February 5, 2022

In the summer of 2021, I was ready to start a new film. At school, we had been developing a certificate program in virtual production, and one of my courses was being transformed into the program’s culminating experience. That meant I suddenly needed to learn a thing or two about virtual production myself. I knew an actual film project would be the best way to become familiar with the processes I’d soon be teaching.

Finding the Right Story

For a while, I had been thinking about creating some sort of film in collaboration with the Indiana Prison Writers Workshop. This seemed like the right moment to pursue that interest. I reached out to see if I could meet someone with an interesting transformational story to tell. That effort was progressing—with a few false starts—when I serendipitously met someone through one of those friend-of-an-acquaintance introductions.

His name is Robert “Church” Brown, and he has a remarkable story to tell.

A Collaboration Takes Shape

Even after I explained the very complicated way this film was going to be made, Church remained interested in participating. So we began the long process of meeting weekly for months, honing his story into a monologue-style film. The concept: he would perform his monologue while appearing in the various locations where his story actually took place.

The Technology Behind the Film

What exactly do I mean by “the very complicated way this film was going to be made”?

The type of virtual production we’re using involves motion-capturing Church’s performance, including facial recognition, and then assigning that captured performance to a 3D character. That character is placed into highly realistic 3D environments that represent the real locations from his story.

Once the scenes exist in all their three-dimensional detail, I “enter” those virtual spaces with a virtual camera and shoot them just as I would a traditional film. It’s filmmaking, but the set exists entirely in digital space.

Capturing Acts 1 and 2

We spent a couple of hours capturing Church’s performance of the first two acts. He did a great job remembering his monologue and pretending our big room was the various locations from his story.

February 27, 2022

Capturing Act 3: The Prison Scenes

We resumed motion capture on Sunday with the third act of the script. All of Act 3 takes place in a prison, so we used tape to outline a cell on the floor—marking where the bed, desk, and lockers would be. Church has a lot of lines to remember, and he delivered them beautifully. Everything went smoothly, and with that, the motion capture phase of the project was complete.

Next up: using the captured motion data to animate a MetaHuman character. A few weeks earlier, Zeb had mocked up a quick MetaHuman based on Church’s likeness as a proof of concept.

March 12, 2022

Capturing Act 3: The Prison Scenes

We resumed motion capture on Sunday with the third act of the script. All of Act 3 takes place in a prison, so we used tape to outline a cell on the floor—marking where the bed, desk, and lockers would be. Church has a lot of lines to remember, and he delivered them beautifully. Everything went smoothly, and with that, the motion capture phase of the project was complete.

Next up: using the captured motion data to animate a MetaHuman character. A few weeks earlier, Zeb had mocked up a quick MetaHuman based on Church’s likeness as a proof of concept.

September 8th, 2022

Setbacks and New Energy

After failing to secure a grant and watching two students who had been helping get the project off the ground graduate, things were put on the back burner for the summer. But now that the fall semester is underway, there’s fresh energy behind the film.

It started when a student named Grace Shelton expressed interest in project managing the film. That interest quickly ballooned into having several students on board. Two of my colleagues typically team-teach a 3D course called Team Production, but this semester it didn’t fill sufficiently, so it was converted into an independent study—with my film as their project. Suddenly, we have a crew of highly talented students.

The Crew:

Jude Morey — MetaHuman Animation

Zeb Wood and Albert William — Executive Producers

Grace Shelton — Project Manager

Brianna White — Art Direction

Jules Kassmousis — Environment Design

Shane Sanneman — Environment Design

Jasmine Martin — MetaHuman Animation

In just the few short weeks of school things have gotten well underway.

Jude has already started working with combining our Faceware captures with a temporary Metahuman and cleaning up the animation. Here is the Raw animation test.

Brianna has produced some great moodboards as we dial in the look of the environments and the overall look of the film.

Friday September 16, 2022

3D Scanning Church

A lot of progress was made over the past week. Among many other things, we did a 3D scan of Church that will be used to create his MetaHuman, and Shane mocked up both the hotel space and the prison based on reference photos.

The Hotel and Prison

We had Church come to what’s called The NEXT Lab—the New Emerging and Experimental Technologies Lab—in our building, where Jeff Rogers scanned him using a handheld Creaform Go!Scan scanner. It was great to see everything come together. We scanned the top and underside of Church’s arms, which will need to be stitched together. He has a lot of tattoos, and we want to reproduce them as accurately as possible. Then we scanned his entire head.

Jules has been blocking out the duplex where Church lived in Spokane with his family

Wrestling with the Uncanny Valley

Jasmine has been busy refining character meshes so we can convert the scan of Church’s head into a full-body 3D character model. Using a 3D scan of Zeb as a test subject, Jasmine attempted to create a MetaHuman from a mesh in Unreal Engine 5. Knowing what Zeb actually looks like, it’s fair to say the result might be suffering from a mild case of the uncanny valley.

This next video if both hysterical and profoundly creepy. Jasmine was trying an attempt to create a MetaHuman using a zBrush sculpt as its base.

Where Things Stand

Updated January 2026

By the end of that semester, the team had assembled a rough cut of the film. And then, as sometimes happens with ambitious projects that depend on the rhythms of academic life, it stalled. Students graduated. New semesters brought new priorities. The rough cut sat on a hard drive, waiting.

Three years later, Church’s story remains unfinished—but not forgotten. The footage exists. The environments exist. The performance Church gave us is still there, preserved in motion capture data, ready to be brought to life. I’m actively looking for the right opportunity to revive this project and finally complete it. Church trusted us with his story, and I’d like to see it through.

If you’re interested in collaborating, or if you know of funding opportunities for experimental documentary work, I’d love to hear from you.