100th Meridian - Work in Progress

Role: 3D Generalist, Technical Artist, Visual Storyteller

Date: 2022, US

Showcase: MIT Co-Creation Studio. Worlding: In collaboration with UNITY, 2022

#RealityCapture #SubstancePainter #UE5 #3DScanning #Avatars #VirtualProduction #Storytelling #ImmersiveDocumentary #drought #EnvironmentDesign #RealTime

About:

100th Meridian is an immersive film that unpacks the hardship and conflicting interests brought on by the longest-running drought in the United States. The project follows people who are working the land as they come to terms with dwindling sources of water in three essential river basins of the American West.

Themes:

The Climate Crisis
Structural Racism
The Collapse of the American Dream
Unsustainable Agriculture
Family Heritage and Loss

Location - Colorado:

Story 01 - Sans Luis Valley:

In the San Luis Valley, 6th generation Hispanic rancher Ronda Lobato is sustaining an old tradition of acequias, a way for communities to cooperatively own and manage surface water. An acequia is a hand-dug ditch that is maintained by the community, and diverted to those along it; most acequias in the Valley go back hundreds of years; the acequia in downtown San Luis (a.k.a. ‘the people’s ditch’) is the oldest continuing water right in Colorado dating from 1852.

As a community leader, Ronda is working to enshrine the acequia cooperatives in the legal code to ensure they’re in good legal standing and the ditches are maintained so that they don’t lose their water rights to opportunistic outsiders. Ronda is also working with scientists to establish baseline measurements of the water system so that the community can identify their biggest risks (fire, flooding) and mitigate them through state and federal funding. Due to the low snowpack for the past two years, Ronda’s ranch has received no surface water and her family has had to end their reliance on the farm for income and focus their efforts on fighting to save their community.

Ronda Lobato - 6th Generation Hispanic Rancher

Camera Shot List:

Storyboard 7-8mins short:

World Building WIP:

Biome Kit:

Authenticity is important for this project so we’re working hard to create accurate local vegetation.

Beyond Traditional Green Screen Composition:

Using diffusion models, pose estimation and depth analysis from multi-camera verité video, we intent to extract a mesh and insert the subjects into the environments, creating photorealistic, animatable yet authentic people in their natural environment. This unique workflow is new but is maturing rapidly and has some distinct advantages for documentary and immersive journalism.

Research Paper: PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model