My favorite time of the year is finally here and I could not wait to make a Holiday special! The newest video “Oh Christmas Tree!” is a step further in the right direction – focused learning, additional characters, props and sets, and even some more camera angles.
Of course we had to make some printable activities to go along with this video!
Decorating Mitzy’s shop for the Holidays was the best part – All assets are from Adobe Stock or the Epic Marketplace – This was the Christmas Decor marketplace asset I purchased and it had the coolest Christmas Tree blueprint which allowed full control of the tree size, ornament positioning and other customizable features. It also included some particle snow that was perfect.
It took me one full day to decorate Mitzy’s shop and build the second set. Most of the time was spent finding the right assets and importing them into Unreal. It took me another day to do the entire video, which included recording both Mitzy and Daisy’s performance, adding camera angles, character/prop placement, rendering, cutting together and adding some audio/sfx.
The next exciting part was introducing Daisy, my new character. Daisy is supposed to represent all of the scientific and mathematical wonders found in nature. Due to COVID restrictions and the lack of the right gear, the process for voicing and animating Daisy was a bit more difficult. One of my friends in San Diego recorded the lines on her iPhone, then I would act the lines back out and record my facial performance onto Daisy so there would be animation that is sync’d to the audio. My friend in San Diego does not have an iPhone with the FaceAR capabilities, nor a machine powerful enough to run Unreal and record. Using some camera angles and trying to record some idle reactions for Mitzy allowed me to fake the back and forth conversation scenes.
Mitzy’s world is quickly growing and this video got me so excited for what is to come. I am shifting gears to finishing the book, for a release in early 2021.
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