Meeting Summary & Key Points
The discussion in Meeting 4 revolved around refining the narrative structure, technical execution, and conceptual focus of the project. Key takeaways include:
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Narrative Arc Development: The team identified the need to clearly define the beginning, middle, and end of the narrative. The story starts with waking up in a tunnel (as the Piper Boy), transitions through challenges symbolizing climate change (e.g., fire, flood), and concludes with a light at the end of the tunnel representing hope.
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Perspective Shifts: Emphasis was placed on using different perspectives (e.g., animals like dogs or ants) to explore climate change impacts. The team debated how to justify these perspective shifts narratively and technically.
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Immersive Techniques: Suggestions were made to simplify immersive elements by incorporating video clips, sound design, and minimal modeling. The idea of live narration versus pre-recorded video was also discussed to enhance audience engagement.
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Project Goals: The overarching goal is to shift audience perspectives on pressing global issues like climate change by creating an emotionally impactful experience.
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Technical Decisions: Agreement on a runtime of 10 minutes for the installation with approximately four “doors” symbolizing different climate challenges. Discussions included sound amplification (e.g., low-frequency sounds for earthquakes) and visual storytelling techniques.
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Documentation & Collaboration: Clarifications were made regarding documentation responsibilities. Each member must submit their contributions individually for transparency and grading purposes.
Individual Contributions:
Zixuan:
During this group discussion, we mainly worked on organizing, integrating, and refining our project. We finalized our main theme—climate issues. Each door in the nightmare will represent a different climate-related problem. We plan for the entire experience to last approximately ten minutes, with two minutes for the introduction, six minutes for the main exploration, and two minutes for the conclusion. The middle section will feature four doors, each leading to a different climate issue.
Next, we discussed the narrative arc and further detailed our story. In the introduction, the Piper Boy will wake up in the tunnel from a human perspective, followed by a brief narration to introduce the legend of the Piper Boy. Then, the exploration phase will begin. In the middle section, we will include four doors, each representing a different perspective on climate change:
Fire – Fish
Floods – Insects
Earthquake – Dog
Typhoon – Bird
Each of these doors will depict climate abnormalities from the perspective of different creatures.
For the ending, we initially considered using narration to conclude the experience. However, Ruotong suggested an interesting idea: instead of a traditional narration, we could have all four doors open simultaneously, allowing the sounds from all the environments to mix into a chaotic noise. Then, the narration would guide the Piper Boy towards a distant, faint light, symbolizing his attempt to escape, leaving the story with an open-ended conclusion.
Through this approach, we aim to convey that these climate issues are inescapable and unsolvable for now, yet we will continue to strive and explore solutions.
Yiting:
Since Assignment 1 needed to be submitted soon, our group increased the number of discussions in the hope of further perfecting the assignment details. In today’s tutorial, Andrew and Jules mentioned that our project might be too ambitious. So we streamlined the content and chose to focus on looking at world current affairs from the perspective of insects and animals, looking at one event from different perspectives or one perspective on multiple events. We have determined that there are four doors in total, representing the four elements of China’s five elements: wood, water, fire and earth. Behind these doors correspond to current events in the world with the same attributes. In addition, Andrew mentioned that the final presentation of the project can be more immersive and screened through multiple projectors. During the group discussion, we also determined the narrative line, which is divided into beginning, middle and end, totaling about eight minutes.
Ruotong:
After our meeting with Andrew and Jules, we identified some issues with our project and promptly held a discussion. At this stage, our ideas were too broad and scattered, making the overall project theme unclear. To address this, we restructured the piper boy storyline, shifting our focus to global climate issues. We selected four global events as focal points— Valencia floods, wildfires in California, storm Éowyn hits the UK and earthquakes—with each news event symbolizing a door. By presenting different audio-visual perspectives behind these four doors, we aim to recreate piper boy’s nightmare. Additionally, in our upcoming research, we need to determine the most effective visual representation—whether 3D modeling or video would better convey the story.
Ruiqi:
We were somewhat lost temporarily, possibly because we don’t have a solid narrative or reference work yet. Today, we had our tutorial session where we felt off track but tried our best to get back on course. However, we made progress on the narrative and developed the narrative arc, which is exciting. Carly suggested finding someone to act as a storyteller at the installation’s start to provide an introduction, while Chao proposed using video narration. I believe it might be better to combine both, though it may require more work. Aha! (Carly’s imitation is so funny.)
Carly:
Today, we discussed the feedback received during this morning’s tutorial and class. We also assessed the research and decided on different ways to change the project to align with the feedback and our project idea. Then, we created the narrative arc for this project. It was a long meeting, but we finally came to a consensus. At one point, I felt that we were stuck and suggested taking a break to clear our minds and come back to the meeting refreshed.
