The project stems from the artistic research of Gert Wastyn (C-Mine Genk), who is working on his doctorate in which he researches the possibilities of Virtual Production tools and Virtual Reality within animation film through a series of artistic projects.
The project is a collaboration between different Campuses within LUCA School of Arts: Luca School of Arts Campus C-Mine – Genk Luca School of Arts Campus Lemmens -Leuven.
Project description:
In Virtual Memory” people’s memories are visualized through a series of artistic projects. It is about short stories and anecdotes of memories that have an important meaning or are constantly recalled. These stories change over the course of the years because our memory is changeable. With this project, we want to capture these stories.
Using interviews, we will explore the own stories and anecdotes of all kinds of people.
Stories about friendships, love and funny moments, strange events, stories of people who moved to another country by their own will or by necessity.
At LUCA Lemmens’ Drama Department, this project will be followed up. In the “voice actor” training component, these stories will be brought back to life using the interviews as a guide. These interviews will be rewritten into short scenarios or anecdotes and voiced/acted upon by the students.
Firstly: these recordings of the stories will be used during a series of workshops at the campus LUCA C-Mine:
- Virtual Animation Workshop with ex-Disney animator Daniel Peixe:
In these workshops, participants create short animation sequences in Virtual Reality to accompany the voiceovers/sound recordings. - Intro Virtual Production Workshop:
During this workshop, voiceovers and short scenarios or anecdotes become the source material for an introduction to the virtual production process.
Secondly and most importantly: all voiceovers + instructions for using the virtual production process to visualise the stories will be made available online for everyone. By sharing this material and knowledge, we invite all Digi-creatives to participate in this project and share their results. By working with an open source mindset, we hope to encourage as many creatives as possible to start using a VR pipeline as part of their animation lexicon.
The processed stories returned will be used in a physical and online expo, immersive VR experiences and a compilation film of all the works.