This week we were briefed on our new project which is the Collaborative Unit in which we need to work with other course majors such as games design, 3D animation, Visual effects, Sound arts and many other options to create our XR project. The main objective of the brief is to create an immersive adaptation of a clip from a selection of sources such as a short film, animation, a cartoon or a short story etc.
My initial Ideas
We were given the options for comedic options for adaptations and some of the options were immersive bot stories which were created by Netflix using Aritificial intelligence that generated different types of movies. Among these options was ‘The first Holiday film written entirely by bots’ which i thought would be quite interesting and funny for a VR adaptation due to the silly dialogue and very strange and quirky interactions that the player could try. The whole film mostly takes place in a cabin as well which would work well for the initial time frame of this project.
Paper Man (2012 Animated short film)
Another idea i had for an adaptation is Disneys 2021 animated shoirt film ‘Paperman’ which tells the story of an accountant trying to find and gain the attention of a woman he met at the train station using paper airplanes. I felt that this is a nice and simple short story that could be very interesting to adapt in Virtual Reality. Firstly the art style would work very well by having the whole environment and characters shown in black and white with some minor hints of colour such as the red lipstick in the original cartoon. For the gamemplay and interactivity I felt it could be fun to create a type of minigame out of the paper airplane scene in which the character is triyng to throw planes through the window on the other side of the street.
This could be adapted for VR by having the player grab and throw airplanes across the street while also needing to do it subtly so that the boss doesnt see you doing this. The woman could also be moving up and down different floors so there are multiple target windows that the player would need to aim for over the games duration.
La Luna (2011 Animated Short Film)
La Luna is a 2011 animated short film created by Disney Pixar and tells the story of a young italian boy, his father and grandfather and their job of cleaning and arranging the stars from the night sky on the surface of the moon. I felt again that visually this would be interesting to show a light hearted and simple art style to the experience that would also have very little dialogue with a story told visually to the player.
In the terms of interactivity and gameplay the player could row the boat to get to the moon, and the player could also walk aroud the moons surface using a sweeper/broom, to move around stars that could continously be moving and changing. A time limit could also be shown to the player or perhaps a competitive or guided nature with the other NPC characters that will be present throughout the experience.
Finding my team mates
Everyone in the course has been added to an online Padlet which has everyones contact details, portfolio/blog and interests to see options of who we can work with on this project. It has also been arranged for this coming tuesday to meet these students face to face so that we can discuss ideas for the project while also finding people with similar interests that we would want to collaborate with.