Our Story:
Derek, just a regular family man, gets a job working the midnight shift for security at the local
mall. It isn’t much, but it pays the bills. Sitting and staring at security video screens of the dark,
empty halls of a stripmall is usually very boring work. But not today!
Derek looks up from his crossword puzzle and performs his routine scan of the screens.
Everything seems normal, that is, until he gets to the bottom middle screen, and... what’s that?
Is that a heist in action?! He freezes, paralyzed by a sense of doom. He immediately rushes off
to do... he doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought that far ahead yet.
How will the story end? Will Derek ride in and save the day, or will the robbers get what they
came for? That is left to the viewer’s imagination. We can be sure of only one thing: for better or
worse, Derek will be leaving the mall for the last time tonight. Either he will quit this job and
never return (ain’t nobody got time for heists), or... well, let’s just say it really isn’t Derek’s day.
Our Technical Contributions:
In order to accomplish the screen illumination, we implemented shadow ray tracing. We simply
applied the image to a plane as a texture, and placed it flush against a hole we have cut in the
wall. We then placed lights behind the screen, made the screens translucent (and slightly
reflective), and voila! Functional screens. In order to accomplish the darkness of the scene, we
also added point light attenuation.
Similarly to the television screens, to make the clock “glow” red and send out a red glow to its
immediate foreground, we cut holes in a cuboid and placed a red translucent screen in front.
This time, we added an area light, because points lights were too harsh, casting unrealistic red
photons across the room. Thus, the only lights in the scene are the backlit screens and the
clock area light.
The objects that we made were the clock and the architecture of the room. The rest, such as the
chair and book, we downloaded online.
We both worked equally on constructing the objects, putting the scene together, and
implementing the shadow ray tracing.