-: My name is Steven Williams
and chair of the Theater program at
the University of Nebraska Omaha.
I'm also the head of design and production.
-: Hi, I'm Jason Jamerson.
I'm an assistant professor of Scenic Design at UNO.
-: So the Theater program at UNO
is centered around practice.
Everything that is learned in the classroom is put
into practice during our rehearsals an live productions.
So entering the unknowns of the pandemic,
the end of our '19-2020 academic year came with a
cancellation of five of our live performances,
live productions.
Our program was faced with a very difficult challenge,
that extended beyond trying to figure out how do you teach
acting online but, with the fundamental questions of how do
we communicate or continue, sorry, to provide active
learning opportunities for our students, while continuing to
engage with our community through storytelling.
So our first production was very much a reaction
to the times.
We wanted to use this time to plot
to provide a platform for our voices to be heard.
So we offered, in extending this opportunity
to our students and offered them the opportunity to
produce their own original work.
They created the QWIT festival or
Queer and Women Inclusive Theater festival.
-: Uh, what we teach is communication and presentation.
Everything that we do is defined by the limitations.
So instead of starting with a blank page
every time we have a new project in the theater
we have limitations like the script, the size
of the stage and the presence of the audience.
When the pandemic hit, it didn't just make us step back from
what we normally do.
It also totally redefined our limitations
which cracked open a lot of new paths for us to explore.
So normally we would have an audience
in the space and the space that the audience takes up,
we work around that, we think about the sight lines from the
audience to the performers and the amount of light
that a real person needs to see in a space.
And right away, we knew that we had to change everything
if we were going to present productions online.
So with QWIT, we kept our original set that we had designed
for it, but we replaced the audience with cameras.
And so we consider this a reactive fix to, to just get
just to get our production
on the internet so everyone could see it.
These are a few pictures from the qwit festival.
And overall, it was very successful.
We were able to make changes on the fly to film it
in a successful way and present it on YouTube.
And it was seen by hundreds of people, Steven
I don't know if you know the exact number, I can't remember
-: Just shy of a thousand right now.
-: Yeah, that's great.
So here you can see our theater space
and some of the changes of the paradigm
of how we worked that were made on the fly to get this done.
And that was our first project in this, in this series.
Steven.
-: One great thing about this is it gave us the opportunity
to extend some new learning capabilities for our students
because we don't deal a lot with film in our
theater programs.
So we put students behind the cameras
we assign students as directors of photography
and each of the different nights that students
would have the opportunity to dive
into this idea of how does the director of photography work?
How can I use the skills as a performer and as a director
because we're very much under the liberal arts ethos.
So is there, it was a great introduction
to those different skillsets
that we continue to learn throughout the season.
So our second production was the musical song
for A New World.
Now we knew we wanted to approach this in a different manner
because we knew we'd be, we'd be charging for ticket prices.
So we really wanted to up the game
even more in terms of production values.
So this musical was a partnership with the school of music
the school of communications broadcasting department.
We invited broadcasting class to come over and work in our
production in a live event so that we had four different
cameras, five different cameras, sorry, set up.
And we also brought in professional broadcaster
and director of photography, Michael McCalsky.
In return, the final video of our live performance was
then streamed around the country.
-: So for our second production,
we designed it to be socially distanced
because there was going to be a lot of singing involved.
We specifically created the set design, let me move it here
and had here to have every performer be at least
12 feet apart and all of the performers to be at least
12 feet from the cameras and all of the individual
crew members.
So we were lucky that we have such a
large space to work with.
And so instead of thinking about the sight lines from the
audience to the performers, we were using this wholly new
metric to distance things.
And it was another arbitrary limitation that really
inspired a lot of creativity by giving the performers
these islands of stairs that they were able to perform
from, oops too far,
that went along with the nature of the
show as well, because it's a series of vignettes where each
performer sort of has their own story happening
in the larger world that we created.
And so
here we were actively trying
to let the limitations
inspire us to do something new
and it worked out really well.
