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This week brought about many changes to the overall direction of the project. During our weekly adviser meeting on Monday, we had a long chat about the outlined story. Overall, the consensus was that the nature of the experience was such that it couldn’t really be scoped down without losing its essence. In addition, the idea had digressed too far away from the peaceful beautiful world that we had originally envisaged.

 

So we returned to the drawing board and tried to revisit the core of our experience. What we discovered that to be really the power and meaning of story itself. Based on this notion, we did a complete story rewrite which gave the player more room to project into the experience :

 

PHASE 1 : THE CALL (0:30)

 

Player explores the world and himself. He is represented as an amorphous glow, so when he looks left and right he sees glowing pulsating light. The player is also hovering on the back of a magnificent bird. The bird is hovering on the edge of a waterfall with the ocean stretching out behind him. In front, the player’s view is obfuscated by mist and cloud. In the distance, he can just see the outline of the spring of stories. Suddenly, the sky changes color going from blue to a bright orange, almost like a sunset. The silence is broken by an ethereal female voice, almost like a distant echo yet distinct and calm.

 

“WANDERING FRAGMENTS, THE SEA AWAITS. YOUR IMMINENT BIRTH THE WORLD EXPECTS. WANDERING FRAGMENTS, THE SEA AWAITS.”

 

The sky reverts to its original blue. Next moment the bird flaps its wings and takes off into the sky.

 

PHASE 2 : DESCENT

 

The bird enters the mist and clouds blocking the user’s vision as it descends down the cliff. The bird breaks through the final clouds as it soars over the sea of stories to reveal the magnificent world stretched out in front. The player’s body glows even brighter and the bird caws with satisfaction majestically. On either side in the distance, the player can see other birds transporting other glowing orbs.

 

PHASE 3 : PURPOSE

 

The bird draws to a halt near the spring. The player sees another bird soar into the spring. A few moments later a ball of pulsating light appears inside the spring and then floats downwards from the tip of the spring into the sea. As the ball of light makes contact with the sea, a new stream emerges from the spring into the sea unfurling itself into the ocean.

 

The goal of this phase is to foreshadow to the player the intended conclusion to his journey, i.e. what is his purpose in the world.

 

PHASE 4 : DENIAL

 

As demonstrated in the previous phase, the player’s bird now approaches the spring looking to enter it and conclude the player’s journey. However, the bird is met with a barrier and the entire spring glows red. The bird attempts to break through the barrier but fails. The spring now speaks in the same ethereal female voice:

 

“YOU, WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND, MAY NOT YET BE BORN INTO THE SEA. WHAT KEEPS THIS WORLD ALIVE, WHAT KEEPS THIS WORLD BEAUTIFUL, YOU MUST DISCOVER FOR YOURSELF.’

 

The spring changes back from it’s disturbed red state into its original golden color. The bird flies round the spring and down through the surface into the sea, swimming closer towards the closest spring. The player is dislodged from the back of the bird and drifts into the stream.

 

PHASE 5 : STREAM (2:00)

 

The world around fades and changes into abstract space; think inside the Black hole in interstellar. The interior of the stream will have visual representations of what stories bring to the world. These depictions will be overlayed with audio and morph from imagery to imagery.

 

1. The Birth of a Story

VO (in background) :

 

Child –  “Daddy, can you tell me a story?”

Daddy – “Sweetheart, why don’t you try telling me one this time?”

 

Visual (Fades in once dialog is spoken):

 

A human brain appears with 12 bars of glowing light around it. The bars create a cube around the brain and lock themselves around the brain. The brain emits a golden orb that shatters the bars. The golden orb morphs and twists into droplets of golden liquid.

 

      2) The Beauty of Story

VO (in background as the orb shatters) :

Child – “Daddy I feel … ”

Daddy – “What do you feel?”

