As part of the 2022 Animist International Animation Festival, I conducted a three day workshop in 3D and VR technologies for animators and ethnographers with anthropologist Dr Huon Wardle. Participants developed short VR films and screened them on the final day of the festival.
I built a virtual ‘workshop’ for Oculus Quest
to get participants used to thinking and making in VR. Participants inside VR encountered an array of digitised artefacts which they will be able to pick up, play with and arrange to tell stories. Through a virtual camera that could be placed in the environment, participants outside of VR had a window into the virtual world, and could storyboard shorts and could co-create stories for the VR users to play out, or observe their behaviour.
The asymmetry between experiences in VR and in 'meatspace' created challenges and opportunities participants had to navigate through collaboration. The virtual ‘workshop’ is a free-form, creative space unconstrained by normal laws of phyiscs, but participants wearing the VR headset were also blind to the outside world and to how their actions appeared ‘on camera’.
The session provided particpants opportunities to rethink some of the key activities ethnographers and animators involve themselves in: observing, participating, creating, analyzing, and becoming aware of the recursivity of their practice.
The workshop was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through an ASTRA measure project “TLU TEE or Tallinn University as the promoter of intelligent lifestyle” (no 2014-2020.4.01.16-0033).