Cutting in VR

What can the storyteller do for the audience in a VR story? This is something that we have been looking into for class.  There are clues that can direct the viewer, but it's impossible to entirely direct their attention. I think it's important that this is accepted when starting to make a story in VR. In the d.school post on designing for VR, one thing that really jumped out at me was that with user centric design concepts in mind, it's important to have repetition in the story so that the viewer just familiar with the way you are trying to tell the story and when they see a specific queue multiple times, they will learn how to react in a scene.

In the second reading, I found this paragraph focusing on why documentary VR has been successful:

"The documentary genre has certainly flourished in 360 video. It clearly feels tremendously affecting to be in a refugee camp. And as soon as you hear a omnipresent voiceover booming, the viewer is comfortable in the format. Nothing is being asked of them. They can just look around and witness. You could argue this takes away some of the magic of the true documentarian artiste, who will build the mise en scene for maximum effect, but there’s no denying it’s a powerful empathy hit. But it doesn’t require us to HAVE to see something happen, like linear narrative might. I might miss something by looking left rather than right in a VR Docu, but the voiceover can ultimately save me."

I think the interesting point here is the last couple of word "...the voiceover can ultimately save me" reducing the FOMO the viewer might have and as a result be looking around so much and ultimately miss the important part of the scene.

This poses something interesting... would a narrater in a narrative film help to ease the mind of the viewer?

Another interesting quote from this reading is the following: " The rear 180 adds to immersion, the front 180 tells the story." Something to think about when creating scenes moving forward.

I definitely don't have the answer to whether or not storytelling in VR will work, but I'm excited to find out.

Here is our assignment for the week ( I worked with Alex and Lauren to cut together this homage to Woody Allen's film, Manhattan):

Class 3 Readings

I really enjoyed Hans Rosling's talk about the importance of data.  I think he did a great job of demonstrating this in his presentation. The quote that really hit home for me and that I think most applies to the projects in this class is when Hans mentioned that "the improvement of the world needs to be highly contextualized. It cannot be considered at a regional perspective".

When I met with my group for the midterm, we looked at this question critically in regards to our task.  Here is the task that we were given:

At first we started to solve the problem and then we realized that we needed to specifically define who the person was that we were transferring the money to.  If it were to be to individuals in Africa, there are a wide spread of individuals of different demographics and access in that country.  After defining the individual with the following parameters: a person who makes (household) about 60-100usd per month with no bank access.  This very much helped to better approach this assignment.

Perception + Isadora

Two point perspective

Linear perspective is a depth cue that is related to both relative size and the next depth cue, texture gradient. In linear perspective parallel lines that recede into the distance appear to get closer together or converge. Take the animation below. Initially, the scene appears flat.

This two point perspective uses the above concept to draw cubes using dots on the horizon and parallel lines to create depth in the image.

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Getting Familiar with Isadora

Layering effect with video and images

Using the live-feed feature with Video Watcher node and projector node

FairyTales as Myths, Myths as Fairy Tales

I have to admit that this week's readings in regards to what Walt Disney did to the original fairy tale stories shocked me. I was unaware of how he manipulated them which saddens me.  I think this quote from the reading sums it up better that I could: "[Disney's] close adaption of fairy tales with patriarchal codes indicate that all the technical experiments would not be used to foster social change in America, but to keep power in the hands of individuals like himself, who felt empowered to design and create new worlds." Many of the characters in Disney's films were adapted to subtly tell his own story and he often injected himself into characters.  He also often changed main story concepts to emphasis the woman's role in the story was to be the home keeper, and to focus on class segregation.

For our assignment, we were to create a story board for our tale and represent two major instances in our stories into a physical model.

Below is the beginning of my story board

And here is my very bad attempt at making a popup version of two of the most important scenes:

Scene 1: Cheeto Face taking over the land of Gamehendge and announcing himself as king.  He pollutes the waters and starts to knock down the forest to build a city.

Scene 3: When Colonel Forbin decides to decent into the world of Gamehendge.  This video is supposed to be the cellar hatch that appears in the bodega

Singular Narrative in Parts

For this assignment, we were asked to tell a story in parts.  Either opposing perspectives or similar position enforcing a particular topic. I really resonate with the format of how This American Life tells stories, so I was eager to have an episode assigned as one of the homework tasks for this week. I do really like how they strengthen one narrative with multiple perspectives and I wanted to see if I could create a similar style audio piece for my assignment.

Even though I had a great time creating this project, I am also really interested in telling the stories of opposing individuals.  If I had more than a week to do this project, I probably would have gone in this direction. I feel that showing both sides of the story can really strengthen the the concept of the narrative.

In the TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, she talks about the danger of a single story, and  I think this is very true and we are living the result of this concept in our current political position.  I don't have a single friend, unless they're not willing to admit it, that voted for our current President Elect. After the shocking results from the election, it is very clear that we need to immerse ourselves outside our tight knit communities and hear other people's stories.  Stories that we might not regularly hear being engrossed in stories that are similar to our own.  I think telling the story from both perspective is very interesting and given the time to do it well, it can be really powerful. 

The individuals that I told the stories for, are women in my community, so it was easier for me to pull together a story--- not to diminishing the minorities in tech story, because it is extremely important one to tell. But to reach out of your community to individuals that don't trust you to get them to tell you their stories, I feel, takes time.  Building relationships where a person feels comfortable to share their personal stories is not something you can necessarily do in a week.  That's why I ended up reaching out to individuals in a community that knew they could trust me with their stories. Given that however, I want to try to create a story this year that has the opposing perspective ---just going to put that there...

Here is my audio response to the assignment -

Minorities in Tech: