Part 1:
After the event where we had to find an existing or make our own group, I have found a group consisted of 7 people.
Three people from the MA Visual Effects:
Martyna Kowalska – m.kowalska0620221@arts.ac.uk – MA Visual Effects – VFX/3D Modeller
Nira Gonzalez – n.gonzalezsanchez0320221@arts.ac.uk
Jess Howard – j.howard0320221@arts.ac.uk
Three from the MA VR:
Alexa Donahue – a.donahue0620221@arts.ac.uk – MA VR – Unity developer & VR artist
An Zhou – a.zhou0820211@arts.ac.uk
Yazhe Li – r.li0920182@arts.ac.uk
And one of my classmates:
Gloria Corra – g.corra0220191@arts.ac.uk
We discussed what everyones’ strengths are, what softwares we are using and how we can benefit the project.
The project itself seemed very interesting to me. BEFORE THE FALL (the name of the project) is an immersive VR experience engaging users with the realities of global warming on their immediate environment. The concept is simple: time-tours in a post-apocalyptic world, allow viewers to return to the home planet we were forced to leave in the late 21st century.
A very important detail about the project is that is it a big project that we will continue working on after the submission and it is also a collaboration with the external partners such as Luke Losey (Unit9) and Tim Harrison (Aumeta).
The concept of the project is about time-tours in a post-apocalyptic world, allow viewers to return to the home planet we were forced to leave in the late 21st century.
A familiar location such as Battersea Power Station, is rendered in the future present – it’s structure crumbling, partially submerged by a Thames, swollen beyond recognition, in a landscape stripped of flora and fauna. But everywhere there are signs of a past civilisation and ghostly voices and memories linger – clues to a planetary trauma.
Removing the VR headset will leave users in an abundant present where catastrophe has yet to destroy everything we cherish. In this sense the experiences can be at once educational, moving, haunting and galvanising with the experiences leaving time tourists with a sense of what may be preserved, rather than one of inevitable devastation.
Part 2:
In the class, we learnt about a game The exquisite corpse and how it can help to understand decentralisation and reveal our creative subconsciousness.
The princip of the game was to fold a piece of paper into three parts that will be later revealed as a head, torso and legs. Each part will be drawn by different people and carefully hided so the next person doesn’t see what was drawn before.
The first topic seemed fairly easy – an animal. Although there are no restrictions on the topic, since it can be understood in any way possible. I decided to go with the fist thought that appeared in my head and my interpretation ended up being pretty straightforward:
The second topic was way more abstract – we had to create a piece on the word “speculate”. My first thought was about a very speculative sentence “not all men” and in my opinion it seemed perfect for the given topic:
The other activity we did was about coming up with the rules for a game for our classmates.
Gloria, Caroline and me came up with very simples rules that our other classmates had to follow:
At the same time we had to follow the rules of our other classmates which we successfully did and had a lot of fun while doing it!
All these fun and more importantly creative activities have shown us how important collaboration is. It showed the importance of a decentralised labor that can help us to come up with incredible ideas and create unique arts and experiences that we would never do on our own.