Okay, Steven.
-: Yeah. So after at the completion, as long
as for new world is, is a really good success for us.
Jason and I had started work on some other things, many
many of our professionals, since we were out of work
we were out of our own freelance work.
Jason and I are both freelance designers.
So we utilized a lot of our time learning new technologies,
learning, you know, new lighting consoles,
all sorts of new skill sets.
And Jason and I both dove into
an online 3D renderer called
blender.
Jason would take that up.
-: Yes. So we were looking for ways that we could not just
react and cover our bases, but to explore these new
limitations in a way that would empower us to do things we
could never do before.
I was searching the internet looking for things that we
could do.
I started looking into 3D modeling and I found a guy on
YouTube named Ian Hubert.
And he is a professional visual effects artist but he's also
making science fiction films in his garage at home.
So if you see what's on the screen now up top
he's got a big green screen taped up.
And then on the bottom is the final product.
And after watching some of his videos many, many times
because he's very advanced, but I started to look
and see that what he was doing,
I thought that we could do it.
And so as I explored it more and he, you know
there's so much about online learning that has beneficial.
And one of the things is being able to watch something
as many times as you want.
I was doing that as a student, by consuming as much
of this content as I could and learning all the software
that it would take for us to be able to film our actors
in a way that would let us put them
into a virtual environment, not just to film them
but to have a design as well.
So all these screenshots show what Ian Hubert was doing
but the first thing you do when you start learning blender
is there's a famous tutorial called the donut tutorial
the Steven and I both created donuts.
And a while it seems like a simple thing,
creating the shapes, giving them texture, giving them color
giving them lighting and reflectivity.
That's the entry point
for being able to create something that's a realistic look.
And so this is my donut.
Steven's even better.
He took a photo of a plate
at home and put it into the environment.
And so by exploring these things, we started to
feel a little bit confident that if we took a risk
it would be worth it to, to try to do this
for our students to expand what we were capable of.
So here is a, here's a shot of a, an image of me.
I was, I filmed myself in front of a green screen
and then you put that into the software
get the green screen out
and you can put that footage of an actor.
It's kind of like a 2D cardboard cutout that can be
animated.
And you can put that into any virtual environment
that we could create.
And so I made a sample of myself doing a little monologue
from the Henry, the fifth prologue
and I showed it to my colleagues after I had finished it.
And we decided that it was worth the risk and worth the
the chance that we had, we had enough comfort
with filming and the scheduling and the planning.
We had enough comfort with exploring this new technology
that we would take a big leap forward
into trying to produce a virtual production where
the entirety of it existed only within the software.
-: So as we looked forward in our season
and with that knowledge of this new technology, mainly
that Jason had taken, I always got so stuck on the donut.
He went farther away, way farther, as I stepped back
and said, how can I, how can the department support him?
So we created a 60 foot wide by 24 foot tall green screen
and floor that could accommodate
three different camera angles.
We employed and trained our own student camera operators.
And our own director
of photography was their student as well.
And producing in front
of the green screen was certainly a new challenge
for all of us, including our performers.
We were challenged with lighting angles, camera angles
the pacing shooting things, you know, very much
like film does they way shoot things out of sequence
how we storyboard and then the scheduling
how we schedule all of these tech rehearsals
still following the CDC guidelines for social distancing
airing out our space.
All of the things that we've all been dealing with
over the past year and a half.
-: But because we had already been disrupted and our normal
schedule of events and our normal ways of doing things had
been broken open and we couldn't do them.
We were open to taking these risks.
And so over the course of the year three, four projects
we incrementally stepped into new methods
and collaborations with other departments
like our collaboration with communications.
So we started doing this project and my thought was
we're bringing Shakespeare into technology.
And so what I'll do is I will take these classic paintings
and I'll bring them forward into technology.
So within the blender software, I turned all these
two dimensional paintings into 3D places that we could put
the actors for each of the scenes.
