I requested this video to replace a several year old video some of our customers were using to show off VBS2 and also to highlight some of the awesome videos that we’ve created. I love the Modern Warfare/Battlefield 3 vibe to the video. It’s one of my favorite videos we’ve ever done.
Author: Brian T. Hall
VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer
My motivation for creating a land navigation trainer inside Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2), the US Army’s official Game for Training, came from a friend of my wife’s from our time in the Army. When we met him for dinner, he was finishing up his time as the lead Army cadet instructor at a large military college. I asked him if I could make one product for him, what would it be? Without hesitating, he said that they desperately needed a way to train land navigation, a crucial skill for cadets to learn so they could pass the course given during their summer training at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Battle of Ganjgal Valley with MG Brown Introduction
For the Battle of Ganjgal Lessons Learned Visualization, I read all available information, both classified and unclassified, to create a script and storyboard to support the desired product for the Center for Army Lessons Learned. After the terrain was created by our Terrain Creation Team, I used satellite imagery to place the buildings in the village of Ganjgal and surrounding areas of interest. Once the level design was set, I began to script the actions of the avatars according to the storyboard leading to a 17 minute Lessons Learned Visualization, portion of which were featured on 60 Minutes.
Introduction to an Army Rifle Squad
This video was created from a request from Cadet Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky. They originally requested 9 Soldiers standing in a line in the desert and each one would recite their job description in turn. I made a demo videos showing the customer my idea for how to liven the project up quite a bit and received their permission to go ahead with my idea. I set the video in the middle of a combat patrol so that the audience would have something visually interesting to keep them engaged and so that I could show off the weapon systems against enemy forces. I was also selected to voice the narration in this video.
Videos
I have created 55 videos for various military training events. Here is a sample of a few of them.
Heat Can Kill 2 is the sequel to a video we created after a Soldier died of Heat Stroke at Fort Jackson in 2010. The video was made mandatory viewing by anyone working with Soldiers and there were zero heat related fatalities in the Summer of 2011.
Land Navigation Course Basic is the companion video to our VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer, intended to help those that have never participated in a real land navigation course before.
This video for the US Marine Corps Infantry Officer school was the first video I was assigned. I learned very quickly that creating a 30 minute scenario in VBS2 made it very hard for the videographers to get the shots they needed for the training video. After that, each of my videos was broken down to individual scenes, very much like the movie industry.
This video was our first experiment with motion capture and getting point cloud data into VBS2. The process took us a while to figure out, but the low crawl animation turned out very well and accurate for Soldiers to learn from.
Brian T. Hall, PMP 