Linear Storytelling

The topics that interest me most, are mythical stories and children’s storybooks. Adam and Eve was an exciting story that has been iterated many times in plays, cinema, and animation but never in VR. I thought it would be interesting to create a twist to this tale because the original story was outdated. I started by looking at similar projects when I came across an oil painting called The Garden of Earthly Delights- by Hieronymus Bosch, which depicts a bewildering perspective of sinful humanity when free of moral restraint. Nude men and women parade upon animals’ backsides throughout the illustration, symbolic of humanity’s ravenous greed for carnal desires.

Eden is the panel that is located on the left side of  Speculum , a digital triptych signed by the Dutch collective SMACK that reinterprets  The Garden of Earthly Delights. For his work, SMACK makes use of 3D animation and sharp references to popular culture. The work is a true x-ray of the most contemporary phenomena such as hyperconnection, digital identities, and mass behavior. 

This art piece inspired me into thinking of how the story can be retold in the new age of digital intelligence.

Story & Player Journey

Story

I started by referring back to the original story of Adam & Eve from the bible and turned it into a pictorial representation. I started by thinking of what morals the original story tried to depict and then re-rendered it to what I wanted to convey, leading me to –

Thesis : Humans are greedy.

Anti-thesis : Humans shouldn’t be greedy and should be satisfied with what they have.

Synthesis : They have to be greedy to live in today’s fast-moving times

I wanted my story to have Eve given the role of an equally important character who emerges powerfully in the end and for each of them to have their vices. Adam was a character who was obsessed with good looks and power ( A concept normally portrayed by a woman) while Eve wanted to be the one with the most knowledge.

Linear Narrative – We learned about the 3 act story structure rule in the filmmaking workshop and I really enjoyed looking at creating VR through the lens of filmmaking. Because VR is such a new concept, the idea of creating a 360-degree film really excited me. One aspect that I took inspiration from the workshop was the idea of ‘hope’, portrayed at the end of the short films we had watched to give the user a sense of relief.

Act I – Setup: Exposition, inciting incident, plot point one

Act II – Confrontation: Rising action, midpoint, plot point two

Act III – Resolution: Pre-climax, climax, conclusion

Player Journey

I started creating a flow chart of the incidents and player interaction throughout the story to better understand the narrative. My narrative initially started off being non-linear where the player could choose to either have the pill or not and the events would change based on the decision of the player. Because we were asked to create a linear story, the challenge was to define an ending. While the original story had Adam & Eve getting banished to Earth, I wanted to give people a sign of hope and so I created a resolution scene at the end of the story. Creating the narrative in forms of a flowchart also helped me to understand the number of scenes that had to be built, the interactable objects to be made, and the characters that went into creating the scene.

Link to Miro : Eve & Adam

Storyboarding & Script Writing

We learnt to use Shapes XR to storyboard in VR and it was very interesting. The tool itself was very user-friendly and allowed me to make a quick walkthrough of the three scenes. I then simultaneously started working on the script. Writing the script was challenging because we had to think about the 360 angle of every scene, thinking about the tone of voice for the characters while keeping it engaging enough for the user to play.

Environment & VR Build

The environment was first thought of as a paradisical state with real-life fantastical objects and sceneries, I started to model and create the assets on blender while using assets from the blender store. I was quite happy with the scene I had created because it was how I envisioned it in my head. While creating it I also stumbled upon a happy mistake. The materials for some of the assets were imported without the UV map and it had an interesting aesthetic to it where it felt like a simulation.

I later thought that the whole playground could be created in a way where the assets are purposefully done with this technique to give a feeling that ‘Adam and Eve lived in a simulation’. After creating this, I tried to import the scene into Unity and it FAILED MISERABLY. None of the materials and lighting came thorugh.