notice any difference, if so let us know?

In the next scenes we want to figure out a way for the ai voices to carry more emotion when they are transformed into the characters.
Things we want to create more in the future are more character talking scenes. We usually do action scenes from the script for the trailers and promos, but it will be fun to do more slow, character-driven, scenes in the near future. Stay tuned!