Author: Alexa Donahue

This week we went to the Aesthetica Film Festival in York to help out in the VR Lab.

I didn’t make a lot of progress while I was there but watching all the VR projects nominated for the awards were really inspiring and gave me some great ideas for my story.

One thing that caught my attention was that most VR stories didn’t have interaction at all, and those who did had very little. I decided that i wanted interaction for my project, in order to take advantage of the medium.

The VR projects I liked the most were:

• Midnight Story: Visual style and navigation guided with the eyes
• Child of empire: Visual style and the way it carried you through space
• The choice: Powerful storytelling, not great use of the medium
• The one with the panda: Loved the way they showed flashbacks and moved you in space.

I managed to organize my thoughts and my complex story into a simple 3 act structure. Here is how it looks:

By doing this I will be able to write my script in a more organized matter.

I also defined some goals and the subtext of the story:

After that, I decided to make the first draft of my script. I am very happy with the results. The formatting looks good.

I decided not to use too much dialogue, keeping the main character mute and having the aliens only say small sounds.

I also created a moodboard with the visual style I want to achieve.

I polished my idea on alien invasion and wrote down the whole story. I want to be able to mislead the player into thinking they are the hero of the story, only to find out the opposite by the end.

Here is the first official description:

I want to be able to place this story in a three act structure so that the concept can be more clear and precise.

I also want to be able to add more interactivity in order to move the story forward, and to be able to have a good use of the medium.

We had a class on script writing for VR. We explored the differences between a classic filmmaking script and a gaming script, versus a VR script.

Explored possible ideas for a VR story. I decided on a science fiction theme.

These were a few of my options:

• Alien invasion
• Ghost hunting

After discussing it with my peers and teachers I decided on working with the Alien Invasion theme but with a moral twist: I don’t want the aliens to be the bad person in the story. I want to focus on the damage humans can cause to other weaker groups.

Project briefing: Understanding of requirements for submission.

☑️ Checklist:

• VR storyboard in format of chosen app
• Graph of narrative
• Script as PDF file
• Recording of VR enviroment
• Recording of storyboard with voiceover
• Build folder of VR environment

We had a class on linear narratives and structures. Notes:

For next week: Need to think of some ideas for possible narratives