Pearl Review
It's amazing how a 5-minute animation can tell a complete, touching story. The use of VR allows the audience to look anywhere at any time, which gives me the sense of feeling that the story is happening around me, that I'm part of the narrative. Locking the audience's position in the passenger seat is also a wise choice, which prevents motion sickness and makes it easy for the brain to process what's happening around.
The visual style is so beautiful and engaging. The use of simplified shapes with rich, expressive color palettes helps convey emotions and feelings. For example, when the daughter is in her childhood, the colors in the scenes are mostly bright and warm, while in her adolescence, the scenes become dimmer and less saturated, indicating a change in the relationship between her and her father. While the visual is simple, there's still a high level of detail in the characters' expressions, which also plays a big part in visual storytelling. For instance, there's one scene where the father looked outside the car window and saw kids living happily with their parents in a big, warm house, then he turned back and saw her daughter sleeping in the backseat. He sighed and shook his head slowly with an upset look. I can immediately get what he was thinking: " Living in a hatchback can't work anymore. My daughter needs a home." And in the following shot, he and his daughter are moving into their new house. The transition is perfectly seamless. Although there's a quick jump in time between the two scenes, the audience can easily fill the gap with their imaginations.
The song is also amazing! It matches perfectly with the visual style and the story. It's like a thread connecting different stages of the life of the father and daughter. By reading behind-the-scenes stories, I learned that in order to make the song sound as authentic as possible, the team recorded wherever the father and daughter sang or spoke in the video—in the car, on the sidewalk, in a park, and on the radio. The sound design made the experience even more immersive.
I really enjoyed watching this VR short film! It actually got me crying in my VR headset.
Gloomy Eyes Review
Gloomy Eyes is set in a world that has been overcome by darkness and follows a zombie boy named Gloomy as he falls in love with a mortal girl, Nena. Although I have mixed feelings about it, I do appreciate its unique art style, animation, and its brilliant use of light.
It's amazing how most of the scenes are presented like dioramas, floating in the darkness and wrapping all around the audience. Unlike in Pearl where you can sit still and focus on one point, in Gloomy Eyes you need to actively turn your head and body to follow the characters as they move around. The clever use of light and darkness directs your gaze to where the story is currently unfolding. However, the darkness in VR made it difficult for me to see the characters and scenes clearly. After watching it for 30 minutes, my eyes really hurt (an experience that gives the audience gloomy eyes...?)
In terms of the story, it didn't evoke any emotions in me. In the first episode, Nena and Gloomy just met for about five seconds and they fell in love immediately, and the following two episodes are all about how they overcame all the obstacles to be together. For me, because of the lack of information on how they got to know each other and why they fell in love, their determination to be together isn't compelling to me. Also, I didn't understand why the "sun" thought their relationship was the only true love from the very start. Just because one is a zombie boy and the other is a mortal girl..?
Overall, I like Gloomy Eye's art style and the way it presents the story in VR, but I'm not into the story itself.
Note on Blindness Review
Note on blindness is truly amazing in simulating the blind experience. Sounds are visualized as point clouds and blue-on-black wireframes around the viewer, the brightness and shape of which will change according to the volume and position of the sound. I think the visuals are made by animating the UV coordinates for texturing with noise distortions in a transparent shader.
All of the visuals and spacial sounds added together creates a beautiful and poetic environment where the viewer can experience what it feels like to be blind.
For me, the best of the 4 chapters is Cognition. It shows how rain and weather create perceptible spaces for you when you are blind. It’s really interesting that the sound you hear is not generated by the object itself (like a radio playing music), but from being interacted with other objects. The way that you perceive things around you is sort of similar to how bats navigate and distinguish objects using Echolocation. In retrospect, I also use sound a lot to perceive the world around me, for example, I can tell if it’s my mother from her footsteps, or how much water is in a bottle when I’m filling it up. Note on Blindness really got me thinking about how much information sounds give us.
Metahuman
This was my first time using Metahuman in Unreal and it was fun. My metahuman character looks like me from the side but not quite from the front, which I think is because the model didn't really capture the shape of my eyes. But it's already pretty good! And I love the funny poses that I can apply.
In the eyes of the animal & Giant Review
Before experiencing the two projects, it took me some time to set up the device and make everything work properly. At first, the display port was not working, and then the sound was not coming through... Many issues came up and this got me thinking that technical difficulties are definitely a big part of why VR still remains far from mainstream.
Talking about the experiences, I like how In the eyes of the animal uses particles to construct the environment, which makes it dynamic and vibrant, but I don't think this works well in terms of stimulating how the animals see the world. In every scene the environment is similar, and visualization is not clear and intuitive compared to the way Notes on Blindness visualizes sound.
As for Giant, I like how the project tells the story of a family suffering from war in a short amount of time and in a metaphorical way. Being in the same room with the characters makes me feel what they are experiencing and emphasize with them. I just hope there could be some kind of interaction in this experience.
Tree
It was interesting to see people's reactions along the sensory journey. From what I saw, they seemed to respond to the smell components most. Some of them asked what kind of scents we were using after the experience and said the scents were familiar but at the same time felt a bit artificial. While I was experiencing Tree, I felt that smell and sound are the senses that played a big part in immersing me in the virtual environment. The sounds of animals around me with the wind blowing really convinced me that I'm inside a rainforest.
Tampopo
The film's central plot follows Tampopo, an aspiring ramen chef who learns the craft under the guidance of a cowboy-like truck driver and ramen connoisseur named Goro. While there are tender moments between Tampopo and Goro, the film avoids placing the central focus on a love line and instead highlights the intersection of food and cultural quirks by splicing seemingly unrelated montages in between scenes of Tampopo’s story. An old man who is devout to ramen; An Italian who eats spaghetti and makes a loud noise, a lady who teaches girls to eat pasta without making noise; A man whose teeth hurt so much but he still can't give up his food; A mother who came back to life and cooked a hot meal for her family before dying...These clips not only reflect people's obsession with food but also satirize Japanese society at that time, exploring food in the contexts of death, eroticism, family, and social customs.