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Today Allie and I had a group meeting with our host where we discussed college, grad schools, and careers. Hearing our host’s story was very intriguing. Particularly, how she started working as a Starbucks barista in the 90’s when the company was still relatively small/regional. She quickly made her way up to high managerial positions and was even on their Green Team. However, she could not work at a company she found to be so wasteful so she went to law school for environmental law. Before our group call I had an additional call with our host that was just one-on-one.

A section of my memo focuses on how land conservation boosts biodiversity conservation efforts and how crucial biodiversity is regionally and for the Earth at large. Today I spend time researching that. I also made some edits from my call with out host yesterday.

On Thursday I had a packed day. I had a series of meetings with the whole team that worked at Dash. I first met with Mack who was the cohost of Dash and gave me a general run down of what Dash is and what they do. I then got to meet Meryn who was the producer. She told me what her job as the producer was and how it plays a role into the production of their animations. Then I met Madison who handled the social media and marketing. It was interesting to learn about what she did even if it wasn’t directly related to what I wanted to do. I then met with the illustrators then 2d animators and the 3d animators. All of these meetings were all huge experiences i was able to have and I am very grateful to have met with these different members of Dash. I learned a lot about the flow and process of their work and it inspired me for the future!

Around this time I began realizing that it may not be possible to finish this project in the span of two weeks. It was an ambitious project to take on for having never worked on something like this and saw it through but additionally I only had two weeks to work on it. While talking to Damian Stamer he told me about some of his struggles with working on his pieces and some of the tactics he uses to get through his problems.

Today I started my day out calling a friend of Damian’s, a professional worker in a gallery up in New York. Her job focused on finding and connecting with artists to help them get their work into a gallery. She discussed her job and her experience as an artist in her field and we discussed how some things she learned could relate and help me with the general direction I planned on heading into as well. We discussed for about an hour together before I went back to working on my project. I finished up the base sketches and began working on the key frame sketches.
I talked with Damian about my current process for a bit and he let me go to continue working.

Tues 6/1/21: today was spent figuring out more of my interactable car tutorial!  I’m starting to have a way better understanding of how the code and nodes work.  I realized that if I hold down right-click while dragging across my screen, I can move around my code!  If only I had discovered this sooner – would’ve saved a ton of time.  Today, I worked on the car’s controls and how to get the passenger to enter the car.

Wed 6/2/21: Because I felt like seeing what else I could do, I started looking up tutorials for audio visualizers! An audio visualizer is basically a visualization (hence the name) of the beats or rhythm to music. This can come in the form of dancing cubes, a particle wave, bouncing spheres, and more.  I didn’t end up finding a tutorial I liked and worked on my interactable car more. Right now, the passenger can enter and exit the car if the user presses the E key and the car can drive.  The passenger has yet to drive the actual car.

Thurs 6/3/21: so my avatar/passenger disappeared! Yay! Well to clarify, it disappears when it enters the car and begins to drive.  As well as this, after leaving the car, the passenger would fall through the floor of the scene.  After tracing back in the tutorial I used and triple-checking all of my code, I asked the awesome Mr. Polge for help. After a while of him and I checking my code yet again and changing a bunch of small things to test out what could’ve been going wrong, we came to a temporary solution.  We got it so that the car would still drive from the player’s POV, but the passenger wouldn’t be seen until they exited the car.  Also, the passenger stopped falling through the floor.

I finally finished the game I was working on. I was able to complete the last floor and fix AI movement and mechanics. I had a really great time during the work experience program. I learned on how to make a game in unreal engine and use the several tools it had. With the help of Mr. Polge, I was able to come up with solutions to different bugs and circumvent different obstacles.

We finished our PowerPoint highlighting each of the projects we completed during the two weeks of the program and how they will be beneficial to Homestead Sage. An example is sharing about the Facebook page we created and how that will open up new opportunities for the business through reaching more potential customers. We are so excited to share our experience at Homestead Sage with other students in the Work Experience Program and we are so appreciative for this opportunity! Thank you, Homestead Sage!