A brief overview of what we have learned, sometimes the hard way, as a student team over the four years of making the 2D animated, interactive, 6DOF, VR-piece “From The Main Square”. Despite the support of the Babelsberg Film University, in which I was enrolled as a master student, in many senses, we were navigating uncharted waters and needed to invent a path of our own. As a seasoned animation director venturing himself in immersive storytelling for the first time, it was a deep shift in many previous notions regarding storytelling through moving images. All of the production tools and methods we’ve gathered from previous projects needed to be meaningfully adapted, if not discarded, with almost no exception. Much of the syntax we used to progress the story throughout the piece had to be invented during production, and therefore thoroughly tested. Some of these mechanisms shall be demonstrated live.
From The Main Square is a multi-awarded VR-piece out in the festival circuit, since 2022. It gathered numerous recognitions including the Grand Jury Prize in Venice 79th, the Grand Prix in New Images 2023 and the Festivals Connexion VR Award at the International Animation Festival of Annecy recently. The piece lasts approximately 22 minutes and depicts the rise and downfall of a society shattered by polarisation. It is a compact illustration of social disruption in the form of an animated “Wimmelbild”. The script is a collage of occasionally funny, eventually brutal urban absurdities experienced in societies undergoing political polarisation and environmental collapse.