VR Storytelling Blog
Our VR story is based on, our main character which is Kate. Kate is a young assistant who works for an unethical, egotistical doctor who goes by the name of Logan. Basically with our VR experience you get to go through Kate’s childhood and adult life. You control what happens to her! The audience have so much control over her life that in the beginning they even have the option of ending it. In the video you get to experience and see how we built this world around this girl. We used a variety of films from our classmates, baring in mind all the other films had a completely different story from our own, and we took scenes from those films so that it made sense in our story, sort of like building a puzzle. In the video we only show a preview of what one of the timelines holds which is the “Go Past 24 years”, however there are three other options that have different outcomes and the user has the freedom to explore and control.
Planning, Experimentation, User-Testing
The planning of our VR experience was quite long and tedious, through hours of brainstorming and working with what we had we finally settled on a feasible idea. The main challenge behind doing this was finding clips from our classmates that would match our story. We decided to start with the protest against doctors to set the stage for the conflict. We used a diagram to create our world and story. We managed to focus on Kate, our main character, and tried to experience different ways of entering her past, present, and future COVID life. The diagram was a bit hard to fill in the beginning because we had various stories to integrate but it became easier when we focused on the character.
If the user decides to go back 24 years we chose a scene in which one of the pregnant characters in the other film would act as Kate’s mom and in this scene she is actually pregnant with Kate.
A few other challenges we had was finding scenes that showed Kates childhood and showcasing what she had to go through as a kid. Perhaps the inspiration behind why Kate wanted to be a doctor was so that future kids didn’t have to go through what she went to as a kid. To showcase this we got a scene of a child attending online class:
As well as a scene in which her parents are having a heated discussion about her going outside and playing, in this scene we cut the clip perfectly so that the parent’s are discussing how Kate is going to have a semi-normal childhood full of games and energy.
As for the user-testing we wen’t through a few trials in terms of logistics, and the functioning of our immersive world before we came up with something we are pretty proud of. The project was difficult to execute and especially difficult finding clips from other films to match our story and the story we want to tell. In addition, we tried to find ways to give the audience control using clips from other movies that weren’t made to necessarily fit our story.
Learning and Next Steps
My team and I learned a lot from this experience, and the reason we learned a lot was because this experience pushed us far beyond any type of story we have told through media. With Unity we were able to tell our audience an incredible story.