-: Sorry, was that a question?
Okay. So here are some screenshots
from the production itself and you can see these
the actors in the spaces of the performance.
So we, now we have a little video here that was made a
little in length.
It's less than two minutes.
It's a short documentary
about our process and how exactly we did that.
I'm going to play that for you now, wave vigorously.
If you can't hear it or see it
-: [Documentary Playing] I've always send the boat
-: [Woman Off Screen] Can't hear it.
-: [Documentary Playing] This project, there is no limitation
because it's the virtual.
You can be as large and this complicated
that we want it to be because
-: Jason, want to restart it, we kind of lost right at the
beginning of that.
-: Okay.
-: [Documentary Playing] I've always said that the limitation
really power you when you're creating a design
-: [Documentary Playing] whether it's the stage
whether it's the timeline.
In this project there's no limitations because it's virtual.
It can be as large and as complicated as we want it to be.
Hi, I'm Jason Jamerson.
I'm an assistant professor of Scenic design at UNO.
To me, what the biggest challenge is
that what we're doing is we're taking video of actors
in front of a green screen, removing the green screen
and placing them in a virtual environment.
So this isn't really just using green screen
where we can replace the background.
We're actually taking that footage
and we're placing it in a 3D world.
And so what that means is I can have scenery
in front of people.
I can move scenery around objects.
Then I can even change their lighting.
I probably got two
or 300 hours so far in creating the virtual environment.
And I've got dozens of hours already
but it will come to five or 600 more hours.
I'm sure by the time remove the green screen
from all of the footage and place the actors back.
And so since we're taking Shakespeare to technology
I thought these old paintings that a lot
of them you're going to recognize.
A lot of these paintings are the most famous paintings
in the world.
It's something that you're comfortable with
but you're going to be seeing them
in a brand new light for the first time.
And that's exactly what's happening with this play
with Shakespeare, because you're gonna be seeing Shakespeare
in a way you've never seen it before.
I hope that we can look at the art and we can look
at Shakespeare in a totally different, I hope that all
of this serves to empower us because we started
down this journey because of the pandemic and looking
for a way to continue to do our work and continue to teach
and for our students to continue to do their work.
And my goal is for it, not just to be something that we did
because we had to do it this way
but rather that it become something that is as big
and as beautiful as anything else we've ever done.
That is wholly because that means we have grown
as a result of this.
Not that we just got by.
-: Okay. So hopefully you could see a little bit more
of how the actors footage went into the virtual environment
there. Now I'm going to show not that again
they show a short video clip of just a couple of scenes from
the final product to show you kind of what we had.
Woman In Video: Welcome to our Shakespearian fantasy
land.
Man In Video: She'll be now with the countess Olivia.
-: I am the dog.
-: Huh? There she is! I bet the ancient privilege of the
heavens.
-: Unsex me here and build me from the ground to the tow top
full of direst cruelty.
-: I moved thee with my sword and one thy love
doing the injuries,
-: Come hither boy.
♪ Intense medieval music ♪
Get thee a good husband.
I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband
-: Not till God to make men of some other metals than earth.
Luciana is with her sister's husband and triplets of
episodes.
She thinks ♪ woman singing ♪
-: what offense
-: You have saved me in a happy hour.
I was about to protest I loved.
-: I do it with all my heart.
♪ Singing ♪
-: It encapsulates the emotional upheaval
that many of the characters we met live in.
Laughing: Oh no, no, no, no, no!
-: There we go.
Great. So Unsex Me Here by Shakespeare
has been viewed over 700 times on YouTube
and it's brought our students experience in film
acting and production.
We also have partnered with the school
of music to do a virtual production for this year's opera
Hansel and Gretel, which was viewed over 500 times so far.
And it's brought a new level
of production value to the opera.
So having taken this risk
and getting our virtual
production up and online
if we were to have seen this video last year
when we were planning
out what we were going to do in reaction
we would've been amazed and had no idea how to do it
but by incrementally stepping towards it
and getting more comfortable with our areas of operation
as we approached risk, we were able to do these
to the point that we were also able to say, Hey
let's do an opera too, we'll squeeze
in another production this year.
