As We Break, We Breathe

Maddie Vassalo, Interarts Performance

Collaborators: Miles Hionis, Interarts; Batool Mahesri, LSA

Faculty Advisors: Susan Hoge, Lecturer II, Stamps School of Art & Design; Sara Eskandari, Adjunct Lecturer, CoE

This project will be an interactive film inspired by the full motion video game genre. It will discuss themes of simulation theory, climate anxiety, and the lack of control we feel over our own future. It will achieve this through a unique mix of traditional filmmaking and game design.

The main plot of the film will be a choose your own adventure style live action film (similar to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch). Embedded within this film there will be a classic video game which the audience is able to play through the main character of the film. The video game will respond to what storyline the audience chooses, with different branches revealing different levels culminating in a discussion between the main character and the player using a custom AI chatbot.

This film will explore why climate change is difficult to stop — not due to a lack of technology, but because its slow pace makes it hard for governments to address. As the main character progresses through the story, he realizes that he is not in control over his own destiny, the player is, mirroring how many aspects of the climate crisis are out of our control.

This project is interdisciplinary because of the way it experiments with the possibilities of new advancements in technology for making art. This film will use technologies such as virtual production, game engines, volumetric video, and AI to further the story it seeks to tell. The interactive nature of the piece will be central to the storytelling as the piece revolves around questions of our own agency when it comes to crisis and disaster.

In terms of timeline, this project is already in development. This Fall, we will be prototyping the video game portion. After Winter Break, we will be preparing for the virtual production shoot February 3-12. We will be filming this portion in the Duderstadt Video Studio with the support of the Emerging Technologies Group. After we wrap, we will spend the next month editing footage, putting it in Unity, and playtesting. Our expected completion date will be April 1, 2025 after which the work will be shown during the Stamps IP exhibition.

We hope this project will demonstrate the potential of new technologies for making art.

Game engines and the rise of AI has made technology more accessible to all of us and are important tools for artists to realize their creative visions. This film can be an example for artists and engineers on how to incorporate other disciplines into their own creative processes.

My collaborators and I have diverse skill sets gained from projects and classes associated with Stamps, SMTD, and CoE. As a group we are relatively comfortable with many of these technologies as we produced a different virtual production film last year. So far, we have or are recruiting writers, programmers, designers, and cinematographers in order to make this project happen.