[MUSIC PLAYING]
BLU: How's it going, everyone?
I'm Blu, and this is my alter-ego, Cory.
And together, we have a YouTube show called
[Xanadu] starring yours truly.
CHATTERBOX: Hello!
What about me?
BLU: And it's all about building my virtual empire.
CHATTERBOX: [SCOFFS] Well, all I see is Cory doing all the work
and you having all the fun.
BLU: Building an empire is all fun?
CHATTERBOX: For you?
Absolutely.
BLU: Anyways, you guys have a good spotlight interview.
We're going to go punk some astronauts on the space
station for our next TikTok video.
Blu out.
All right, cut.
[BEEPING SOUND]
CORY STRASSBURGER: Hey, thanks a lot, Blu.
I appreciate it, buddy.
So my name's Cory Strassburger.
I'm a visual effects artist.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BLU: What's going on, everybody?
So I got my alter-ego finished.
CORY STRASSBURGER: Blu is more or less
an extension of me in the metaverse or the virtual world.
And Xanadu is both his spaceship/ home base and also the name
of an episodic YouTube series that we recently created starring Blu.
And it follows his mishaps and adventures
as he's building his virtual empire.
BLU: [YELPS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
CORY STRASSBURGER: The process of making
an episode is actually very similar to what
you'd do for an animated short film.
I write something really quickly.
I block it all out, just using a voiceover in Unreal
and figure out my rough edit.
And after that's locked, I just go into my home garage capture studio,
do all the capturing-- which, I'm using an Xsens Link
suit for the body capture, an iPhone for the face capture.
And then, I have a pair of Manus gloves which capture the fingers.
And so all combined, just goes into the Unreal engine.
And then, I start refining the cameras, the editing.
I start introducing the lighting and do all the final sound design
and music, and then just output the final piece from there.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BLU: [YELLS]
CORY STRASSBURGER: Originally, I wanted to try and get
my episode times down to a week.
Right now, I'm about 3 and 1/2 weeks consistently.
But I think over time, I'm going to try to rope some more artists in
to help speed it up, and just make it better.
My goal is to get it down to a week.
One of the big advantages of being a one man band,
and wearing all these hats, and how the Unreal Engine works
is that as I'm editing or setting up cameras,
the sequencer is like gold to me.
Because everything is real time.
And it's just this beautiful timeline like what
I'm used to in any kind of compositing program.
But yet, I'm working in 3D.
I'm working with 3D objects.
You're setting up cameras.
You're setting up lighting, all in real time, as fast as you can do it.
Or I can shift animation around.
Or I can restage a whole section of stuff.
And being able to do all of those things
as they arise when you just get into that state,
and you're building the thing--
I've never had as much fun creatively in my entire life
as I do when I sit in this thing and just work.
BLU: Mike, you sure you want to watch this go down?
I'm not paying for therapy.
CORY STRASSBURGER: When the MetaHumans dropped,
it was a little bit of a gift from God,
because it was just before I was about to put episodes out.
And I was really worried that Blu being a humanoid
wasn't going to be quite up to the level--
too far in the uncanny valley.
So I wasn't able to create Blu using the MetaHuman Creator.
But what I was able to do was make as close to a Blu-looking MetaHuman as
possible.
And then, I could extract a lot of the data from that MetaHuman
and infuse that into Blu, including the body, skeleton,
the MetaHuman skin textures, which are very lifelike.
And then also, the blend shapes are all from scans of real humans.
And it helped Blu become much more articulated and realistic looking.
I feel like in real life, some people are just naturally cool, right?
That's not me.
I'm very dorky, geeky.
And so Blu, in a sense, is a way for me to be cool.
Being him in his world, I can live out all of the dreams
that I want to do in reality--
I can do in this virtual space.
BLU: And it's all happening right here within the Unreal Engine.
Yeah.
CORY STRASSBURGER: In a way, it's been a culmination of all the stuff
I love wrapped into one package that continually
is going to evolve as the technology evolves,
and as Xanadu and Blu evolve as a character and as a storyline.
BLU: Whoo-wee.
Yeah.