Child – “I feel … alive”

 

Visual (As the word alive is spoken):

 

The droplets expand into streams emitting a beautiful golden light. The streams criss cross around around the player encompassing him in a thin translucent golden sphere. The sphere fades away leaving golden orbs hovering around the player.

 

       3) The Purpose of Story

VO (in background once the orbs are created):

 

Child – “But (daddy) what do they do? What do the stories do?”

Dad – “They bind us … connect us … give us meaning”

Child – “Woooow”

 

Visual (as the word “bind” is spoken)

 

The golden orbs grow and start to shimmer and brighten. At the word “connect”, they start to create lines between each other. At the word “meaning”, the lines become definitive shapes.

 

       4) The Destiny of Story

 

VO (in background once the shapes are created)

 

Child – “What do we do with them? What happens when we go away”

Dad – “You must share them … So that they may live on forever … And then … so too … will we”

 

Visual (as the first question is asked)

 

The shapes disappear and the golden orbs converge in front of the player forming a liquid once more. A pair of hands appear around the liquid. At the word “share”, the hands release the liquid which is passed from sets of hands around the player until the liquid is back to where it started. At the words, “so too will we”, the light coming from the liquid gets brighter and brighter until it eclipses the screen.

PHASE 6 : CONCLUSION

 

Slowly the world comes back into focus. The player is still flying on the bird’s back, facing the Spring. The Spring speaks :

 

“DO YOU SEE NOW, YOUR POWER, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF YOUR EXISTENCE? THROUGH YOU, ONLY THROUGH YOU, CAN THE REFUGE OF IMMORTALITY BE SOUGHT. SO GO NOW AND SHINE INTO THIS WORLD, AND EVERYTHING BEYOND”

 

The player merges into the spring and brightness envelops the screen once more.

 

In last week’s blog I discussed the story in a fair amount of detail. However, last week most of the team was also involved in a tech exploration of what can be achieved in Unreal Engine. We explored water simulations, particle system based effects for fire, player representation, streams etc. in the quest of understanding how to recreate the art style defined in our preproduction bible. Using this tech exploration as a launching pad we have begun to execute on phase 1 for production which involves building a prototype of the entire experience from back to front.

 

In addition we also brainstormed five pre-production pitches amongst which one emerged a winner. The concept builds on the thought of a rain dance as a cultural phenomenon. The VR experience set inside a child’s room, wherein the player is depicted as a child surrounded by dolls of many cultures. User interactions will triggers individual sets of toys performing their own respective rain dance telling one part of a single story. In the final phase, all the toys dance together finally merging into a beautiful rain dancing spirit who dances the entire story from back to front representing the unity of cultures. Overall the piece is intended to be revolve around toy based animations, heavily driven by music and delivering a powerful message of cultural unity.

 

This week marked the onset of many parallel lines of development and investigation. We finalized the core narrative for the experience which we also refer to as the different concept phases. On a high level, the story is divided into six phases :

 

PHASE 1 : GENESIS

 

• This phase represents a twilight zone, a transitioning area from which the player will launch into the World of the Sea of Stories.
• It allows us to start of at a small scale before launching the player into the Sea of Stories World so that it appears even more big and overwhelming. Think of it as setting up an ah hah moment for the player in the next phase.
• From a VR experience point of view, we can’t start the player off flying on the bird. It would be extremely jarring and disorienting to start off in a virtual world with the entire environment moving around you.
• Oculus Story Studio describes 3 stages to begin a narrative in VR : The In, The Letting Go and The Call to Story. We’ve utilised all three of these stages in this phase.

 

PHASE 2 : DESCENT

 

In this phase, the player has mounted the bird and together they enter the mist and clouds blocking the user’s vision as it descends down the cliff. The bird breaks through the final clouds as it soars over the sea of stories to reveal the magnificent world stretched out in front. The player’s body glows brightly and the bird caws with satisfaction majestically. On either side in the distance, the player can see other birds transporting other glowing orbs.

