reel-exchange

Reel-Exchange member Ben Young (see Ben's profile) recently completed work designing a virtual model of the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The following is an exclusive Q&A between Ben and Reel-Exchange Community Manager Craig Erpelding. (If you have a project you'd like to discuss in an exclusive Reel-Exchange Q&A, email information about the project to support@reel-exchange.com)

Watch Ben Young's "Beijing Olympics: Virtually There"

CE: How did you get involved with the Beijing Olympics project--what was the scope of the entire project and what parts of the content creation did you take part in?

BY: "Beijing Olympics: Virtually There" was a project designed and executed entirely on my own for Silkroad Institute. Silkroad Institute is an educational video production company, creating video content for the web teaching Chinese to the western world. I lead a small in-house production studio in producing video and animation content for our website, www.silkroadinstitute.com. As Producer, I take on many roles in the production process and this Olympics project was my own contribution to our collection of videos. Our goal was to give the audience a peek of the dramatic landscape of the coming Olympics, and through doing so, hopefully get them more energized about Chinese culture and language. The Olympic video is a part of a series of videos, all created in different themes or formats, depicting Chinese culture.

CE: Did you go to Beijing? How was that experience?

BY: I traveled to Beijing this past January for the first time. It was like stepping into a whole other world! I had studied the language and the culture but simply nothing prepares you for the experience in person. I was in China for two weeks. We traveled all over Beijing, exploring the historical attractions, to the food, the nightlife, and of course a trip to the Olympic Green construction site. Image is so important to the Chinese people in almost everything they do. As the plane landed, I flew over miles and miles of demolished buildings, apparently being cleared to make way for newer, more attractive buildings. The whole city was under construction in fact. I spoke with a friend of mine there and she remarked how dramatically different it felt from just a year ago. We had a difficult time collecting reference material from the Olympic site—as they were very secretive about the work-in-progress (not unlike an artist with an unfinished masterpiece).

CE: What tools did you use to create the content and was there any stumbling blocks that you had to workaround with various technologies?

BY: The entire project, not counting the research in China, took a little over three weeks working by myself. I started with studying the video and images taken at the Olympic construction site. Most of the building frames at least were in place. Then I turned to Beijing's official Olympics site and others to compile the necessary architectural drawings, landscape maps, etc. Naturally it still left some to my imagination. I modeled the landscape and buildings in Autodesk Maya. I pulled together the textures working from reference photos I took and stock images. Particle Effects were also done in Maya. For the next step, I took the rendered images and composited with a background sky plate for each shot, color-corrected frames to match, and added the various motion graphics. All of this step was done in Adobe After Effects. Then I exported to Adobe Premiere to work in the music and sound, working from some royalty-free Apple loops. Photoshop was used to create all the graphics before animating them in After Effects. The entire project was completed in our studio at Silkroad Institute.

CE: What does being a part of a project like this mean for you? What is the most gratifying aspect of creating content like this?

BY: This project has been an amazing experience. I would love to go back to China! One of the most amazing things for me was completing the landscape in Maya and just scrolling around inside this virtual world I'd created and imagining what the real thing will look like. It was a great learning experience and I hope to take on more challenges like this in the near future.

Thanks for the interview Ben and best of luck on your endeavors. For more on this project visit www.silkroadinstitute.com and Ben's personal portfolio at www.byoungstudio.com.