Attic

Proposal

We will be creating a small virtual playground of sorts, and allowing the audience to interact with the environment using the cursor. 

Curatorial Statement

Children are known for their free and wild imagination, and having that sense of apprehension and anxiety in a world they are still unfamiliar with, even as they are also known for brash behaviour precisely due to this naive ignorance of the environment. In this sense, the whole world is a playground for children. We recreated this experience in a virtual environment without any introduction or prelude to the piece to invoke the same sense of being in an unfamiliar environment. Unsettling and unusual/unexpected content was also put in to mimic the effects of one having an overactive imagination, and feeling of being in a potentially hostile environment. 

Product 

Our Website - http://ricardomantv.github.io/

Our project is an interactive scene displayed on a website. By hovering over or clicking on objects in the room, the user can uncover the story of what took place while encountering unsettling elements. In addition to the interactive art in the scene, our project also presents the user with a cipher to solve that, once cracked, unveils what occurred to the children who once lived in the room.

Photoshop CS6 was used to create the art assets - most of the graphics were either drawn by hand with a tablet, or with the use of the Pen tool.

GIFs - The gifs were made by putting together the gif frames in http://gifmaker.me/.

Sound assets - The sound effects and music were downloaded from online (see Attribution section).

Intention 

We wanted to recreate the childlike experience of being in a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar - familiar because the setting, at first glance, appears warm and home-like, unfamiliar because it is full of unsettling elements.

The attic where the protagonist twins Mabel and Dipper (from the cartoon Gravity Falls) stay was chosen as the setting for the virtual environment. We wanted to choose someplace peaceful and everyday to start the audience off with certain expectations - after all, a bedroom is a very normal place to be. This is contrasted with the fact that the twins' bedroom is in the attic, a location that is associated with the old, unusual or creepy. The stylization of the cartoon architecture further adds to this with the awkward positioning and the geometries of the wooden beams, along with the triangular framing of the scene. The cartoon itself deals with the weird and supernatural phenomena of Gravity Falls, where the events of the show take place, and follows the adventures of the two preteen twins as they not only contend with the mythological and supernatural but also confront their inner demons, such as the fear of growing up, and feelings of insecurity and inadequacy about one's relative immaturity to those around them.  A playground is not only a place for fun, but also a place where children learn to coexist with others and find a place for themselves among others. It is a sandbox in which one can experiment and learn from, and where one leaves to enter the "real world" and become an adult. This parallel with the attic made the choice easy, even as the idea was compelling for personal reasons.

By including creepy and unexpected elements in the virtual space, we broke the rule that a playground should strictly be a place for laughter. It can be argued that horror provides a playground of sorts, as people are attracted to horror as a form of amusement even as it causes fear and discomfort.

The sounds and background music were included to make a more immersive experience; they allow the 2D environment to stimulate the visual as well as auditory senses.

Context 

Windosill - http://windosill.com/, a puzzle game taking place in a series of interactive little rooms, or playgrounds.

Escape The Room - http://www.365escape.com/, as it sounds, takes place in a playground where one solves puzzles to eventually escape from their confinement.

Gone Home - http://www.gonehomegame.com/, an interactive and story-focused playground taking place in a home.

Fran Bow - http://www.franbow.com/, a horror/puzzle point-and-click adventure game

"Performing Interactivity" - our project is an example of the navigation-level interactivity this piece describes since our work allows the user to interact with the scene, but only in pre-programmed ways.

Popular Culture - Like the way Andy Warhol incorporated well-known items and people into his work to add meaning, our project draws on the already established elements of Gravity Falls. A number of references are alluded to in the environment, although we kept them relatively subtle such that only those familiar with the material would be able to recognize them. To not spoil them for the audience here, we will simply identify them as being incorporated into various design choices in both art and animation, as well as the puzzle elements.

Process 

After choosing our setting, we planned for the different furniture in the room to react differently depending on the audience's interactions with the objects. These objects would be placed in separate layers, and later animated in another file.

As the art assets were produced, the pieces would be available for further processing - either placed onto the background in the final website, or animated as GIFs if they were a series of animation frames. These would be programmed to play on a layer above the original static image. An art asset's availability also meant that it was ready for sound assets, which would then be found online and added to the animations in the final website.

A general blueprint with all the assets placed, along with the relatively empty room to serve as background, was uploaded. All art assets, sound assets, puzzle elements, tasks, ideas etc were shared on google drive.

The cipher was designed by first constructing the hidden message to tell the story, and then constructing the diary entry around it.

One of the comments we received suggested adding jump scares during the lightning, and our final project uses this idea by including ghostly silhouettes during the lightning flashes.

Collaboration

Azer - Art assets

Everi - Sound assets, Cipher/Narrative

Ricardo - Website

Sarah - Animating art frames

Reflection

We originally had far more ambitious plans, to have an escape-the-room element to the experience, having the audience solve puzzles to eventually escape from the attic. This would have required storing certain items or game states in a database, and greatly increased the workload on the art asset front, which was not viable as we had only one person producing art assets, and being too experimental with new techniques risked foregoing much of the content should anything fail. The time constraints and resources we had encouraged us to work with a simpler, scaled-down version of the idea. Given more time, it would have been nice to include such an activity in the website.

However, we still wanted to provide an activity for the user to complete in order to create an enjoyable experience. Thus, we included a hidden message within the scene. The nice part about this interactive element is that it is entirely up to the user to decide how much they want to interact with the scene. If they want to decipher the diary entry, they are provided the opportunity to do so. If they do not, they are still able to interact with the art assets.

Attribution

Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls Attic design

Gravity Falls fanart of attic by Sprits

http://gifmaker.me/

Sound Effects and Music:

https://soundcloud.com/tim-pryor  ?

http://www.videograbby.com/#

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcAkB_y0s8U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXayhXyfJkU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uww3lW6PqoI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHawMsHK4iw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljKmiQVojo

iLife sound effects

Garageband

http://offers.adobe.com/en/na/audition/offers/audition_dlc/AdobeAuditionDLCSFX.html?cq_ck=1407955238126&wcmmode=disabled