This was a really exciting project to take on. It was based on a friend's suggestion that I create an environment from one of my books and accompany it with the audio of the story so that people could hear the story and see the environment as I envisioned it at the same time.

I chose a scene from "The Devil Whispered" where the protagonists are being led through an series of interconnected underground bunkers. The work took about six months to complete, though my attention was split between this and several other projects.

There were many lessons to be learned in the process, primarily regarding lightning, environmental effects, media players for live video, and particularly around using decals to enhance the realism of a scene. A floor slick from the mud of many footsteps tracking through the room feels more visceral than a clean one with no signs of traffic.

I also learned quite a bit more about rendering scenes, and using cinematic cameras, which ended up being a much larger portion of the process than I had initially budgeted time for.

When the environment was complete, I rendered out scenes to the best of my ability and took everything into Adobe Premiere Pro to do post processing of the audio samples and story being read. Prior to that, I'd used the book recordings to set up a timeline for each shot.

Ultimately, it was wonderful to see the vision in my head come to life on the screen with a visual counterpart that was so precise. If it didn't take so long, I'd definitely consider doing this for an entire book because I think it would be a really unique experience to have an authors vision shared in this way, more completely.