Pagan Full Moon Ritual – Final Project – Anna Leach

For my final project, I decided to record a Pagan ritual. The ceremony which fit best with the timing of this assignment was December's full moon ritual, as put on by SPIRAL, the Pagan group on campus. After clearing the idea with SPIRAL, I recorded the entire ritual from the center of the circle. The circular formation allowed for a unique perspective on an already taboo and often misinterpreted set of faith traditions. To develop a greater sense of story, I split the ritual up into its different components in...

Samsung Gear360 Manager – Independent Learning

For my final project, I decided to film using the Samsung Gear360 camera. One of the "perks" of using this device is certain Samsung cell phones can download the Samsung Gear360 Manager app, which acts as a sort of virtual remote for the camera. Configuration The camera connects to Manager via its own Bluetooth signal. Once the app is launched, the user is prompted to pair it with any Gear360 camera whose signal is on and within range (which through trial and error, I discovered was fairly strong up even at...

Assignment #5 – Unity Scene

The concept for my scene was taken from Maurice Sendak's "While The Wild Things Are," when Sendak describes the way Max envisions his room not as a room but as a forest with magical beasts. My Unity scene represents a transitional moment, when bits of "reality"  (i.e. the bed and the desk) in his world are colliding with the world of his imagination. Because I'd never used Unity before, a lot of this assignment was about me learning some of the more basic tools/the UI of the software and adjusting my...

Assignment #2: 360 Video Pitch

This 360 would explore the "behind the scenes" of the popular Syracuse restaurant Pastabilities. The ultimate product would walk the viewer through different parts of "back end" life of working at this restaurant, following the journey of a server who works at the restaurant. The piece would begin with the view from the service entrance and then travel to the kitchen and then out onto the main floor (near tables) and then at the end of the night, end up back outside. While the opening scenes in the beginning and end...

Anna Leach – Assignment 1: My VR Experience

Coming into lab on Wednesday, like others in the class, I had no hands-on VR experience. " Moving from device to device, the reality of the medium's "wild west" nature became so much more clear to me; even with some sizeable similarities, there was a lot of variation in the apps/programs, the physical and digital design, the use of the senses, the target market(s) etc., too. All of those things affected how the stories were executed and then how they were felt. The first device I used was the HoloLens. In...