 

PHASE 3 : TURMOIL

 

A slow rumbling sound echoes in the sky. Slowly dark ripples snake their way across the sky casting the world in shadows. Green pillars of fire erupt from the sky into the world. The massive spring begins to lose it’s shine, collapsing inwards. However, the pillars do not break into the sea; they are blocked by a dome of energy. The player’s glow fades back into the dull brown/grey color.

 

PHASE 4 : PASSAGE

 

The player crashes into the sea. Above the sounds of the fire making inroads into the dome are still audible above reminding the player of the danger the world is in. Slowly the player drifts through the stream until he sees a stream. As he drifts closer to the stream, his faded color glows once more and he gets pulled into the stream.

 

PHASE 5 : JOURNEY TO THE SPRING

 

As the player exits the stream, he hears a huge rumbling sound from above him. The dome cracks open as a huge pillar of fire streaks into the sea and obliterates the stream into a million pieces. As the stream explodes, the air streaks with the sounds and images of the stories, knowledge and human culture lost in the fire. Suddenly all around, the pillars of fire streak into the sea around the player. From above, the player sees the bird enter the sea and rescue him from the fire. The bird streaks through rapidly evading the fire pillars getting closer to the spring.

 

PHASE 6 : APOTHEOSIS

 

Finally the player reaches the base of the spring. The player floats into the spring and the bird caws and nods sadly. Just before the player merges into the spring, a pillar of fire hits the bird seemingly killing it. The player merges with the spring and begins to rise up to the top of the spring. His vision is partially blinded by the light in the spring. He reaches the top of the spring and sees the dome destroyed, the water slowly turning green and polluted and the world submerged in chaos. The pillars of fire are all around him and he can see the silhouettes of a bird trapped inside of each pillar.

 

A golden sphere pulsates from the player and ripples into the world. However, the sphere shatters as comes in contact with the pillars. From below him, he sees other orbs flowing upwards into the spring merging with him, making his glow brighter and brighter. Another golden sphere ripples through, this time destroying the fire and the black sky as it engulfs the entire world. The player’s view is engulfed in bright golden light. Slowly the world fades back into view, tranquil and peaceful with the streams in the sea restored and the birds soaring majestically.

‘Sea of Stories’ is an immersive VR art experience intended to deliver an interpretive narrative. In the experience, the viewer will be perched on the back of a bird flying over an ocean that represents all the stories ever told. This week the team has primarily been digesting the concept. Below are some of the creative challenges we foresee :

 

• The Sea of Stories could struggle with an amplified version of the Swayze Effect, which is essentially a lack of a relationship between the narrative and environment, with the viewer. The reason this problem is amplified is because of the context of the viewer in our narrative. In SoS, the viewer’s placement in the world is extremely specific, i.e., he/she is perched on the back of a flying bird which is traversing the world. This fundamentally enhances the question of relationship with the environment as it instantly throws questions such as ‘Who is the bird?’, ‘What is my relationship with the bird?’, ‘Why am I perched on top of it?’
• A large part of the Swayze Effect is the question : ‘Who is the viewer?’. What if we use this question in the narrative itself; the question itself could be a powerful storytelling element. It could be a question that is asked throughout the narrative and eventually answered at some point in the story itself.
• This could be resolved through the following. The viewer is a ‘story’ who is about to be born into the ‘Sea of Stories’, through the ‘Spring of Stories’. The bird is the vehicle that transports you to the ‘Spring of Stories’ for you to be born.
  
  a) It stays true to the overall vision behind the piece, i.e. to be an Artistic VR Experience. There is a degree of interpretation involved. We can strike a balance between telling a story but also letting the viewer interpret for himself.
  
  b) Innovation – The concept of exploring viewer identity inside the experience has never been done before.
  
  c) The concept implicitly has a story arc that makes the world an important part of the experience : Example – The Sea of Stories is in danger and the bird needs to get you to the Spring as soon as possible.