On the Other Side

A 360 VR video experience from the viewpoint of an astronaut who goes through a series of surreal events in outer space.

My Role

Creating an interactive animation experience with two teammates from fine art and architecture background, my roles was to:

My Roles:

UX Designer
Tech Lead
Environment Designer

Duration:

2020 Spring

Teammates:

Eileen Lee
Yugy Lee

Direct—

The emotional journey the viewer will be experiencing throughout the film and associating the visuals & sound with it.

Prototype—

Testing combinations of softwares such as Unity, Cinema 4D, and After Effects to achieve the intended level of fidelity.

Act—

As if I’m an astronaut... It was fun, but not too pleasing to look at... but no regrets :D

100 Words

We initially created a 100-words story that became the very basis of the film’s narrative. After refining the rough drafts through peer review and instructor’s feedback, we were able to reach a simpler, but better understandable version of the narrative.

“You are an astronaut in space who completed a task and is waiting to be retracted back to the spaceship by your colleague. Suddenly, you sight a wormhole, which then consumes you. Traveling through a blur of confusion and bright lights, your colleague’s voice fades, and you lose oxygen. When your vision comes back, you see yourself in a new world. Strange shapes surround you, glowing and pulsing. Suddenly, you feel yourself getting sucked back in reverse. Your colleague exclaims in relief when he sees you. As you are retracted back to the spaceship, you see the wormhole moving away.”

Story Development

Envisioning awe and various emotions in the context of outer space

Given the prompt of creating a 360 film experience, we came up with different emotions we wanted to express in our film, and decided to use outer space as the setting for the story to take place. We arranged the emotions in different orders to brainstorm a variety of scenarios.

After a few sessions of playtesting, we received feedback saying that ending it with sadness doesn’t align with our purpose of bringing joy and wonder through this film. Thereby, we designed the storyline to end with a sense of relief in returning home and with curiosity of questioning what just happened.

Visual Inspirations

Searching for imageries that emits the emotion of our intention, and enhances the story flow.

Tracing back our memories and searching online, we found visual inspirations and methods to bring the user more immersed into our story. For example, starting off with the helmet UI would clearly give one an unspoken, but an immediate understanding that they are an astronaut.

Bringing many inspirations to the table really helped clarify concepts such as “alternate world” visually, which were quite difficult to communicate just verbally. I learned that people associate different experiences and imaginations even if they were to speak the same word, especially after working a single story together.

Scene Creation

Pushing and compromising technical limitations.

After deciding the story, and the visual direction of the film, we moved on to actually creating the scene using Unity, After Effects, and Cinema 4D. I was in charge of directing this process and executing it with a teammate (Eileen) while another teammate (Yugy) worked on production and sound.

This was one of the toughest, but also fun aspects of the entire project for me because I got to learn new skills to create visuals that seemed so far away and unreal to me. Also, it was the most fruitful part of the project where I was contributing to transitioning a story into an experience.

Reflection

Melting imagination and memories into an experience with sight and sound as a TEAM.

Creating a story from scratch and making it into a film is a crazy cool experience, but doing that with a team is even crazier. I learned how it’s just so easy to get carried away and diverge into different directions if things are not communicated clearly. On the other hand, when you are on the same wavelength, the bouncing of the ideas is cathartic. And of course you also get to further refine your idea as well.