screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-6-11-56-pm__________________________________________________________________________

Forest is a semester long aesthetic interactive VR storytelling experience created by team PROLOGUE, mentored by Oculus Story Studio. I worked long distance from Pittsburgh (they were based in Silicon Valley), and they are way better at explaining the experience than I am, so I’ll let them do that.

___________________________________

                                          Explanation
                                          Playthrough

__________________________________________________________________________

For this project, I wrote and designed all the sounds and music. The team wanted the sound effects to be more conceptual (i.e. having a cello pizzicato when the player picks up a flower instead of a literal grabbing sound effect) to match the already beautiful, impressionistic aesthetic. This brought about some really fun challenges: What does dropping a flower sound like? What does looking into a pond sound like? How does one create a feeling of empathy, but also of fear and confusion at the same time through background music? Collaborating with the Prologue team to understand the musical/sound needs of a visual situation meant that my original material underwent many iterations; two sounds in particular, the “thank you and good luck” and the human crying at the end have over seventy takes each. These were probably the two hardest things I’ve ever had to design/record (I still am not satisfied with the “thank you and good luck” and wince a little every time); I never would have expected that. Regardless, I am extremely proud of this artistic VR experience, and and am so happy to have been able to work with the whole Prologue team.

_______________________________________

 

Tracks:

The serene opening. The player is introduced to a peaceful forest at dusk that has some playful but scary secrets.

The transformation sequence. The player watches as the cute little creature in front of them grows into a large humanoid figure while the player shrinks into a tiny creature.

The ominous and lonely forest. As the humanoid figure backs away from the player, the environment darkens as night descends on the forest.

Appearance of the scary creatures. Strange black floating creatures appear and jeer, hiss and attack the helpless player.

Ending twist and decision with the little girl. As dawn approaches, the scary creatures flee and a crying girl, lost in the forest, walks towards the player, scared and alone. She is taken aback and offers the player a flower. Does the player accept this cursed gift or not?