So all of that really is a great achievement to
help our students not just get through this pandemic
but to help us move forward into new things.
And so what we have next
so here's a shot from the opera or the opera filming
and here are two screenshots from Hansel and Gretel itself.
So in a very similar fashion, we put the
the performance of the opera into a 3D virtual environment.
So the thing that's next for us is a virtual production
of She Kills Monsters, Virtual Realms
which is a play, it's a version
of a play that was released solely to be performed virtually
during this time.
Steven, will you talk briefly about the
your rights conversation that you had with them?
-: Absolutely. So a Virtual Realms was released solely
to be done on zoom and Jason
and I going into this understanding of what he's capable
of now of doing and what we can do as a production team.
I reached out to the rights holders and at MTI and said
we have this new approach that is very innovative
that we want to take our experience to the next level.
And they've given us the rights now.
We're, we'll be recording those fully
in our space in front of our green screen again.
And this time Jason will be creating
with hopefully with some of our students as well in this
we'll be creating what you're seeing on the screen.
Now, just as an example
this is something that's not going from a photograph
that he spent hours creating three-dimensional
but now he's creating these spaces
and we'll be able to create this
for all of the different environments
for She Kills Monsters.
-: Great. So yeah, we're looking forward
to having these real 3D objects in there to represent all
of the different fantasy locations that this play
that this play takes on and going forward, all these skills
we'll be able to use to anything from doing short films
to creating documentary material about our productions
in the department, to doing a full-out virtual production
and teaching classes and all of these is possible.
Now that we, we can bring our students up to
to do all of these things.
-: Absolutely.
Great well, that's kind of the end of our presentation.
We have four minutes, it looks like there's any questions.
-: Hi guys, Brevan Jorgenson from UNO,
I'm one of the instructional technologists on campus.
I just wanted to say, thank you so much for sharing this,
I didn't know we were doing something like this on campus
and I'm sharing your YouTube video with all my coworkers
because I think it's phenomenal.
So good job.
-: Thank you so much.
-: Jason, can you make that link
to the YouTube video available in the chat.
-: Yeah, I will. That's a great idea.
Let me see if I know how to do that. [ Chuckles ]
-: Do you guys have a timeline
for your new play digital play when it's going to roll out
-: It'll be the first production we do in the fall.
It'll be, it comes out just before mid
mid October will be our release date
and that'll be our last
fully digital production in our season, Next season.
We'll be inviting our first audience into our space in
November.
It'll be their first audience in over 18 months.
So, we're excited for that.
Thank you, Jason.
So Jason, just put that link to that video
a little documentary in the chat.
Feel free to share that with anyone.
-: All of the other videos
like the production and the operas are available
in that same channel on the UNO CFM, YouTube channel.
-: Jason, another question came through
are you using a game engine
like unreal for the 3D environments models?
-: Yeah, that would be the next step
and something I'm hoping to do for
She Kills Monsters right now.
I was just our, or for Unsex Me Here, we were creating all
of those paintings in Photoshop and then importing them
as image files into blender to create a full 3D
environment that say could be immersive and interactive.
Let's say we wanted to make not a film
but to make this the same thing, but be virtual reality.
We could do that through using a game engine like
unity or unreal.
And that's my next area
of research to be able to create immersive content as well.
There are a lot
of other benefits to possibly using a game engine too
but for our, for our virtual films, a blender is, is enough.
And so as in going into the future
we're going to be exploring, creating immersive content.
So that's where we'll be concentrating
on learning things like unreal, yeah.
Good question.
-: All right. I think it's like we're, we're done at that.
So please share that video.
Do you have any questions please reach
to Jason or myself at University of Nebraska
at Omaha and be more than happy to speak
with you about this process or what's next in our world.
-: Yeah. Thank you very much.