Giovanni Lopez
Crimson Chronicle Reporter
NMA’s long-anticipated video production teacher, Brett Erskine, who worked in live production, virtual reality, and 360 filmmaking, began his teaching term at Hollywood High last month.
Bringing virtual production to filmmaking is one goal of Erskine. Since it’s a brand new aspect of filmmaking, sharing his skill sets of technology such as camera experience, lighting, and editing is crucial. As this type of production is increasingly relevant to production on a professional level, Erskine said he is eager to teach students his expertise.
Curious about many things, Erskine has had a very visual and technical perspective of the world; through a camera, he was able to combine a lot of his interests. By learning something technical and making it creative later on, he grew comfortable in this field of work.
Anticipation has grown around transforming the green screen set into a medium that reacts in real-time to production projects. In simpler terms, the green screen can be set to any background you want it to be and the camera’s viewfinder will reflect the movement made by people in front of the screen into real-time animation.
“There’s no budget… there’s even no physics if you want, you know, let’s go to the future,” said Erskine.
With the equipment provided, virtual reality can be easily integrated. Erskine aims for students to be excited about bringing virtual reality into teaching subjects in class.
“Do you want to imagine what an exoplanet looks like or do you want to go there,” he said.
Alongside the animation department, Erskine said he hopes to teach motion capture; the animation students can design characters and the drama department can play out those characters. Since Erskine believes the animation department is usually working alone, this may be a chance for them to try something new by expressing themselves through their character design.
With the addition of the new video production teacher, there’s going to potentially be a lot of crossovers in NMA’s departments.