When Pierre first told us about this project I was excited. When I was younger I really enjoyed reading the interactive books where depending on what choice you make you flip to a certain page and the story continues from there. So you can imagine I also enjoy interactive films.
My first idea came almost instantly, an interactive film based off of a night of partying. It starts out and you are deciding what to wear, who to go out with, what party you want to go to, etc. My favorite part of this though was going to be that if you decided to drink too much I would put a drunk effect on the video so it would genuinely be hard to navigate. There would also be the choice to take mystery drugs from a stranger and maybe those would give you crazy visuals where everything is colorful and wavy.
Well as you can imagine I was super disappointed when Pierre went on to explain the requirements. We had to film it on campus and it was supposed to be like we were giving a new student a tour of the UAL campus. So lame. Luckily Pierre met me in the middle and said it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tour of UAL, but it does have to be filmed on campus. Me and my team decided to do a first day experience where you essentially have 2 different paths. One is the normal go to class route and one would be the “bad kid” path. The film starts outside of the building and you have 2 choices, you can either go in to the canteen or go smoke. The good choice and the bad choice. We figured that if you keep choosing the bad choices, it gets to the point where you are in the full After Effects room and there’s just trippy colors and visuals all around you. We thought this would be fun as it would be so different from all the other scenes and would almost feel like a secret room.